Management

Peter Tsepeleff, Founder, President and CEO, is regarded as an expert in the commercial sector of the wireless mesh networking industry. He is a member of this Stanford Sensor Working Group, has over twenty years high-tech experience in Sales, Marketing and Business Development in Global and Domestic Markets. Mr. Tsepeleff was recently Vice President of Sales and Business Development at SensaMetrics, Inc. Prior to SensaMetrics, Mr. Tsepeleff was the Strategic Partner Manager at QWEST for CISCO where he was responsible for over half a billion dollars in business between the two companies and strategic joint initiatives. Before joining QWEST Mr. Tsepeleff was the Founder of NETmachines, a web server appliance company. Prior to founding NETmachines, Mr. Tsepeleff was Vice President of World Wide Sales and Marketing for Smart Link, Ltd., an Israeli Communications Company. Mr. Tsepeleff first started his career at Shugart Corporation, a Xerox company, where he received a solid foundation in Sales, Marketing and Business Development. He is best known as the Product Manager of the 5 1/4 inch floppy drive where he was at the very frontier of the development of the commercial PC. Mr. Tsepeleff has a BA and MA from San Jose State University and a MBA from Golden Gate University .

Dr. Vahe Manugian, Chief Technology Officer. Vahe Manugian holds a Ph.D. in Parallel Computing from Heriot-Watt University , Edinburgh , Scotland and B.Sc. Electronics from Birmingham University in the United Kingdom . Most recently Dr. Manugian founded and worked at Quantum Micro Systems, an engineering company specialized in embedded internet appliance products. He has over twenty years of experience in engineering management, developing computer, and embedded systems. Dr. Manugian's experience includes advanced electronics for control and image capture in Scanning Electron Microscopes at AMRAY, Secior  dedicated electronics for very high speed image processing at KLA Instruments and microprocessor design at Advanced Micro Devices, where he developed the 8041 and 8049 microprocessor devices. Recently, he was the Senior Scientist at Siemens Medical in San Francisco .

Dr. John Suh, Vice President of Product Development. Most recently Dr. Suh worked for Crossbow Technology, the pioneer and World Leader in TinyOS Wireless Sensor Networks software and hardware Development. At Crossbow Dr. Suh was responsible for Product Definition, and Wireless Sensor Training in TinyOS, where he taught thousands of Academics, CTO's, Engineers and Scientists throughout the world on theory, operation, and programming of TinyOS. Prior to joining Crossbow Technology, he was with Xerox PARC where he developed new robotic technology with applications in exploration and search and rescue. John also has extensive expertise in MEMS Sensor design and fabrication technology. He developed a CMOS integrated polymer MEMS actuator array chip with applications in micro robotics and manipulation arrays. He also helped to develop micro-mirror arrays for optical switches. Dr. Suh has been granted 5 patents in the fields of printing and robotics technology. His education includes a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from GMI Engineering & Management Institute (now Kettering University in Flint , MI ) and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Anshuman Sharma, Director Embedded Systems, holds a M.S in Electrical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley and B.S in Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. While a researcher at UC Berkeley, Anshuman was part of the extended TinyOS team and worked on the Mica, Mica2 and Mica2Dot platforms. He was involved in cross-discplinary NSF funded research projects in the areas of building management systems and emergency response and tracking for firefighting. As a professional he has held prominent engineering roles at Medtronic in core product development in developing embedded technology for implantable medical devices - drug pumps and neurostimulators. While at Medtronic, he spear-headed the effort to start net-centric therapy development that include use of existing implantable devices and sensors to deliver optimal therapy parameters. He also has held project management roles in a consulting capacity in the field of telecommunications and healthcare.

Kimberly Cornett, Director Operations, holds a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Davis and received her Bachelor of Science degree from Harvey Mudd College, graduating with Honors in Engineering and a dual-major of Government from Claremont McKenna College. Miss Cornett performed her graduate research in the field of Optical Microelectromechanical Systems (Optical MEMS), “Miniature Variable Optical Delay Lines Using Silicon Micromachined Resonant-Scanning Mirrors for applications including Optical Coherence Tomography and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy”. Prior work includes the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Fellowship year of independent study, dedicated to the “Engineering Aspects of Winemaking in Europe and Irrigation Techniques in Israel”. Miss Cornett studied bulk weather stations in both France and Germany. In Israel, she studied the utilization of different irrigational systems to control vine vigor, canopy development, and the rate of ripening. This gives Miss Cornett a truly international understanding of today's grape farmers, which culminates from hands-on training at her family's vineyard in Mendocino County under the tutelage of her Grandfather Billy Cornett, former President of the Mendocino Farm Bureau.

David Klitzke, Director Software Architecture, has over twenty years of experience in enterprise software engineering management and development in the areas of High Availability, Storage Networking, Operating Systems, and Systems Management. Mr. Klitzke most recently was Vice President of Software Engineering for Server2Net, a server blade company with unprecedented density of processor, memory, and fabric interconnect. As Sr Manager of Cluster Engineering for Sun Microsystems, he drove cross-functional teams through the product life cycle of four releases of Sun Cluster. Prior to that he was a software development manager and developer for Unisys and Convergent Technologies, where he directed networking performance enhancements including the multi-threading of TCP-IP and NFS, drove industry leading TPC-C performance results, and developed a Unisys-wide storage architecture. He's currently focused on current .NET and XML Web Services. David holds an MS from the University of Wisconsin .

