A crystal lattice structure, its internal grid exposed at a cut face, as a visual analogue for a coordinate system

Career Timeline

An annotated map with magnified detail insets, tracing a route through named districts
Forty-five years, read the way this map reads a city: the whole route, and the detail inside each stop.

1981–1990 — PaineWebber

Managing Director, Mergers & Acquisitions.

1991–1995 — RF&P Corporation

Chief Executive Officer of RF&P, a real estate investment company owned by the Virginia State Retirement System.

1993 — FibroGen

Co-Founder and Director, since October 1993 — the longest continuously held board seat in his record.

1996 — Royalty Pharma and BioMatrix

Co-founds Royalty Pharma with a $60 million start, building the market for pharmaceutical royalties as an asset class. In the same year, becomes President, CFO, and Director of BioMatrix (through 2000, spanning the Synvisc® launch).

2003–2024 — Royalty Pharma, Chairman

Chairman of the Board through Royalty Pharma’s growth to $26 billion in assets and its 2020 public listing (RPRX), with partial royalty rights on seven of the top thirty drugs sold in the United States.

2013 — The Locus Model

Formulates the Locus Model — the framework setting out how any product-producing system is built and how it runs, and the basis for every functional-coordinate patent that follows.

2014–2025 — Intra-Cellular Therapies

Director, serving through the company’s growth as a public pharmaceutical company (ITCI).

2017 — WEBs ETF Trust

CEO and Trustee, a role held since. The Systems Syntax patent family — the logical data model underlying the Functional Information System — is filed the same year.

2019 — The textbook

Systems Economics: The Parts and Processes of Economic Systems is published in its 3rd edition (Locus Analytics, 294 pages) — the primary technical specification of the Locus Model and FIS® methodology.

2021 — Cibus, Chief Executive Officer

Named CEO of Cibus in October 2021, applying pharmaceutical-grade production standards to plant biology through the Rapid Trait Development System®.

2024 — Recognition, and a transition

Cibus is named Fast Company’s #2 Most Innovative Agriculture Company of 2024. Riggs steps down as a Royalty Pharma director in June, having led the company from founding through its public listing.

2026 — Syntax Data

Executive Chairman and Founder of Syntax Data, built on the patented Locus Model and FIS® as a coordinate-based information infrastructure for finance and economic data. Steps down as Cibus CEO while remaining Chairman of the Board, with Craig Wichner named as successor CEO.

See Credentials for education and recognition, or the full board and governance record.

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