Advisors
Ivan Eliashevich
Dr. Ivan Eliashevich started his scientific and business pursuits at the Ioffe Institute in his native St. Petersburg, Russia. He earned PhD in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and Executive Master in Technology Management from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. After a few years as a Research Scientist at Emcore Corporation, Ivan became Director of LED Chip Development at Joint Venture start-up GELcore (now General Electric Lighting Solutions). Ivan holds 25 US patents.
After a highly profitable sale of JV share to GE in 2006, Ivan joined IQE - world’s largest compound semiconductor wafer foundry. As Director of Sales and Business Development, Ivan helped to grow IQE’s global GaN HEMT wafer foundry business from the ground up to world leading position.
A few of Ivan’s favourite hobbies are globe trotting with his family in tow, genealogy, tennis and debates about military and political history.
Click to View an Interview with Ivan
Michael Zigman
Michael Zigman Bio
Michael Zigman has been advising and helping to finance high technology corporations for nearly 20 years. Most recently, Mr. Zigman led the team that acquired a developer and manufacturer of antimicrobial technologies and products. From 2004-2009, he was with WR Hambrecht + Co as Managing Director of technology investment banking. From 1994-2004, Mr. Zigman was Managing Director at SoundView Technology Group, which was spun out of Gartner Group, the world’s largest information technology research firm. At both Hambrecht and SoundView, in addition to focusing on new business, he worked closely with corporate clients to shape and present their strategy and message; to analyze markets and to plan and execute growth strategies, including strategic partnerships and acquisition opportunities; to advise clients and negotiate on their behalf in M&A transactions; and to introduce clients to the appropriate investor partners.
Mr. Zigman has devoted his non-profit work to the advancement of the mutual goals and shared interests of science, business and education. He serves on the boards of three institutions dedicated to science and education: (1) The New York Academy of Sciences, the third oldest scientific society in the United States, with over 25,000 members in over 140 countries; (2) The Graduate Center Foundation. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting body of The City University of New York (CUNY), the world’s largest urban public university, comprised of 23 institutions serving over 260,000 students; and (3) Macaulay Honors College Foundation. Macaulay is the highly selective honors college which draws its students from the seven senior colleges of CUNY.
Mr. Zigman holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College.
John West
John West BIO
John West has made his career in liquid crystal research and applications. He has published over 120 papers in the field and holds 15 US patents which have been licensed around the world. In addition to his individual research he has served as Director of the LCI and the Center for Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials and most recently as Vice President for Research at Kent State. He has a proven track record of effectively transferring technology from academia to the marketplace. Working with local and state officials he established FLEXMatters, a regional consortium designed to establish a cluster for the development and manufacture of flexible electronics in Northeast Ohio.
Alexis Gambis
Alexis Gambis Bio
Alexis Gambis is a filmmaker, scientist and founder of Imagine Science Films. He is currently attending New York University Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Film Program and is an adjunct science faculty member at New York University College of Art and Sciences. Dr. Gambis is also a key advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a regular Sloan grant reviewer and the youngest appointee to the five-member Sloan Film Council.
His film work straddles both documentary and fiction, having directed projects such as a documentary ‘Amazonia Brasil’ on the Amazon Forest and a short fiction ‘Disposable’ about the relationship between man and technology. He is currently preparing his first feature, ‘The Fly Room’, based on the life of Calvin Bridges, a pioneer geneticist known for his seminal work in understanding sex and inheritance in and out of the laboratory. His recent short narrative ‘Courtship’, a prequel to the ‘The Fly Room’ is about a young scientist’s challenge to overcome his isolation and explore his sexual identity.
Joel Smernoff
Joel Smernoff Bio
Joel Smernoff is the co-founder of Potential.ly, focusing on helping users find out which of their friends are experts in any topic to help with recommendations and sharing. Before that, he was the CEO of MarketSharing, a B2B marketplace of curated local and national services to help small businesses save money, save time and grow faster, as well as the CEO and co-founder of 960 Media, an innovative online service geared to transitioning military veterans into better civilian lives. Previously, Joel was the President and COO of Paltalk, the largest video chat service in the world. Overseeing Paltalk's strategy, product design, business development, marketing, ad sales, finance and ops, he was able to triple revenue in just four years. Prior to joining Paltalk, Joel was a key founding member of AOL's first brand extension, AOL for Small Business, after holding an executive position on Netscape's Netbusiness team. Before that, he led the strategy and operations for a variety of companies in several industries, from asset management to large Fortune 500 companies. Joel graduated from the University of Michigan with both a BSE in Naval Architecture and an MBA in Finance.
