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| Keynote Speaker |
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Kip Ludwig, Ph.D., Program Director, NIH NINDS
Kip Ludwig is program director in repair and plasticity at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Ludwig received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Michigan, followed by post-doctoral work at the same institution. Ludwig's academic work focused on neural decoding algorithms for brain-computer interfaces, signal processing techniques to denoise neural recordings, and advance materials to improve the chronic stimulating and recording performance of microelectrodes. More recently, Ludwig worked in industry at CVRx as a research scientist, where he and his team conceived, developed and demonstrated the chronic efficacy of a next-generation neural stimulation electrode for reducing blood pressure in both pre-clinical and clinical trials. Through his industry work, he oversaw good laboratory practice and non-GLP studies supporting both European and FDA Investigational Device Exemption human trials, as well as participated in the protocol development and execution of those trials. Ludwig's interest is in all aspects of neural engineering, with special emphases on neuromodulation, BCI devices, and neural interface technology development.
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| Conference Faculty |
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James Cavuoto, Editor
and Publisher, Neurotech Reports
James Cavuoto is editor and publisher of Neurotech Business Report
and the founder of Neurotech Reports. He was the lead author of "The
Market for Neurotechnology," a market research report published
by Neurotech Reports. Cavuoto was the founder of Micro Publishing
Press, Inc., a publishing company that helped pioneer the market for
electronic publishing, digital imaging, and computer graphics. He
holds a degree in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve
University, where he studied under pioneers in the field of functional
electrical stimulation. He has also studied human factors engineering
at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Cavuoto spent
three years as a member of the technical staff at Hughes Aircraft
Company in Los Angeles, where he worked on simulation, training, and
publication products produced for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Cavuoto is an adjunct professor at Rochester Institute
of Technology and the author of eight books on computer graphics,
electronic publishing, and digital imaging. He is a member of the
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. He has authored a chapter in the textbook Neuromodulation (Elsevier, 2009), as well as articles in Neuromodulation, Journal of Neural Engineering, Medical Device Daily, IEEE Spectrum, MX magazine, and the International Journal of Medical Marketing.
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Thomas Hughes, President, Hughes & Associates
Tom Hughes, an attorney specializing in reimbursement, has driven healthcare reimbursement and payor strategies for nearly 20 years. Prior to founding Hughes & Associates, Tom successfully led initiatives for various companies resulting in expanded coverage decisions and enhanced payment for new and existing therapies. He built reimbursement teams, successfully lobbied decision makers at the state and federal level, and expanded coverage and payment with Medicare, Medicaid, private payors, workers compensation, and military plans. As an attorney, Tom has written and negotiated contracts with national payors, advised on the prosecutorial landscape involving false claims and anti-kickback issues, and conducted legal review of public policies. Tom's experience includes senior leadership roles in global medical companies as well as start-ups, including Hill-Rom Corp., Encore Medical, Empi, Inc., and Celleration. Prior to his work in the medical technology industry, Tom was a litigator for a Minneapolis law firm, representing physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare providers in medical malpractice actions. Tom is the current co-chair of the Minnesota Life Science Alley's Reimbursement Special Interest Group. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and holds a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, MN.
