David Witzke

Dr. Witzke is the founder, managing partner, and CIO of Everlong Capital, a biopharmaceuticals and health-care focused investment firm with offices in Dallas, TX and New York, NY.

Dr. David Witzke has approximately 26 years of investment research experience, including eight years at Citadel and five years as CIO and co-founder of Avidity Partners, a healthcare - focused hedge fund that grew to over $4 billion in assets under management at its peak. Prior to Avidity, Dr. Witzke was a Portfolio Manager at Surveyor Capital, a subsidiary of Citadel, from 2009 to 2018, where he managed the firm’s largest healthcare portfolio and led one of its most profitable investment strategies. Prior to Citadel, he worked as a biotechnology analyst at Ridgeback Capital and held senior biotechnology equity research roles at Banc of America Securities, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Salomon Smith Barney.

Dr. Witzke began his professional career at Cargill Inc., where he served from 1993 to 1998 as a Senior Research Engineer and Mathematical Modeling Specialist in the company’s Biotechnology division. There, he commercialized his Ph. D dissertation and contributed to the design of the world’s first and largest polylactide (PLA) manufacturing facility in Blair, Nebraska — work that helped lay the foundation for what has since become a multi-billion-dollar industry. He holds a Ph. D. and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Michigan State University, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School. Dr. Witzke has authored numerous scientific publications on bioprocess modeling and is a coinventor on more than ten industrial biotechnology manufacturing patents. His doctoral dissertation is widely regarded as a field-defining work on polylactides and is often referred to as the “PLA bible.” Dr. Witzke is also an advisor to Omega Point, a leading Risk Management solution provider for the investment management industry.