He sits on the advisory boards of Social Media Week, AdventureUS.com, Plexus Entertainment, Nanotronics, Hand Swipe, Juxster, Balance Integration Corp, Dimestore Media (sold), and Ugen Media (sold). In his free time, Joel’s passions include kitesurfing, yoga, yacht racing, adventure travel, car racing and lifelong learning.
Paul Roossin
Paul Roossin Bio
Paul Roossin brings a broad background in science, technology, and entrepreneurship to Nanotronics Imaging. Paul trained as a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University where he performed pioneering investigations into the neural substrates of memory consolidation and recall. Seduced by computer technology, he then spent the next fifteen years at IBM's Research Division, where he and his team created the world's most accurate machine translation system, for translating French texts into English. At IBM he also produced the first commercial continuous speech, large vocabulary speech recognition system, which had an accuracy rate of over 99%. As an entrepreneur, he and two friends founded ConsumerSearch.com, a shopping meta-review website; it grew to be one of the largest shopping sites on the web and was sold to The New York Times in 2007.
Click to View an Interview with Paul
Keith Yerian
Keith Yerian Bio
Keith Yerian brings 26 years of IT/software experience and the ability to identify customer processes and requirements leading to world-class solutions. His background includes President, CEO, and Chief Architect of ETC Computers, a 35+ employee specialized software development firm whose clients have included International Harvester, Firestone, Intermac, various call center companies, and data companies such as Harris InfoSource (a division of Donnelly), Platinum Data, and various yellow pages companies; Senior Software Engineer with Lockheed Martin/Goodyear Aerospace; Senior Software Engineer with Technicare, and Software Engineer with the University of Texas Medical Center. He is currently working on his PhD in Computer Science at Kent State University, has a MS in Computer Science from the University of Houston, and has taught computer science at the college level at two colleges.
Georges Sylvestre M.D.
Georges Sylvestre Bio
Dr. Georges Sylvestre is currently working at the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center as Vice-Chairman of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department and Director of the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Division. A native of Montreal, and he moved to New York City after his Medical School and Residency at McGill University an completed a Fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Sylvestre’s clinical interests are varied, revolving around medical complications of pregnancy, prenatal diagnosis as well as clinical an bench research. He is the author of multiple publications including a bench research paper entitled "The endothelin-converting enzyme1/endothelin-1 pathway plays a critical role in inflammation-associated premature delivery in a mouse model" (which was his fellowship thesis) in the American Journal of Pathology. He is the author of a chapter in the Textbook of Perinatal Medicine published in 2005. He has a special interest in Women' Health Epidemiology and is presently pursuing a Master's Degree in Public Health (M.P.H) at Columbia University School of Public Health. He is also a collaborator and steering committee member for several large international, multi-center randomized controlled trials, including the Early External Cephalic Version Trial published in 2011 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He frequently is a guest lecturer for Grand Rounds in the NYC area and abroad. Dr. Sylvestre has been certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Maternal Fetal Medicine and in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
Karen Starr, Founder of Hazel Tree Interiors
Karen Starr bio
Karen Starr is an Interior Designer who lives and plays in Akron, Ohio. Along with her partner in life and business, Jon Haidet, she co-owns and operates Hazel Tree Interiors - their studio/store located in a fantastic 1870’s-meets-1960’s building near downtown Akron, Ohio.Hazel Tree Interiors sells three things: Karen’s interior design services; Jon’s custom picture framing services; and lots of other’s locally-made home décor, furniture & art. The combination of the three is a fun and successful mix of many people’s passions, talents and hard work. Her first interior redesign consulting business, Karen Starr ReDesign, was born from the notion that we often have more useable and valuable possessions than we realize. From there, it just takes a sharp design eye to move it around and maximize it, adjust your color choices, then add responsibly-made (and often locally-made) pieces from there. These days, her current business and design philosophy are rooted in that same notion….they have just grown a bit since then, into a full-service interior design studio that is now doing commercial projects as well as residential.
For more, visit: http://www.hazeltreeinteriors.com and http://karenstarrredesign.com
Click to View an Interview with Karen
Images from the new Nanotronics Main Office, Designed by Karen
