The Health Technology Podcast

Aswin Gunasekar, CEO & Founder, Zeto Aswin is a former electrical engineer and management consultant. He turned to entrepreneurship to solve serious problems in health care. Zeto’s mission is to transform the way neurological conditions are recognized, managed and treated. Under his leadership, Zeto has brought to market the first true dry electrode EEG headset and cloud platform cleared by the FDA for clinical use and won several top medtech awards. Aswin focuses on putting the customer first, creating products that deliver remarkable advancement and building a strong, profitable business.  Prior to Zeto, Aswin worked as a management consultant at PwC, revamping sales and marketing for large and mid size clients. Prior to PwC, he worked for 10 years in the semiconductor industry in a variety of roles including design engineering, product development and marketing. He played a key role in the design of many cutting edge and commercially successful microprocessors at AMD. He holds 4 international patents in computing technology, authored 1 IEEE publication and co-invented 5 Zeto patents in EEG technology. Aswin graduated in the top 5% of his B.S and M.B.A class with Beta Gamma Sigma Honors. 

Christine Lemke, Co-Founder, Co-CEO, & President, Evidation Health Christine is the Co-founder, Co-Chief Executive Officer, and President of Evidation Health. Previously, Christine was the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Sense Networks, developers of the first machine learning platform for mobile phone activity data (exited to YP.com). She has also held roles at 3iGroup (Paris), Microsoft XBOX and co-founded Chicago-based Channel IQ, a product analytics platform. Christine has a BA from the University of Washington and an MBA from HEC Paris.

Matt Fairhurst, Co-Founder & CEO, Skedulo Matt Fairhurst is the co-founder and CEO of Skedulo, a leading mobile workforce management platform. Matt founded Skedulo with James Davies in 2013 with a vision of creating applications and technology to manage the growing number of mobile service industry workers. He has a background in user experience and user interface design and is a graduate of the Queensland University of Technology where he studied Marketing and Management. Prior to founding Skedulo, Matt held a number of leadership roles in marketing, consulting and design in the enterprise software and manufacturing sectors. Matt spends his time across Skedulo’s growing engineering/product development headquarters in Brisbane, Australia and global headquarters in San Francisco, California.

Abner Mason, Founder & CEO, ConsejoSano Before creating ConsejoSano, Abner was Founder and CEO for the Workplace Wellness Council of Mexico, now the leading corporate wellness company in Mexico. From 2003-2008, he was founder and Executive Director of AIDS Responsibility Project, driving the creation of CONAES and JaBCHA, the first business councils on HIV/AIDS in Mexico and Jamaica. Abner previously served as Chairman of the International Committee and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), appointed by President Bush in 2002. He spent ten years in the Massachusetts State government, including roles as Chief Policy Advisor to Massachusetts Governors Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift, Governor Cellucci's Undersecretary of Transportation, and Deputy General Manager of the Massachusetts Transit Authority. Before joining state government, Abner worked as an Associate Consultant for Bain & Company. In 2018, he founded Health Tech 4 Medicaid (HT4M), a non-profit coalition of healthtech leaders collaborating to create technology for Medicaid programs. Additionally, he is a founding council member of U.S. of Care, a nonprofit centered on improving healthcare access developed by former Medicare/Medicaid administrator Andy Slavitt. Abner is a graduate of Harvard.

Amr Salihieh, President & CEO, Shifamed Amr is a seasoned medical device entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the medical device industry. Amr is the founder of Shifamed LLC, a Silicon Valley-based medical device incubator founded in 2009, from which Legacy Portfolio Companies Maya Medical, Kalila Medical, and Apama Medical have successfully exited and through which three additional companies are currently under incubation. Prior to founding Shifamed, Amr founded Sadra Medical, a percutaneous aortic valve replacement company, which was sold to Boston Scientific in 2011 and co-founded Embolic Protection, Inc. (EPI) which was sold to Boston Scientific in 2001. Amr has extensive R&D management experience stemming from his engineering consulting firm, Sobek Medical LLC which he sold to EPI, and from his work at CardioThoracic Systems and Guidant. Amr is either the inventor or co-inventor on >100 granted and >140 published US patent applications. He holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.

