Executive Committee Members
Volker Saile
President
Dr. Volker Saile is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He was Conference Director of COMS 2005 in Baden-Baden and a member of the MANCEF GAC since 2006. Volker Saile served already previously as MANCEF President from January 2012 to January 2019 and was again elected in this position in September 2021.
Todd Christenson
Past President
Dr. Todd Christenson is CTO and Chairman Emeritus of HT MicroAnalytical, Inc. a company he co-founded to design and mass produce microdevices fabricated primarily with metal materials. He has been working in the semiconductor and MEMS areas for 35 years and served as MANCEF’s president from January 2019 to October 2021.
David Tolfree
VP Europe/ Africa and Executive Director
David Tolfree, a professional physicist and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Physics, has forty years R&D and management experience working for the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority and Science Research Councils (SRCs). In the late 1990s he was head of the SRC’s Daresbury Laboratory’s European Office and its Research Services. In 1999 he co-foundered Technopreneur Ltd, a consultant company for the exploitation of emergent technologies. He was also a consultant to a UK Government Dept for the exploitation of micro-nanotechnologies, and one of the founders of MANCEF and the UK Institute of Nanotechnology.
Roger Grace
VP Americas
Roger H. Grace is president of Roger Grace Associates, a Naples Florida-based strategic marketing consulting firm, which he founded in 1982. His background includes over 40 years in high frequency analog circuit design engineering, application engineering, project management, product marketing and technology consulting. His clients include the international “Who’s Who” of corporations, federal laboratories and government agencies. He is one of the founding members of MANCEF. He has been a past president of MANCEF and is currently its US VP.
Douglas Sparks
VP Asia/ Pacific
Dr. Doug Sparks has worked with consumer MEMS & foundry services as the CTO at Hanking Electronics and automotive ICs and sensors at Delphi. He is the president of M2N Technologies LLC and was the founder and president of NanoGetter which specialized in ultra-high vacuum MEMS packaging. Doug holds a Ph.D. in materials engineering from Purdue University.
Robert Warrington
Treasurer and Secretary
Dr. Robert O. Warrington, Former Dean of the College of Engineering at Michigan Technological University is currently a research professor at Michigan Tech and active in ASME, SME, AAAS, and ABET. He was founder of the Institute for Micromanufacturing and organized the first COMS Conference in 1994 and was one of the first presidents of MANCEF along with Steve Walsh.
General Board Members
Tom Nguyen
Board Member
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DunAn Sensing, has over 30 plus years of engineering, operations, and business development experience in the MEMS sensors and semiconductor industry. His goal and vision are to bring together both of his MEMS & semiconductor expertise to deliver the MEMS packaging technology roadmap to Lower Cost!
Andy Oliver
Board Member
Andrew “Andy” Oliver MBA PhD is a MEMS Program Director at TDK Invensense in San Jose. He has more than 25 years of experience in MEMS including work at universities, national laboratories, small companies, startups, and large companies.
Panel of Advisors
Clive Davenport
Past President 2006-2012
A highly enterprising multifaceted executive with over 30 years of experience in delivering research outcomes into successful commercial ventures. His roles have included Director of Australia’s CSIRO Future Manufacturing Flagship, CEO of the CRC for microTechnology, and Chairman of STC Australia.
Dr. Kees Eijkel
Past President
Director Business Development for QuTech, a leading institute in Quantum Technology. QuTech builds scalable prototypes of Quantum Internet and Quantum Computing and commercializes the technology. In the past decades, he was president of MANCEF, director of the MESA+Institute for Nanotechnology, and CEO of Kennispark, the commercialization shell around the University of Twente.
Robert Giasolli
Past Board Member
Robert Giasolli is co-founder, VP of R&D and Clinical Research, and CTO for Cagent Vascular. Robert’s technology expertise includes both MEMS devices for manufacturability, packaging, and testing, and endovascular medical device design, as well as endovascular disease progression, complexity, and methods for disease mitigation. In 2020, Intact Vascular, a company he co-founded and was the lead designer of its sole product, the Tack Endovascular Stapler was purchased from Philips in the largest acquisition deal of the year. He has numerous accolades in MEMS and cardiovascular product design and corporate development with over 100 issued patents and peer reviewed papers.
Robert Mehalso
Past Board Member
Dr. Robert Mehalso is internationally recognized for his pioneering and innovative approaches to the commercialization of micro/nano/biosystems – integrating the development of manufacturing approaches, the building of infrastructures, and the delivery of products to the marketplace. His focus on commercialization in the communications, automotive, and medical industries has enabled new products that include fuel-injection systems, ink-jet printheads, optical and wireless telecommunication devices, the CD ROM, various medical diagnostic devices, and biosensing systems. Dr. Mehalso founded and built the world’s first corporation dedicated to the commercialization of micro/nano/biosystems and has subsequently been involved in founding over a dozen companies. He has provided business advisory support to universities and governments and to over 100 companies internationally on the development of micro/nano/biosystems commercialization strategy, also providing analysis and due diligence for mergers, acquisition and venture funding for start-up companies and businesses. He was a co-founder of Ardesta, the first micro/nano/biosystems venture fund. Dr. Mehalso holds a B.S. in Ceramic Science from The Pennsylvania State University and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a University Fellow of Penn State and Rensselaer. Dr. Mehalso serves on advisory boards of several academic and financial institutions and as a Director of several companies.