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| Panelists and Presenters |
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Mikhail Shapiro, Ph.D., Miller Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
Mikhail Shapiro is a neuroscientist, engineer, and technology entrepreneur focused on developing new technologies to study the brain's activity and treat neurological and psychiatric disease. He is currently a fellow of the Miller Research Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is working on ways to non-invasively sense and manipulate brain activity at the molecular level. Dr. Shapiro was previously a Venture Principal at Third Rock Ventures, where he helped launch several companies in neuroscience and personalized medicine. He was also a co-founder of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, whose BrainGate technology allowed paralyzed people to control external devices directly with their thoughts. Dr. Shapiro holds a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT, and received his undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from Brown University. In 2010 he was recognized by Technology Review as one of the world's top 35 innovators under age 35. |
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Roger Quy, Ph.D., General Partner, Technology Partners
Dr. Quy has been responsible for the life science practice of Technology Partners since 1989. Before joining the firm, he was a member of the founding management team of Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Europe. Dr. Quy began his career as a Research Fellow at the Queen Square Institute of Neurology in London, where he contributed to a textbook on epilepsy and developed a mobile monitoring system for epilepsy and sleep disorders that was acquired by Oxford Instruments. He holds six issued patents and is a recipient of the Gold Electrode neurotechnology achievement award from Neurotech Reports. Dr. Quy has served on numerous private, public and charitable boards. He was a Director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists for 10 years. He is member of the Advisory Board of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, and he served on the Advisory Boards of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of California in Berkeley, and the Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii. Dr. Quy earned a B.A. with honors in psychology and law and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Keele, England. He received an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. |
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| Victor Pikov, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Huntington Medical Resarch Institutes
Victor Pikov obtained Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Georgetown University, where he evaluated physiological and neurotransmission-mediated plasticity in micturition reflexive circuitry after spinal cord injury. During his postdoctoral fellowship at California Institute of Technology, he worked in David Baltimore's lab on expression of an optically-activated ion channel in virally-transected neurons. His present position is a neural engineer/neurophysiologist at the Neural Engineering Program of the Huntington Medical Research Institutes. Dr. Pikov's research covers five areas: (i) in vitro and in vivo evaluation of intelligent bidirectional arrays of silicon-based multisite probes for recording and stimulation of neuronal tissue; (ii) evaluating the changes in spinal neuronal excitability in the animal model of stroke; (iii) stimulating the spinal neuronal circuits responsible for bladder voiding in the animal model of spinal cord injury; (iv) examining the tinnitus-related neuronal activity in the auditory brainstem nuclei; and (v) studying the effect of electromagnetic waves in the millimeter band on neuronal activation. Alongside his research activity. |
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Don Deyo, Vice President, R&D, Medtronic Neuromodulation
Don Deyo is Vice President of R&D for Medtronic Neuromodulation; a role he has held since January 2004. Don is an experienced medical device R&D executive having joined Medtronic in 1983. Prior to his role in Neuromodulation, Don served in a variety of product development, technology and business management roles in Medtronic's Cardiac Rhythm Disease Management division, including his last position as Vice President of Product Development and Technology. During his time in CRDM, Don led many pacemaker, defibrillator, and information management initiatives from early concept to world wide commercialization. Prior to joining Medtronic, Don was with Control Data Corporation. Don holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and an MBA.
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Heath Lukatch, Ph.D., Partner, Novo Ventures
Heath Lukatch joined Novo A/S in 2006 working out of the San Francisco, CA office. He is chairman of the board of directors of Inogen, Inc. and NeuroTherapeutics Pharma, Inc., and a member of the board of directors of Amira Pharmaceuticals, Inc., AnaptysBio, Inc., and Cianna Medical, Inc. and was a board member of FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., InSound Medical, Inc. and Synosia Therapeutics. Prior to joining Novo A/S, Heath was a Managing Director for Piper Jaffray Ventures and SightLine Partners, and a bench scientist at Cetus, Chiron and Roche Bioscience. While at Piper Jaffray and Sightline he was responsible for biotech venture investments and served on the boards of several biotech and medical device companies. Previously, he was at McKinsey & Co. where his primary focus was on strategy consulting for biopharmaceutical companies. Heath also brings entrepreneurial experience from his role as founder and CEO of AutoMate Scientific, Inc. a biotechnology instrumentation company. Heath holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University and a BA in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkley. |
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Jonas Hansson, Investment Associate, HealthCap