Joe R. Bengfort, SVP, Information Technology & CIO, UCSF Health Joe R. Bengfort is senior vice president, information technology, and chief information officer at UCSF Health as well as an associate vice chancellor at UCSF. His responsibilities span across the university, including UCSF Health, research, education and administration, as well as strategic information technology (IT) initiatives at the University of California (UC) health system. At UCSF, he leads IT information and analytics, financial and human resources core systems, infrastructure, operations, customer support services and security. He represents UCSF at UC to establish strategy and tactics to protect data, systems, and university and health system operations. Bengfort joined UCSF in 2011. He worked for 22 years at Perot Systems, where he held a broad range of senior leadership positions, including the management of client relationships and service delivery at Parkland Hospital, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, Triad Hospitals and Stanford Health Care. He has a bachelor of science in electronic engineering technology from Texas A&M University.

Charles K. Fisher, PhD, CEO & Founder, Unlearn.AI Charles is a scientist with interests at the intersection of physics, machine learning, and computational biology. Previously, Charles worked as a machine learning engineer at Leap Motion and a computational biologist at Pfizer. He was a Philippe Meyer Fellow in theoretical physics at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and a postdoctoral scientist in biophysics at Boston University. Charles holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University and a B.S. in biophysics from the University of Michigan.  

Malay Gandhi, Senior VP, Business Operations, Evidation Health Malay is an active angel investor in early stage, health-focused startups and advises a number of leading health tech companies. Most recently, Malay served as the SVP of Business Operations at Evidation Health, and prior was an EIR at Greylock Partners and led Rock Health as its CEO and Managing Director. As an investor, Malay originated early stage investments in Benchling, Collective Health, Evidation, Honor, Solv, Stride Health, and Virta amongst others. His research and work in health tech have been cited in the The New York Times, Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Bloomberg, USA Today, Inc., BuzzFeed, and The Information.

John Adler, Jr., MD John Adler is the CEO of both Zap Surgical Systems and Cureus Inc. Dr. Adler is world-renowned for inventing the CyberKnife and the related field of image-guided therapeutic radiation. Dr. Adler has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1987, being appointed the Dorothy and TK Chan Professor of Neurosurgery and Radiation Oncology in 2007. His entire medical and neurosurgical education happened at Harvard, excepting a one-year fellowship at the Karolinska Institute with Lars Leksell, the “father of radiosurgery”. As an academician, John is the author or co-author on more than 300 peer reviewed articles and book chapters and serves or has served on the editorial boards of eight different peer reviewed journals. He is also a named inventor on more than 20 patents. While creating the CyberKnife, Dr. Adler founded Accuray Inc (NASDAQ: ARAY) in 1992 to commercialize his invention. Up until 2009 he served in varying roles at Accuray including CEO, Chief Medical Officer and Chairman. To date Accuray technology has been used to treat more than one million patients and most modern radiation equipment now incorporates John’s basic idea for image-guided targeting. In 2002 Dr. Adler founded the CyberKnife Society, later (2012) renamed the Radiosurgical Society. He also serves or has served on the scientific advisory boards of 7 different medical device or pharmaceutical companies. In 2014 Dr. Adler founded Zap Surgical Systems in Silicon Valley with a mission to “Advance Cancer Treatment for All Humanity”. His invention, the Zap-X received US FDA clearance in September 2018. John also founded and serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Cureus.com, the world’s largest and fastest growing multi-disciplinary open access medical journal, publishing nearly 3000 peer-reviewed articles each year.  Unrealistically and even laughably John yearns to live the peripatetic life of a big wave surfer.

Frank Fischer, Chairman of the Board, Neuropace Frank Fischer has more than 40 years of senior management experience in the medical device industry. He co-founded NeuroPace in Dec 1997, led the company as its President and Chief Executive Officer from January 2000 thru July 2019, served on its Board of Directors since inception and is currently Chairman of the Board. Prior to joining NeuroPace, Mr. Fischer was President and Chief Executive Officer of Heartport, Inc., a cardiac surgery company, from May 1998 until September 1999 and served on Heartport’s Board of Directors. Previously, Mr. Fischer was President and Chief Executive Officer and a director of Ventritex, Inc., a company that pioneered implantable cardiac defibrillators, from July 1987 until the sale of the company to St. Jude Medical, Inc. in 1997. Before joining Ventritex, he held various management positions at Cordis Corporation from 1977 to 1987 in the cardiac and neurosurgical device areas, serving most recently as President of the Implantable Products Division. Currently he is a member of the Board of Directors of Nevro, Inc., the Board of Trustees of both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Babson College as well as the Board of Directors of the Epilepsy Foundation of America. Mr. Fischer holds B.S.M.E. and M.S. in Management degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.