University of Washington Center for Commercialization

Rob Arnold is the former President and CEO of Geospiza, Inc., a leader in cloud computing solutions for genetic analysis. Geospiza was successfully sold to Perkin Elmer in May of 2011. Prior to Geospiza, Rob founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Crossport Systems, a leader in Internet security providing complete security solutions for broadband. In December 2001, Rob led the successful sale of Crossport to Lineo/Metrowerks, a division of Motorola. Before founding Crossport, Rob co-founded and was Chairman and CEO of ST Labs, Inc., which he built into a highly regarded and top-ranked software testing and quality assurance firm, employing 250 people. ST Labs customers included Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Adobe and Countrywide Home Loans. After selling ST Labs to Data Dimensions, Inc. (DDI) in 1998, Rob served as its executive vice president for the newly-formed test center division until September, 1999. In that role, he led DDI’s transition to an Internet-centric testing and quality assurance firm.

Rob presently serves on the executive committee and board of directors of the Technology Alliance. In 1998, Rob was named one of the “Top 40 Under 40” business leaders by the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Lars Johansson is an active Cleantech angel investor and the co-chair of Northwest Energy Angels. At UW C4C his primary focus will be on commercialization opportunities in the Energy/Cleantech space. His background is in IT where he was an executive at Microsoft for a combined 16 years. Lars joined Microsoft in Sweden and was responsible for the Nordic Enterprise business when in 1993 he relocated to Redmond to lead the development of the company’s initial volume licensing programs. Most recently he was responsible for the Worldwide System Builder business. Lars has a Business degree from the University of Uppsala and an Engineering degree from Älvkullegymnasiet in Karlstad, both in Sweden.

Michael “Luni” Libes is a serial entrepreneur who over the past two decades has helped build five start-ups, four of which he founded. His companies include Ground Truth (mobile market research and analysis), Medio Systems (mobile search, advertising, and analytics), Mforma (mobile gaming and applications), 2WAY (enterprise collaboration systems), and Nimble (pen computing, PDAs, and early smartphones). In addition, Luni is an Entrepreneur in Residence and Instructor at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, and advisor to a dozen early-stage companies.

Ted Weiler will use his 35 years of experience in R&D and marketing of a wide variety of medical devices to help UW scientists find the best path to commercialization for their medical device–oriented research. Ted has been involved in the development and clinical application of unique technologies in ultrasound at UW and ATL (Phillips) and defibrillator monitors at Physio-Control. During 19 years managing R&D for Olympic Medical (Natus), he oversaw the development of a wide variety of products for the pediatric, surgery, and inhalation therapy markets, as well as neonatal neurology products for the detection and treatment of brain injury in newborn infants. Ted has extensive experience in dealing with the FDA, including management of clinical trials and the 510(k) and PMA regulatory processes. As general manager of the Olympic Medical Division of Natus Medical, he oversaw the implementation of Lean techniques to improve the efficiency and flexibility of the manufacturing facility. Recently he has been investing more time and energy in social business concepts and appropriate technologies for developing countries.

Chris Wood has worked in the field of medical image post processing since 1987, and has held various senior management positions with Picker International and Siemens Medical Solutions. He has been responsible for the commercial release of products in the early stages of the fields of 3D medical image visualization and image guided surgery. He was most recently Vice President of Research and Development, and co-founder of Confirma. Confirma is a CAD company focusing on post processing and CAD detection for Breast MRI which won the 2003 award from Frost and Sullivan for the most entrepreneurial CAD company of the year. He holds several patents in the areas of image post processing, registration, CAD and visualization. Chris holds BS and MS degrees in Physics from the University of South Florida.