Our Story

Stanford

Modern flow cytometry originated in the late 1960s in the Herzenberg Laboratory at Stanford University, and as the utility and power of cytometers evolved into the 1990s, the need arose for a more powerful and user-friendly analysis and display program. FlowJo® was conceived in the laboratory to address this need and easily analyze flow cytometry data and was primarily written by Mario Roederer and Adam Treister, based on concepts developed with David Parks, Martin Bigos, and Wayne Moore.  

Our founders collaborated on the first prototypes for FlowJo® – Mario worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Herzenberg lab and drove the evolution of the multicolor flow cytometry, and Adam served as a scientific programmer for the lab in 1995, as the analysis requirements of the multi-parametric data being gathered at Stanford had outgrown the power of any commercial software application.  The first version of FlowJo® was born as the next generation of the DESK software which was being used for analysis; Mario and Adam licensed the technology from Stanford and in 1997, FlowJo™ Version 2 was released commercially as a Macintosh-only application.