Laurence H. Cooke, Founder / Inventor / board of directors
Laurence H Cooke (Larry Cooke) has over 40 years experience in Electronic Design Automation, Semiconductor and Computer Systems technology, with over 35 years of management experience including over 30 years of executive experience. As an engineer he created and upgraded a wide range of EDA tools. As a manager he directly or indirectly managed a wide range of engineering functions. As an executive, he founded: Vertex (a fabless ASIC company, now an ASIC division of Toshiba) where he was VP of Engineering & CTO, Crosspoint Solutions (an FPGA company) where he was VP of Engineering & CTO, Chameleon Systems (a reconfigurable compute company) where he was COO, and On-Chip Technologies (an SOC verification & test company) where he was CEO & CFO. As a consultant, he has done business/market analysis, developed SoC Platform based Design Methodologies, and lead a geographically diverse internet based standards organization called the VSI Alliance as their executive director. He is also the inventor or co-inventor on 94 granted US patents. Larry has a BS degree in Applied Mathematics from Stanford University.
Richard Preston, CEO / board of directors
Richard Preston has been the CEO of several technology-based companies and is active in the Silicon Valley community. He has run both software and hardware companies. As CEO, he has taken two companies from concept to profitability and sold others to public companies. He has a strong financial and operations background with an MBA from UC Berkeley; public accounting experience with PWC and banking experience as a founder and director of Silicon Valley Bank. Rich has also sold products through a variety of channels, from direct and OEM to retail. Rich is a former Chairman of the American Electronics Association, NorCal Council. He has served his community as a Trustee of the Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education and was a founder and Board member of the San Mateo County Parks and Recreation Foundation.
Paul Comita, Process Expert
Paul has successfully applied scientific and engineering principles to create technology in a number of diverse areas, primarily centered around semiconductor processes and equipment. He has research and development experience with IBM and others, including new materials, process technology and tool development, scalability from lab to fab, efficiency and yield improvement, and productivity optimization.
Specialties: Semiconductor process technology, lasers and optical imaging and their application toward commercial products, intellectual property and patent development and writing, quality control studies, such as FMEA, VAVE, DOE, and risk analysis. Project management using critical chain methodology. Paul has published over 38 articles in refereed journals, including 6 book chapters, and have given over 30 national and international presentations. He was Director of Technology at Applied Materials, Inc. and has over 30 granted patents.
Paul has a PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley and has done post doc work at Stanford.
BOB Cousins, Co-Founder / Board MEMBER
Bob Cousins has worked with startups in both energy and computing for more than 35 years. Bob has served as CTO and/or Engineering VP of multiple technology companies from New York to California. He is an inventor and technologist, holding over twenty patents in diverse areas including filesystem design, data storage and security, high frequency RADAR, imaging and medical instrumentation, and virtual credit cards. Bob was selected as Inventor of the Year, 2020 by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association He has also written two novels, Pipov and Miller's Trials.
Daniel M. Kammen,ph.d., Board of Advisors
Dr. Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL; rael.berkeley.edu), and was Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from 2007 – 2015
He was appointed by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in April 2010 as the first energy fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative. He began service as the Science Envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016, but resigned over President Trump’s policies in August, 2017. He has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (BA 1984) and Harvard (MA 1986; PhD 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Albert K. Henning, Board of Advisors
Albert K. Henning has over thirty years’ experience in semiconductor device physics, and in micro- and nano-systems technology development. He specializes in technology and intellectual property development and assessment, related to semiconductor device physics, MEMS, microfluidics, and nanoscale technologies (nanotechnology).
Dr. Henning began his carrier as a Research Assistant for the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College from 1977 to 1979. Subsequently he served three years as a Device Physicist at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California, leading the device physics effort on Intel’s first CMOS process technology, used to build the 80386 microprocessor. He then returned to graduate school at Stanford University for five years, researching hot carrier device physics (and related temperature effects) in Si and SiGe MOSFETs under the direction of Jim Plummer. Over the next nine years he was Assistant and Associate Professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. His research centered on MOSFET device physics, TCAD, and metrology (including scanning Kelvin probe, scanning capacitance, and atomic force microscopies used to measure nanoscale dopant distributions in semiconductors), and microfluidic MEMS devices and process technologies.
In 1996 Dr. Henning started work at Redwood Microsystems as Director of Technology. Here he directed all aspects of research, development, and deployment of MEMS-based flow control systems, using silicon microvalves and related flow and pressure sensors, for customers such as Applied Materials, until December 2005.
He then founded Aquarian Microsystems in 2006, continuing to develop microfluidic and microflow devices and products. He was a finalist in the Clean Tech Open in both 2006 and 2007.
In 2007 he joined NanoInk, Inc. as Director of MEMS Technology. He conducted research on Dip Pen Nanolithography and NanoEncryption technologies, with applications to: verification of pharmaceutical (drug) authenticity; integrated circuit mask repair; and biosensor nano-array assay for disease diagnostics and drug development. He also directed development of microdevices and microsystems, based on atomic force microscopy and nanofluidics, and all metrology activities relative to micro- and nano-fabrication processes.
Jyotsna Iyer, Ph.D., Board of Advisors
Dr. Iyer’s area of expertise is in functional materials and their engineering applications. She has 15+ years of professional experience developing products using functional materials in biotech, fuel cells, specialty films & coatings, sensors, microfluidics and nanotechnology. Dr. Iyer managed many materials R&D programs to enable development of disruptive technologies during her 11+ years with Lockheed Martin.
Before joining Lockheed Martin, Dr. Iyer was the materials technical lead for the development of a microfluidic chip and microarray based high throughput drug library screening system at Caliper LifeSciences (now Perkin Elmer LabChip® systems) and consultant for the development of high throughput excipient formulation system at Alza. Dr. Iyer worked in the Technical Polymers Research Group supporting the Kynar® (PVDF) and Rilsan® (Nylon) line of products and worked on PVDF based fuel cell membrane development for Atofina Chemicals (now Arkema) prior to joining Caliper LifeSciences.
Dr. Iyer received her B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in Chemical Engineering and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT under Professor Paula Hammond.