company

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.