Jonas Hansson is investment associate at HealthCap. Prior to joining Odlander Fredrikson in 2008 Jonas held various sales and marketing positions within Janssen Pharmaceutica (J&J). Jonas received his M.Sc. in Pharmacy from Uppsala University and his master thesis was presented at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. Jonas also holds an MBA from Stockholm School of Economics. |
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Paul Grand, Managing Director, RCT BioVentures
Paul M. Grand is a Managing Director for RCT BioVentures, the investment arm of Research Corporation Technologies, Inc., a technology venture investment firm and management company that provides early-stage venture funding for promising biomedical companies and technologies. At RCT, Grand is responsible for sourcing RCT's investments in medical devices. Prior to joining RCT, Grand was co-founder and VP of Operations of Imagine Pharmaceuticals and co-founder and CEO of MicroSurgeon in Los Angeles. Grand has extensive experience in new company formation and fund raising. Since 1990, he has built, operated, recruited management and raised financing for eight high technology, medical device, and biotechnology companies. He has employed more than 300 people in the Los Angeles area and served as CEO in companies with up to 150 employees. Grand also was a managing director for Fruition Ventures, a group of private equity investors focused primarily on early-stage information technology companies. Grand is a frequent panelist at biomedical conferences. He is a member of several groups helping to foster regional biomedical innovation in California, including the Los Angeles Life Science Roundtable and the OCTANe Biomedical Operations Committee. He has lectured on entrepreneurship and venture funding, judged business plans, and mentored students and scientists at numerous universities, including the University of California Berkeley, the University of California Los Angeles, Stanford, and the University of California San Francisco. Grand serves as an investment advisor to the LARTA NIH Commercialization Assistance Program for National Institute of Health Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program awardees, and he served as an advisor to the LARTA Venture Forum. He has spoken at more than 100 conferences, been featured in hundreds of articles in publications including Forbes, New York Times and Wall Street Journal and appeared as an expert on Bloomberg Television, CNN, and CNN/FN. |
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Kevin Wasserstein, Managing Director, Versant Ventures
Kevin Wasserstein specializes in investing and building medical device companies at Versant. His work with entrepreneurs spans the earliest seed or concept stage of development through the entire life cycle of the company. Kevin has more than 18 years of venture capital and operating experience in medical device and high technology companies, and currently serves, or has served, in board or advisory roles with companies which include: Acclarent, Autonomic Technologies, Respicardia, LipoSonix, Lutonix, Microfabrica, NeoGuide Systems, Rox Medical, Second Sight Medical, St. Francis Medical, and The Innovation Factory. In addition, he serves as a member of AdvaMed's National Venture Capital Advisory Board, and MDMA's Venture Capital Advisory Group. Before joining Versant in 2002, Kevin held a variety of marketing and business development roles at Guidant Corp. Previously, in Guidant's Compass Business Development Group, Kevin's responsibilities included acquisition, licensing, and investment with both private and public medical device companies, and corporate strategy. His operational experience also includes business development at Heartstream, and engineering design and engineering management at Hughes Aircraft Company. Kevin holds both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in product design, as well as an MBA, all from Stanford University. |
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Chip Fisher, President, Fisher-Wallace Laboratories
The son of stereo pioneer Avery Fisher, Chip Fisher earned his BA from Harvard University in 1978. After graduation, he worked for IBM in the Data Processing Division. He later founded and sold several companies before founding Fisher Wallace Labs in 2006 with the late Martin Wallace, Ph.D. Chip serves on the boards of the Avery Fisher Artists Program and the Virtual Music Academy. He resides in New York. |
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Michael Russell, Ph.D., President, Aaken Insite, Inc.
Michael Russell is the founder and CEO of Aaken Insite Inc. He graduated from the University of California, San Francisco with a Ph.D. in physiological psychology. He received a National Academy of Science fellowship in the Neurobiology of Aging at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Russell was the Director of the Intraoperative Monitoring group at University of California Davis until he left the University to become the founder of three successful companies.
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Ting Lu, President, COO, and CFO, eNeura Therapeutics
Ms. Lu has been with eNeura Therapeutics since 2005 when the company first set up shop in Silicon Valley. She currently serves as the President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. Ms. Lu is responsible for executing the company's strategies and overseeing performance of all functions within the company. She is a specialist in building operational and financial infrastructures for early-stage companies. She has over 30 years of experience across a number of industries with large multinational companies and small startups. Ms. Lu has served as CFO at medical device companies Afmedica (acquired by Angiotech) and Abaxis (nasdaq: ABAX), and for IT companies Teneros, Westbridge (merged with Actional then acquired by Progress), and EnterpriseLink (acquired by Merant). In addition, Ms. Lu has held key management positions at Xerox and Raychem Corp. She is a certified public accountant (inactive) and a graduate of Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley. |
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Philip Low, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO, NeuroVigil, Inc.
