Mr. Galanaugh has had a wide variety of functional and managerial roles, which include product development engineering, marketing and sales management, division general management, corporate business development, newsletter editing and independent consulting. After several years of aerospace engineering he joined Becton Dickinson and Company. At BD, he was responsible for new product development /market introduction for many very successful analytical systems products, for various clinical laboratory sites, such as hospitals, commercial and physician’s office laboratories. He has managed both direct sales forces and distribution relationship efforts.
He served as President of Becton Dickinson, Primary Care Division and as Corporate Vice President of Business Development for the Diagnostic Sector. In recent years, his consultation efforts focused on "the strategic implications of technology innovation". He has developed processes for assessing opportunity, evaluating technology and specifying the requirements for commercial success. His experience is relevant to the interpretation of both customer preference and technology promise. Most of his efforts have been focused on worldwide healthcare issues and on products subject to FDA regulation.
In addition, he has served as President of NCCLS (now, CLSI), the global organization responsible for voluntary consensus standards for clinical laboratory practice. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Van Slyke Foundation, a not-for-profit entity of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, devoted to supporting programs in education, research and career development.
Mr. Galanaugh received a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Polytechnic University (Brooklyn, NY) and a Master of Business Administration from Seton Hall University (South Orange, NJ).
Rudy Rodriguez is the Chief Technical Officer and interim President of Advanced Animal Diagnostics. He has a Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering from George Washington University and holds the Professional Engineer (PE) certification. He has thirty years experience in development of diagnostic instrumentation, twenty-eight patents and is a four-time winner of the R & D 100 Award as one of the 100 most significant new technical products of the year. He served as the Vice President of Research & Development for Becton Dickinson's Primary Care Diagnostics Division for fifteen years. Prior to that, he was an R & D executive for Coulter (now Beckman-Coulter) and Baxter International diagnostic divisions. He was the Project Leader of the world's most successful Physician Office Hematology (BD's QBC and QBC Autoread), and the Project Leader in the world's most successful Veterinary Office Hematology System (marketed by Idexx as Autoread). He participated in the development of the NCCLS H20 Standard used for evaluation of automated leukocyte differential instruments. He is a co-inventor and was the BD Project Leader of the R & D team that developed the base technology upon which AAD was founded. Mr. Rodriguez is an Adjunct Professor of the Department of Population Health and Pathobiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, at North Carolina State University, and is a member of the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians (AAVLD).
Mr. Linn most recently served as Alliance Manager, Business Development, BD Technologies, in Research Triangle Park. In recent years, among other duties, he managed the BD Technologies Incubator and was involved with 15 emerging companies in the area. These companies have created over 500 jobs and raised almost $500 million dollars in VC Funding, Grants, or Corporate Funding. Before his 22 years at BD, he was a researcher at Research Triangle Institute and Union Carbide Ag Products. Mr. Linn has 21 Publications and 15 issued US Patents, including several in a successful molecular diagnostic product commercialized by BD. He graduated from UNC at Chapel Hill with a BS in Chemistry. He is the member of several professional societies including, American Chemical Society (ACS), American Society for Microbiology (ASM), and Licensing Executives Society (LES).
Deborah Asion began her work as a Scientist for AAD in August 2004. She brings 15 years of laboratory experience to AAD with special emphasis on cytology and hematology. She also has a strong research and development background that includes experience in flow and image cytometry, chemistry, immunology, microbiology and blood bank. Ms. Asion is an ASCP certified Medical technologist and has received accreditation from the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science in Molecular Biology.
Prior to joining AAD, she was with Dade Behring in Newark, Delaware as a Compliance Analyst and as a R&D Assistant Chemist working in the Cardiac QC Division. She has also worked for Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus Ohio, as a Cell Image Consultant on a project regarding the identification of Fluorescent Cellular Images and at Becton Dickinson as a Research Associate on Fluorescent Microscopic Imaging and Analysis and Bovine Hematology including research on Mastitis.
Ms. Asion holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Marine Biology from Long Island University, and has completed several graduate level courses at Clemson University in Biochemistry.
Victor Minton is AAD's Co-Founder and a Director, and an active member of the Research Triangle financial community. He is a financial analyst of long standing and is a member of both the New York Society of Financial Analysts and the Association for Investment Management and Research. He is also an active member of the North Carolina Council for Entrepreneurial Development.