Board of Advisors

Dr. Pruitt's research interests are in the area of micromachined sensors for system monitoring and modeling, development of novel processes and devices for measuring nanoscale mechanical behavior, and the analysis, design, and control of integrated electro-mechanical systems. She is particularly interested in the biomedical applications of nanofabricated devices with the goal of developing diagnostic tools, measurement and analysis systems, and reliable manufacture methods. MEMS devices and systems have the potential to revolutionize our healthcare and our energy production, as well as the way we work and the way we interact with engineered products and one another. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is essential to developing scalable and manufacturable solutions, especially for the medical and biological applications. The challenges include instrumenting and interfacing devices between the micro and macro scale, understanding the scaling properties of physical and material processes and finding ways to reproduce and propagate new technologies efficiently and repeatably at the macro-scale. Dr. Pruitt has a S.B. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering, an M.S. Stanford University in Manufacturing Systems Engineering and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering.

Dr. Wenstrand joined Hewlett-Packard, later Agilent Technologies, in 1991 as a member of the technical staff in the ULSI Research Laboratory concerned with the problem of achieving manufacturing efficiencies in a silicon process research fab. He managed the team responsible for the manufacturing and engineering information systems as well as logistics policies, culminating in publication of innovative manufacturing policies and the achievement of world-class cycle-times in a research fab. He then led a project team and later the section for the LaserJet ASIC business, building a capable IC design team, doubling revenues to more than $100M, and winning customer loyalty by developing excellent project management practices. More recently, Dr. Wenstrand managed the global R&D team and a $20M R&D budget for Agilent's Sensor Solutions Division, developing the initial camera module products contributing to the fastest growing business in Agilent.   He is now Chief Technologist at Agilent/SSD with responsibility for new technology, new business, and IP, where he recently sponsored a program which led to the shortest time to high-volume manufacture of a new technology product in the history of Agilent Labs, the recently introduced laser-based optical mouse. Concurrently, Dr. Wenstrand is Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford.  His research interests include sensor networks and extraction of useful information from the output of CMOS image sensors.  Dr. Wenstrand holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in E.E. from Stanford University and M.B.A. and B.S.E. degrees from the University of Michigan .

Dr. Hamid Aghajan, is a Consulting Professor and the Director of the Wireless Sensor Networks Laboratory in the EE Department of Stanford University. He has 10 years of industrial experience in system and algorithm design and performance evaluation for application domains in the wireless, optical telecommunications, and semiconductor manufacturing industries. He was a co-founder and vice president of an optical telecom start-up company in 2001-02. He has also worked on the development of smart antenna techniques for 802.11a WLAN systems. Hamid is currently supervising research programs of a group of students at Stanford University in the areas of wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks and is also collaborating with several corporations, research labs, and investors on the various technical and commercial aspects of the WLAN, RFID, MIMO, WiMAX, image analysis, and sensor network technologies. Hamid has published numerous journal and conference papers and holds 5 US patents. His research is currently focused on distributed processing methods for automated network node localization, cross-layer design of virtual MIMO techniques, collaborative event detection networks, RFID-enabled networks, and ad-hoc vehicular communication systems. Dr. Aghajan has his Masters and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University .

Dr. Alan Lakso is a Professor at Cornell University New York State Agricultural Experimental Station. Dr. Lakso has his Ph.D. in Plant Physiology from the University of California at Davis. His particular area of research is integrative plant and crop physiology, primarily on fruit crops. The team investigates the individual physiological bases of specific processes such as the regulation of sink activity in the grape berry, carbon partitioning as related to developmental stage and light microclimate, and fruit growth/abscission in the apple. His emphasizees how these individual processes are integrated in the whole plant and what can done to influence such processes to improve plant productivity, especially under field conditions. As indicated by our increasing use of dynamic simulation modeling, he feels that they will need more and more integrative physiology to be able to attack current needs to improve our management and culture as well as to attack increasingly complex problems such as global climate change and environmental compatibility through IPM and sustainable agriculture approaches

Dr. Bowen is a whole-plant physiologist and viticulture researcher at PARC Summerland. Her research is directed towards understanding the physiological ecology of grapevines, particularly the dynamic acquisition and utilization of resources such as water, nitrogen and solar energy. From her basic research she develops cultural strategies to improve wine grape quality. Dr. Bowen has also led the development of a geographic information system (GIS) for viticulture in the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys where the diverse combinations of soils, climate, terrain require equally diverse cultural techniques to achieve high quality wine grapes. Analysis of GIS data has elucidated how varieties and cultural techniques interact with site conditions to influence vineyard performance and wine quality. In connected projects, the relationships between vineyard ecology (also known as terroir), fruit and wine composition and quality, and wine aging potential are being studied at PARC and WRC.