Board of Directors
Chuck Witkowski, II — President and Chief Executive Officer
Gary Stevenson — Chairman
Mr. Stevenson is Managing Partner of Memphis Biomed Ventures I and
President of MB Venture Partners. Mr. Stevenson has a unique
combination of financial and strategic experience in the health care
industry including four years in public accounting, seven years with
one of the largest and most diversified health care manufacturers, and
six years in investment banking and equity research. Mr. Stevenson was Director of Health Care Investment Banking for Morgan
Keegan & Company and worked on a variety of transactions in private
equity, public offerings and mergers and acquisitions. He was also an
equity research analyst on medical device and health care services
companies at Morgan Keegan and at A. G. Edwards & Sons. Mr.
Stevenson held several management positions in finance, sales,
marketing and strategic planning with Abbott Laboratories. He began his
career in public accounting, where several of his clients were health
care companies. Mr. Stevenson received a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Missouri in 1984 and an MBA
from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern
University in 1992. He is a certified public accountant and a chartered
financial analyst. Mr. Stevenson currently serves on the Board of
Directors for Protein Discovery and Biomimetic Pharmaceuticals and is a
Board Observer at Axiomed Spine Corporation.
Kevin Lalande
Kevin Lalande is a Managing Director at Santé Ventures. Prior to
founding Santé, Kevin spent seven years with Austin
Ventures, a prominent venture firm with $3.9 billion under management.
Before joining Austin Ventures, he was a management consultant with
McKinsey & Company. Previously, Kevin co-founded and sold three
successful companies: NetProfit, sold to a privately-held advertising agency in
1996; Serus, sold to Netopia (Nasdaq: NTPA) in 1998; and TimeMarker, sold to PrimeHoldings (OTCBB: PRIM) in 2001. Kevin received an MBA with highest distinction (Baker Scholar) from the Harvard Business School and holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Lee Martin, PE Ph.D.
Dr. Martin is a Managing Member of Clarity Resources, LLC
and a Director of Protein Discovery. Dr. Martin is a business visionary
who can take ideas from concept to marketplace. After six years as a
development engineer at ORNL, he founded
TeleRobotics International, Inc., to develop robots to use in hazardous
environments. The company, which later became iPIX®, developed,
patented, and introduced to the market an immersive interactive imaging
method call iPIX® that is now used worldwide via the Internet to
remotely display images. As CEO of the
company, he secured funding from Small Business Innovative Research
Program, which led to major corporate equity investments from Motorola
Corporation and the Discovery Channel. The company went public in
August 1999. Dr. Martin holds engineering degrees from the University
of Tennessee and Purdue University. His technical efforts have received
20 U.S. Patents, two Research and Development Magazine R&D 100
Awards, and the 1994 NASA SBIR
Technology of the Year Award. The National Society of Professional
Engineers named him the National Young Engineer of the Year in 1988.
Grady S. Vanderhoofven
Grady Vanderhoofven is Executive Vice President of Southern Appalachian Management Company, LLC,
and Assistant Manager of the Southern Appalachian Fund. Mr.
Vanderhoofven is also the Executive Vice President of Eclipse
Management, LLC, and a Fund Manager for
Meritus Ventures. He is a member of the Boards of Directors for Protein
Discovery, Smart Furniture, Tricycle, and ThinOptX. Mr. Vanderhoofven
previously worked for ten years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL),
where he worked as a materials engineer and in business development. As
a commercialization manager, he led a group responsible for
identification and commercialization of intellectual property and
negotiated more than 50 license agreements and more than 125 commercial
research and development agreements with companies ranging from
start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations. Mr. Vanderhoofven led ORNL in the creation of twelve start-up companies founded to commercialize products and services based on technology developed at ORNL.
He has both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in mechanical
engineering from Yale University and has completed an Executive
Education Program in private equity and corporate governance at Harvard
Business School.