A partner in the Raleigh firm, Smith, Anderson, Blount, Dorsett, Mitchell & Jernigan LLP, Mr. Mason has extensive experience representing technology and life sciences companies at all stages of development with particular emphasis on emerging and entrepreneurial enterprises. Prior to joining Smith Anderson, Mr. Mason co-founded Triangle-based Hutchison + Mason in 1996 where his leadership helped the firm grow to 20 lawyers specializing in meeting the general corporate needs of technology and life sciences companies.
Passionate about working with developing entrepreneurs and law students, Mr. Mason has taught as an adjunct instructor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and the University of North Carolina, School of Law. He is a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Council for Entrepreneurial Development. He is listed, in several publications, among the best lawyers; for example, Business North Carolina’s Legal Elite, Woodward / White’s The Best Lawyers in America and North Carolina Super Lawyers (Business/Corporate). He has authored articles such as “Nobody Said There Would Be Math” and “Valuation of a Start-Up Business – Art Not Science”. Mr. Mason received BA and JD degrees from the University of North Carolina and has been admitted to Practice Law in North Carolina.
Dr. Slenning has a Bachelor's degree in animal science, graduates degrees in agricultural economics and in epidemiology, as well as a DVM, all from the University of California, Davis. That was followed by eight years of private practice in the southern San Joaquin valley—the heart of California’s dairy industry - where he and his partner provide production medicine services to approximately 40,000 dairy cows.
He joined NC State College of Veterinary Medicine in late 1989 where he teaches all four years of veterinary students, undergraduate Animal Science students, and graduate students. He has been the coordinator of the Population Medicine Graduate Program and is currently the head of the Animal Biosecurity Risk Management Group, in the Department of Population Health & Pathobiology. Dr Slenning was also the Associate Editor for the Elsevier journal for Preventive Veterinary Medicine (the flagship journal for veterinary epidemiology and quantitative research) for five years.
Since 2001, Dr. Slenning's focus has been on agricultural disasters with emphases on catastrophic foreign animal disease prevention, detection, and response. He helped form the four-university collaborative 501©(3) organization, the Agriculture Disaster Research Institute, and is currently its Executive Director. He is on several state and regional work groups aiming to improve the resilience of agriculture to disasters of natural, accidental, or intentional origin.
Dr. Slenning has authored 20 peer-reviewed research articles and 87 review/technology transfer papers and presentations on clinical decision theory, economics, epidemiology, agricultural disasters, and foreign animal diseases; 5 book chapters on epidemiology, production medicine, and clinical investigation; a manual for quantifying dairy management quality; and 30 copyrighted spreadsheet applications in all the above areas.
Joseph Wilder, Ph.D., is a Research Professor in the Rutgers University Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP). Currently, he is pursuing research in pattern recognition and machine vision. He has contributed to the design and development of the current Rutgers multi-modal human-computer interface in the areas of gaze tracking, face tracking and speech and gaze interactions. He brings his knowledge of the image processing and pattern recognition aspects of the analysis of multiple wavelength fluorescence fields to the Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Wilder received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published papers on pattern recognition, human visual search and decision-making, and applications of machine vision to industrial and biomedical inspection, measurement and guidance. Dr. Wilder holds 12 U.S. patents related to these research areas.
Mr. Adler recently retired after a 47-year career in the investment industry. His experience encompasses service as an investment strategist and manager of both equity and fixed-income portfolios on behalf of major European financial institutions. As Vice President and Senior Investment Officer, he established and managed Portfolio Management Departments for the US affiliates of two large German banking institutions. Earlier, he had investment banking and security analysis experience with eminent American securities firms. Mr. Adler served on the Boards of Directors of The Greenfield Fund, an SEC-registered mutual fund, and Asia Electronics Holdings Co., a China-based manufacturer of electronic components that was listed on NASDAQ. Mr. Adler has a BA degree from Swarthmore College and has done graduate work at the NYU Graduate School of Business Administration. He is a member of the CFA Institute and the New York Society of Security Analysis and a retired member of the New York Association of Business Economists.
Mr. Appert has for the past twelve years been an independent consultant in the areas of financial and turnaround management and strategic planning for small to medium sized companies. For the previous eighteen years, he held various executive positions with administrative, financial and Information processing responsibilities in the domestic and overseas operations of Becton Dickinson and Company. Before that he was for ten years an executive with Ernst and Young, LLP. He is a retired CPA and holder of the CCP certification in information processing. He is also a member of the Financial Executives International and several other professional societies. Mr. Appert is a graduate of Fordham University with an A.B. in Mathematics, Columbia University Business School with an MBA in both Accounting and Finance, and the PMD Executive Program at the Harvard Business School.