Leadership
Michael Brown - Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer
Michael started where Supera’s clients are. He ran clinical research at Baylor College of Medicine, working with HIV patients and their specimens, before moving into laboratory supply and distribution. He handled patient samples before he ever sold a tube, and it shaped how he builds programs.
He spent more than two decades in the Thomas Scientific organization, starting at Phenix Research in 2001 and rising to Senior Vice President of Sales, Strategic Alliances and Biosolutions. He built and led national programs for clinical laboratories, genomics companies, and biopharma, negotiated directly with the manufacturers behind the components those programs depend on, and learned the supply chain from the inside, including where it breaks.
That is the knowledge he brings to a kit. Which components are genuinely available. Which manufacturers hold their lead times. Which substitutions are safe when a supply chain moves, and which ones quietly change what a lab is testing. Clients come to Supera with a testing program and a set of requirements. Michael turns that into a kit that can be built, sourced, labeled, and shipped at volume, without the lab discovering the compromises later.
He joined Supera full time in 2024 and built the commercial operation. He works the accounts himself rather than handing them off, which is why clients reach the person who scoped their program when something changes.
Michael holds a double major in genetics and biochemistry from Texas A&M University and an MBA from the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Sitara "Tara" Waidyaratne - Founder and President
Tara is Founder and President of Supera Fulfillment, an ISO 13485-certified, FDA-registered contract manufacturer she built to serve clinical laboratories running regulated specimen collection kit programs.
She brings more than 25 years of clinical laboratory operations experience. From 2012 to 2019 she served as Director and VP of Laboratory Operations at Companion Dx and Access Dx, directing teams of up to 200 laboratory professionals processing thousands of high-complexity specimens daily across genetics, infectious disease, and molecular diagnostics. She built high-complexity genetic testing operations from the ground up and scaled them to enterprise level.
Tara also established a formal clinical rotation program with MD Anderson Cancer Center, creating a pipeline of ASCP technologists who became the core of her teams. These were not turnaround assignments. She built the infrastructure, hired the people, and drove the programs to scale.
Supera is the direct extension of that career. Tara runs it the way she ran her labs, with the quality standards, process discipline, and clinical accountability that regulated diagnostics demand. The quality system is hers, and she is on the floor daily.
