William
C. Altman, President & CEO. Mr. Altman is an
experienced healthcare executive with 20 years of
experience in building growth companies as a private
equity investor, consultant, Chief Operating
Officer, President/Chief Executive Officer, and
Board member. Mr. Altman co-founded three firms,
two of which grew to over $50 million in revenues;
the other was successfully sold. He has also served
on the boards of five growth companies, including a
publicly traded firm with a market capitalization of
$1.5 billion and 7,000 employees before it was
successfully sold.
Previously, Mr. Altman served as President, CEO & Director of Kardia Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company engaged in developing adult cardiac stem cells for use in heart failure therapy. Mr. Altman recently played a key role in founding Vapogenix, a pharmaceutical development company, where he serves on the Business Advisory Board. Mr. Altman also serves on the Business Advisory Board of n3D Biosciences, a start-up company engaged in the production of innovative three-dimensional cell culture media and devices. Mr. Altman also co-founded FemPartners, a health care services firm providing management services and facility development joint ventures in women’s health care, which grew to over $50M in revenues and 500+ employees, as one of the largest women’s healthcare services firms in the US. Mr. Altman was Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer as well as Chief Operating Officer, and raised $15 million in financing from prominent East Coast venture firms. Most recently, he helped build “C-level” health care and life science senior management teams as Senior Client Partner in the Houston office of Korn/Ferry International, the nation’s largest executive search firm. Earlier in his career, Mr. Altman worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and did private equity investing as Senior Vice President of Capital Guidance Corporation.
Mr. Altman was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an M.A. in Politics and Economics. He also received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, summa cum laude, from Texas A&M University, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Dr.
Criscione
has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and an M.D., both from Johns
Hopkins University. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the
Department of Cardiology at University of California at San Diego; and
in 2001, joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering
at Texas A&M University. He is a leading expert on the role of
mechanical stimuli in heart disease and heart recovery, and he is the
inventor of CRK therapy and CorAmend TM. This is his first
commercial venture; yet as the director of the cardiac mechanics
laboratory, he has management experience. He has proven himself as an
effective grant writer and as paradigm shifter who does not give up and
who can lead a scientific field in a new direction. For example, he
recently proved, in the Journal of Elasticity, that the conventional
approach for describing high strain materials was ill-conceived
experimentally. The mechanics community was not ready to accept that 50
years worth of analysis was flawed; but despite multiple rejections and
controversial presentations, Dr. Criscione persevered and forever
changed how the behaviors of materials such as latex and polyurethane
are described quantitatively.
Dennis Robbins, Ph.D., Founder & Chief Operations Officer
Dr.
Robbins
has 25 years experience in the semiconductor industry and held a variety
of management and executive roles at Texas Instruments. From 1997
through 2000, as a Vice President of Texas Instruments, he managed the
worldwide manufacturing operations for TI’s analog and mixed-signal
products, with ten factories worldwide, and a workforce of over 9,000,
supporting $4B/yr revenue. Previously, he managed an R&D project
targeted at the flat-panel display market, and was a member of the Board
of Directors of the U.S. Display Consortium. Other roles include
acquisition/integration manager for the acquisition of Silicon Systems
Incorporated (SSi) by TI, a $600M acquisition, Product Department
Manager for TI’s analog and mixed-signal ICs, with responsibility for
design engineering, product engineering, production planning, and P&L,
with a worldwide revenue base of $400M/yr, and QRA Manager for TI's
Volume Products (all Analog and Logic products). He retired from Texas
Instruments in January 2001 to pursue interests in the area of startup
companies. In addition to his role with Techpiphany, he is has recently
served on the boards of directors and advisory boards of various
companies, and is currently on the board of MAI Logic, a Fremont CA
based company. Mr. Robbins holds a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from
Arizona State University (1976). He also holds an M.S. in Physics
(Arizona State University, 1973) and a B.A. in Physics (DePauw
University, 1971). His research was in the field of Raman Scattering.
Michael Moreno, Ph.D., Chief of Engineering
Dr.
Moreno
is
a graduate of The Honors
College at Florida International University (FIU) where he received his
Bachelor's degree and two Master's degrees, including a Master of
Science in Biomedical Engineering. While attending graduate school at FIU he formed Failure Analysis of Cardiovascular Systems, Incorporated (FACTs).
Through FACTs, Dr. Moreno has consulted with numerous major medical
device companies. He developed and patented a multi-axial testing device
designed specifically for vascular stent grafts. He eventually sold
that patent to Bose/Enduratec. He also developed the Hybrid Dynamic
Stent which has issued European patents and US patents pending.
He worked as a
Research Engineer at the Biomedical Engineering Institute at FIU before
moving to Texas A&M to serve as TEES Associate Research Engineer.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy in Biomedical Engineering from
Texas A&M University where he was awarded the Gramm Doctoral Fellowship
for outstanding scholarly research and teaching. In addition, he
has served as a Lecturer in the Department of Biomedical
Engineering at Texas A&M for several years. where he has developed and delivered
courses in Biosolid and Biofluid Mechanics, as well as seminars in
Philosophical Foundations of Science and Engineering. Presently, he has
over 15 publications (including textbook chapters in Philosophy of
Education and Biomedical Engineering). Throughout his career, Dr.
Moreno's research interests have focused on the role of mechanics in
cardiovascular disease processes and device based therapies for
cardiovascular pathologies.