Advisors

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. 

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 Nanotronics main office designed by Karen.

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.

Paul Roosin

Paul Roosin 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.