Brendan McKernan has spent over two decades building life science and genomics companies from the ground up. Alongside his brothers Kevin and Brian, he co-founded Agencourt Bioscience, which grew into one of the largest commercial genomic services companies in the U.S. and played a key role in the Human Genome Project. The team went on to build Agencourt Personal Genomics, where they developed the SOLiD Next Generation Sequencing platform, a technology that reduced the cost of genome sequencing by a factor of 100,000.

Brendan later co-founded Courtagen Life Sciences, which applied clinical genome sequencing to help children with epilepsy, autism, and mitochondrial disease. It was through that work and the McKernan family's personal experience with plant-based therapeutics that the team recognized the untapped potential of cannabis science. In 2011, Kevin founded Medicinal Genomics, and the brothers helped build it into an industry leader.

As CEO, Brendan leads a team that has built an industry-leading molecular microbial detection platform and the world's most advanced genomic database for plant and fungi genetics. While the company established its reputation in cannabis safety testing, the MGC team has expanded the technology into food safety, dietary supplements, nutraceuticals, and botanical testing — markets where the demand for accurate microbial detection and species confirmation is rapidly growing. The platform now also supports confirmation sequencing, giving manufacturers and testing labs the ability to definitively identify organisms at the species level, and environmental monitoring, helping facilities proactively detect microbial contamination before it reaches finished products.

The team's shared vision is to make MGC's genomics-driven approach the standard for product safety and quality assurance across any industry where what's in the product — and what shouldn't be — matters. That same commitment to advancing the science is behind CannMed, the premier scientific and medical summit in the cannabis sector. Founded by the MGC team, CannMed brings together world-class researchers, clinicians, and innovators each year and has become the definitive gathering for those driving evidence-based progress in plant science, safety testing, and natural product therapeutics.

Brendan holds a B.S. in Management Science from Muhlenberg College and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lally School of Management, where he received the Delmar W. Karger Award for outstanding academic and leadership achievement and was named the William F. Glaser '53 Rensselaer Entrepreneur of the Year.