Dr. Philip Low is Chairman and CEO of NeuroVigil, the award-winning wireless neurodiagnostics company headquartered in San Diego. At the University of Chicago, he invented novel neurosurgical techniques. At Harvard Medical School, he showed in nine weeks that a collagen inhibitor could successfully neutralize the growth of fibroid tumors – he was 19 years old at the time. At the Salk Institute, he invented the SPEARS algorithm and authored a one-page Ph.D. thesis, a solution to a longstanding problem in brainwave analysis, which was unanimously approved by a committee including four members of the National Academy of Sciences and two past Presidents of the Society for Neuroscience. The degree was officially granted by UCSD, which had tried to flunk him out of the Ph.D. program five years prior. Dr. Low holds dual appointments at the Stanford School of Medicine and the MIT Media Lab, as well as an extraordinary ability recognition in the field of brain signal detection from the U.S. Government. He was named President of the 1st International Congress on Alzheimer's Disease and Advanced Neurotechnologies, held in Monaco in February 2010. His work has been featured in technical and popular articles including CNN, The Economist, Forbes and The New York Times. To bring his innovations to the market, Dr. Low founded NeuroVigil when he was still in graduate school and enlisted four Nobel Laureates and three Fortune 100 company founders. Under Dr. Low's leadership, NeuroVigil won the 2008 UCSD Entrepreneurship Competition, the annual DFJ Venture Challenge, the 2010 CONNECT Most Innovative New Product Award for iBrain TM , a wireless iPod for the brain, used by some of the world's top pharmaceutical companies with outpatient drug evaluations, and was listed by Fast Company as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Health Care, along with GE and the Cleveland Clinic. NeuroVigil successfully went to market in 2009. For his innovative contributions to Biomedicine as well as for his business leadership, Dr. Low has been recognized in 2010 by the MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 top innovators under 35 worldwide. Past recipients include the founders of Linux, Netscape, Paypal, Google, and Facebook. On May 1 st 2011, NeuroVigil successfully completed one of the largest seed valuation financings to-date. The same year, Dr. Low became the first recipient of the inaugural Jacobs-Rady Pioneer Award for Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship, awarded once every five years, irrespectively of age, gender or geographical location, to an exceptional scientist and chief executive for combined leadership in technology and business. |
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Alvaro Fernandez, CEO and Co-founder, SharpBrains
Alvaro Fernandez is SharpBrains' co-founder and CEO. He has been quoted by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, and Associated Press, among oters. Alvaro is a member of the Global Agenda Councils initiative run by the World Economic Forum, and recently wrote the acclaimed articles Preparing Society for the Cognitive Age , for Frontiers in Neuroscience, and Why We Need to Retool Use It or Lose It , for the Journal of Active Aging. He started his career at McKinsey & Company and led the launch and turnaround of several publishing and education companies in the U.S. and Europe, including Bertelsmann On Line, Docent, Inc, and Edusoft, a unit of Houghton Mifflin. Alvaro has an MBA and M.A. in Education from Stanford University, and enjoys teaching The Science of Brain Health at SFSU and UC-Berkeley Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. |
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Jennifer French, Executive Director, Neurotech Network
Jennifer French is executive director of the Neurotech Network, a nonprofit organization founded in Florida in 2003. Jennifer acquired her C6-7 incomplete spinal cord injury in 1998. Prior to her injury, she was recreationally active with such sports as canoeing, snowboarding/skiing, sailing, fly fishing, biking. After her injury, she still participates in all those activities. She is an active user of an FES system. Now residing in Tampa, Florida, Jen is active in the community accessible sailing program, Sailing Alternatives as well as the national US Sailing, Sailors with Special Needs. French has helped launch successful divisions is such organizations as Bombardier Capital and PC Connection, Inc. With an MBA specializing in marketing & strategy, she works with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, large and small, emerge into new markets, profile target customers and create and build systems to support sales efforts.
