Dr. Jonathan Thomas is the President and CEO of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Thomas was previously the Chair of the CIRM governing Board from June 2011 to March 2023. He is a Co-Founding Partner at Saybrook Capital, an investment banking and private equity firm based in Santa Monica, California. In his legal career prior to Saybrook, Thomas clerked for White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler in the last year of the Carter Administration and for the Honorable George Mackinnon in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He later practiced at Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles.

Long interested in the biological sciences, Thomas majored in Biology and History at Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude. As a George C. Marshall Scholar at Oxford, he then earned a PhD with a medical focus in Commonwealth History. He subsequently returned to Yale for a JD at the Yale Law School. While there, Thomas retained an involvement with biology by teaching courses on the legal implications of genetic engineering and the impact of disease on history.

Thomas has a long-standing commitment to patient advocacy. He spent more than 15 years on the Board of the Crippled Children’s Society of Southern California and served as chair for four years. The organization, now called AbilityFirst, assists children with spinal cord injuries and mental disabilities that could be targets of stem cell therapies. Thomas is an Honorary member of the AbilityFirst Board.