Frank was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After coming to America, while learning English and becoming a naturalized citizen, Frank attended the Denver Public Schools, graduating from East Denver High School. He went on to study biology, chemistry, and English literature at Claremont College, then was accepted to the University of Colorado School of Pharmacy, earning the B.S. Pharm degree and becoming a licensed pharmacist. He then returned to the University of Colorado to attend the School of Law. Following law school, he passed the Colorado state bar and U.S. Patent Office agent’s exams, and began his legal career by practicing general civil litigation, including successful representation of a class of defrauded investors in one of the first suits to apply the federal racketeering statutes to a white-collar investment company.

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Remaining in Denver for the time being, Frank joined the Gates Corporation, the third largest family-owned manufacturer in America, which owned the Gates Rubber Company, Learjet Corporation and Gates Textiles. The broad range of Gates’ business interests led to patent work in chemical, electrochemical, optical, agricultural, and mechanical work that supported the automotive, aviation, construction, manufacturing, military, and railroad industries. This necessitated Frank returning to the University of Colorado, to study mechanical engineering, and also materials science in polymers, metallurgy, and textiles. The textile background in turn led to Frank being appointed as the General Counsel for Gates’ textiles division in Maine, handling all legal matters for the entire subsidiary, as well as lobbying activities at the Maine state legislature. Work in the mechanical arts had the added benefit of sparking Frank’s interest in mechanical devices as a hobby, and he now has a collection of steam engines, and enjoys repairing clockworks, music boxes, and toy trains.

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Frank then combined his pharmacy and law training to work in the patent department of Pfizer’s division, G.D. Searle & Company, in Chicago. While there, Frank worked on protecting pharmaceuticals, herbicides, and also food additives as part of the program leading to the successful formation and spinoff of the Nutrasweet Company. Work in the intellectual property field led to positions and technologies of increasing complexity at Merck & Co., Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, and Gilead Sciences, where Frank managed the global intellectual property department. It was during this period that Merck and Glaxo each earned the ranking of being the number one pharmaceutical company in the world, and Gilead became a top ten company, and became the acknowledged world leader in antiviral drug therapy.

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Meanwhile, Frank started a family and raised twin daughters, Abigail and Hayley, who attended the Notre Dame high school in Belmont, California, and went on to graduate this year in neuroscience, dance, and pre-med at Atlanta’s Emory University, and history and pre-law in the International Honours Programme, receiving a joint degree from Scotland’s St. Andrews University and William & Mary University.

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Following a stint in the field of FDA regulation and human clinical trials at Genentech-Roche in San Francisco, Frank accepted an appointment at the UT Southwestern Medical Center here in Dallas as Vice President and manager of the Office for Technology Development, which is responsible for managing all of UT Southwestern’s inventions. This institution has been ranked the number one academic medical research institution in the world. This caliber of research yielded discoveries that required obtaining patent protection, licensing inventions to existing companies, and promoting start-up new ventures, to develop and commercialize biomedical inventions in all technologies including biology, chemistry, medical devices, bioinformatics, and healthcare software. During his service there, the Office for Technology Development executed over 300 licenses and formed 24 new start-up companies. As a Faculty Associate in the Department of Clinical Sciences, Frank taught the course on Developing and Commercializing Biomedical Technologies, as well as lecturing on ethics, conflicts of interest, IP, and start-up ventures.