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| Entrepreneur Panel Presenters |
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Randall Nelson, CEO, Evergreen Medical Technology
Randall Nelson is founder and President of Evergreen Medical Technologies, LLC, a contract development and manufacturing company for Class II and Class III medical devices located in St. Paul, MN. In addition, Nelson has established PhysioTest (subsidiary of Evergreen Medical) as an independent test lab providing contract testing services for virtually all medical devices. Previously, Nelson was responsible for the development of medical devices for 30 years at both emerging and larger medical device companies. Nelson has held management positions at St. Jude Medical Inc., Atrial Fibrillation Division; Boston Scientific Corp., Scimed Division; Angeion Corp.; and Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc., with earlier experience as a mechanical engineer in the design of pacemakers at Medtronic, Inc. He has a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota and an Economics degree from Willamette University in Salem, OR. Nelson is an Adjunct Faculty member of the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, where he teaches a graduate level course in the evaluation of new medical innovations. |
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David Westendorf, Vice President, Business Development and Marketing, NeuroSky
David Westendorf is a consumer gadget nut with over 20 years in marketing and business development. Beginning in advertising with TBWA Chiat/Day, he managed campaigns for Infiniti and Nissan. Several years later, he made the jump to the client side of the business, where he launched five wireless markets for Cox PCS, acquired by Sprint. He kicked-off PocketMail in 1998, a mobile email device and service with international appeal. For the first time ever, getting email in Europe was a breeze. After PocketMail was sold, David became Palm's general manager of Palm.Net , where over 450,000 people subscribed to service for their Palm VII, with its ubiquitous raised antenna. He was GM of three business units; Palm.Net, PalmCafe retail, and Palm's mobile developer program. He returned to the startup world with Ofoto, which was acquired by Kodak. He ran the WW Partnerships group for Kodak. This included Apple, Adobe, Google, Microsoft in addition to Verizon, Cingular, and several EU operators. Currently, David runs marketing for NeuroSky, leading the charge for business development, product marketing, developer relations and demand generation. |
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Allen S. Braswell, Jr., CEO, Magneceutical Health
Allen Braswell has a background in finance and law and a 25-year track record in starting, building, and operating small companies and growing them into large, successful businesses. Mr. Braswell spent most of his career leading Circuit Test Inc, a computer service company with over 15 Fortune 500 customers such as. IBM, Apple, Toshiba, Sony, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems, along with two Fortune 500 Strategic Partners (FedEx and UPS) in changing the landscape of computer service logistics, by combining his company's technical repair capability within the “hub” locations of FedEx and UPS. While there, he led four M&A transactions (two selling and two purchase events) before finally retiring from Jabil Circuit, a tier one company in the Electronic Manufacturing Services arena that ultimately acquired Circuit Test. He is skilled at attracting and developing the highly talented management teams successful start-ups require. Mr. Braswell has spent the last several years as a member of the Boards of Directors of two publicly traded companies, gaining valuable experience in the strategy, governance, and performance expectations that the public markets require. |
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Andy Gotshalk, President, Blackrock NeuroMed
Andrew is a business operations senior manager with over 14 years experience in sales, strategic planning, process improvement, business design, financial modeling, and customer relationship management. Previously, he was Director of Research Products Business at CKI, leading the sales strategy and responsible for annual revenue growth in excess of 40 percent. Prior to CKI, Andrew was sales operations manager at Haemonetics Corp. in Braintree, MA for five years. Haemonetics Corp. is the global lead in developing, manufacturing, and marketing of blood processing technology. Andrew has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Steven Stupp, Ph.D., CEO, TriGeminal Solutions, Inc.
Steven Stupp is the co-founder and CEO of TriGeminal Solutions, Inc., a healthcare-technology company that helps physicians significantly improve patient outcomes and reduce costs by providing patient-specific solutions for chronic diseases, such as migraine. He has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in condensed matter physics from the University of Illinois, and a B.S. degree in physics, summa cum laude, from Tufts University. He was also a visiting scholar at Stanford University in the electrical engineering department. Steve has founded and served on the management team of several startups. He has also contributed to a variety of technology fields, including superconductivity, digital communications, and biosensors, at organizations such as Philips Research and Quantum Corp. He holds 10 patents, and has authored over 35 publications. He is a registered patent agent who has written more than 250 patents for startups and Fortune 500 companies, including the first patents for Apple, Inc.'s iPhone. |
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Todd Langevin, President, Functional Neuromodulation Inc.
Mr. Langevin brings over 20 years of medical device experience to the company. He has served as a key business advisor and consultant since late 2010. In September 2011, he joined the company as President and COO to lead the company’s internal operations and clinical and regulatory efforts. Prior to joining the company, he served as Senior Vice President of Clinical Operations and Commercial Development for CVRx, Inc., a company engaged in the development of an implantable device to regulate hypertension. Previously, he worked for Medtronic as Vice President and General Manager of Medtronic's Global Movement Disorders business, which includes deep brain stimulation products for treating Parkinson's disease, essential tremor and dystonia; and the SynchroMed pump for delivery of intrathecal baclofen for spasticity. For five years, Mr. Langevin managed Medtronic's Neuromodulation business in Europe. Prior to his European assignment he had global marketing responsibilities for Medtronic’s spinal cord stimulation pain management business and led teams which developed and launched novel therapies for the treatment of movement disorders. Mr. Langevin is a member of the board of directors of CSA Medical, Inc which develops and manufactures a proprietary therapeutic interventional treatment platform, the CryoSpray Ablation(TM) System, that delivers therapeutic doses of a cryogen to flash freeze and destroy diseased tissue inside the body. |
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Keith Winter, CEO, EmSense Corp.
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