Fuad El-Hibri, Who Led a Troubled Vaccine Maker, Dies at 64

“The cross-contamination incident is unacceptable,” he said, “period.”

About 60 million additional doses were found to be contaminated in June.

Fuad El-Hibri was born on March 2, 1958, in Hildesheim, Germany, the son of Elizabeth (Trunk) El-Hibri, a homemaker, and Ibrahim El-Hibri, an engineer and entrepreneur. He grew up in Lebanon and Germany and graduated from Stanford University in 1980 with a degree in economics. He received a master’s degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Management in 1982.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy (Grunenwald) El-Hibri; his mother; his brother, Samir; his sister, Yasmin El-Hibri Gibellini; his daughters, Faiza and Yusra El-Hibri; his son, Karim; and three grandchildren.

Mr. El-Hibri began his career working for Citicorp in Saudi Arabia and later worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Indonesia. After returning to the United States, he started a business that helped national telecom companies upgrade their networks in Russia, Venezuela and El Salvador.

In the 1990s he advised the Saudi Arabian government on its efforts to buy millions of doses of an anthrax vaccine. That experience seeded the idea for what became Emergent BioSolutions.

He co-founded the company, originally called BioPort, in 1998. He and his partners, including William J. Crowe, a former admiral, soon won a bid to buy a disused government laboratory in Lansing, Mich., and upgrade it to produce anthrax vaccines for the U.S. military.

The company changed its name to Emergent BioSolutions in 2004. It went public in 2006.