Drawing from over 25 years of experience innovating in both academia and private industry, Dr. Orser holds twenty issued US Patents, numerous foreign patents and has authored sixty-one peer-reviewed publications. She was awarded a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Plant Biology, where she discovered the molecular basis of bacterial ice nucleation to be a single genic trait responsible for widespread frost injury on agronomic crops. She received her BS in Botany from Montana State University in Bozeman, and was also a tenured professor of Biochemistry and Bacteriology at the University of Idaho.

Twelve years ago, Dr. Orser founded Big Sky Biosystems Inc. In her role as Chief Scientific Advisor, she provides scientific, technical, regulatory, and strategic affairs consulting for the diagnostics and cannabis industry. She also cofounded and served as CSO of ASDx Biosystems, Inc., a Boulder, Colorado company that developed and validated rapid diagnostic tests for Homeland Security in collaboration with the CDC to identify the biothreat agents ricin and botulinum toxins. Prior to that for five years, Dr. Orser served as Corporate Senior Scientist and Head of the Biodefense/Biotechnology Initiative at Areté Associates, a DC physics-based company and leader in the design, integration and operation of in situ and remote sensing instrumentation where she invented an assay to measure protein-misfolding. Following that, she co-founded Adlyfe Inc., serving as the Director of R&D, where she was responsible for the management of all aspects of bringing to market an innovative blood diagnostic for misfolded proteins associated with prion-mediated neurodegenerative disease as well as a lyophilized human platelet product for thrombocytopenia, which was spun out into a new company, Cellphire Inc.

As Chief Science Officer at DigiPath since 2014, Cindy has been creating a replicable cannabis testing environment with validated standard operating procedures to ensure cannabis and cannabis-based products are safe once they reach the dispensary shelves. She is also promoting strain authentication through combining chemoprofile data analytics with strain genotyping to distinguish cannabis drug type strains currently being grown in the global cannabis market and oversees the development of GroSciences’ IP portfolio on terpene applications.