Company

Mr. Roark is a knowledgeable entrepreneur with nineteen years of experience in the life science research market. Prior to founding Matrical, he served as the Vice President/General Manager of the Liquid Handling Business Element of PerkinElmer Life Sciences, an S&P 500 company. From 1994 until 1998, he was employed by, and then a co-owner of Carl Creative Systems, a business that he sold to Packard BioScience in 1998. PerkinElmer Life Sciences subsequently purchased Packard in 2001. Mr. Roark is credited with launching several innovative liquid handling instruments currently on the market as well as partnering with the major international institutes involved in the Human Genome Project which was completed in 2003. Mr. Roark obtained a B.S. in Biochemistry in 1984 from Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1987 from Washington State University..

Dr. Oldenburg received his PhD in 1990 from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA where he focused on protein structure function relationships. Upon completion of his PhD, he joined Affymax as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Peter Schultz of U.C. Berkeley. During this time he performed some of the seminal work with "peptides on phage", demonstrating that small peptides could mimic and inhibit sugar binding to lectins. As a Staff Scientist at Affymax, he was involved in developing methods and technology for high throughput screening of combinatorial libraries. In 1996, he became the Director of Biomolecular Screening at DuPont Pharmaceuticals, where his group focused on both conventional screening as well as assay miniaturization. His group developed some of the first truly miniaturized assays in a 9600-well (0.2ul) plate. In 2000, Dr. Oldenburg left DuPont Pharmaceuticals to found Matrical, Inc., a company focused on technology development for the Pharmaceutical Industry. Dr. Oldenburg currently holds over 20 patents issued and pending and has over 50 peer reviewed publications. In addition, he has extensive industrial experience in biotechnology, with particular expertise in the areas of assay development, high throughput screening and technology development.

Margo L. Buckles joined Matrical, Inc. in February 2003, where she works as corporate counsel. Before joining Matrical, Ms. Buckles worked with the Internal Revenue Service's General Legal Services in San Francisco, California, with Pepper Hamilton LLC, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and with Gallagher, Schoenfeld, Surkin & Chupein, PC, in Media, Pennsylvania. Ms. Buckles is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin - Madison (B.A., Political Science/Spanish), UCLA (M.A., Latin American Studies), and UC Hastings College of Law.

Dr. Gary Sams has worked as a Sales and Marketing executive for the last 20 years in the life sciences research and drug discovery tools sectors.

He has played pivotal roles in a broad spectrum of activities, including early corporate formation, commercial strategy development, marketing, business development, and sales at several life sciences reagents and instrumentation companies, including Promega, EG&G (now Perkin Elmer), Digene (Nasdaq: DIGE), and Vysis (acquired by Abbott for $350MM in 2002).

For the past five years Dr. Sams has provided strategic marketing and commercialization consulting services as a Managing Partner of Beachhead Consulting Group. The group's clients include a wide range of leading life science companies including Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Perkin Elmer, and Caliper. Dr. Sams has also worked with many early-stage companies, including Geneospectra, 454 Corporation, Cytokinetics, Sequenom, and Nanogen.

Dr. Sams has broad experience in technologies, from genomics to proteomics to cell assays. He has worked in virtually all product platforms including reagents, instruments, and imaging systems, and has worked in evaluating all parts of the drug discovery process, from basic research through drug discovery and development.

Prior to entering the commercial sector, Dr. Sams received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Kansas and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin.

Thomas C. Tisone, Ph.D., is currently President of Biodot, Inc. a company that supplies sub microliter dispensing technology to the diagnostics industry. He was a co-founder of Biodot, Inc. in 1994. Prior to this Dr. Tisone was President and co-founder of Cartesian Technologies, a genomics solutions company, and Executive Vice President and Board Member of Genomics Solutions.

Dr. Tisone was also President and one of the founders of Nouvas Manufacturing Technology Co., a custom automation engineering design company specializing in the development of equipment and instrumentation processing systems for use in the medical device and bio-diagnostic industries.

Along with being President of ASU R&D, Orange, CA (a division of ASU, AG), he also was the R&D Laboratory Director at their Electronics Research Laboratories in Rolling Meadows, IL. Being involved in the development of new quartz-based products for frequency control and measurement, the development of sensor technology and manufacturing automation, and the development of sensor and instrumentation products used to measure temperature and pressure in medical and industrial applications, Dr. Tisone brings a rich expertise to Matrical.

Dr. Tisone holds a PhD degree in materials Science from Northwestern University and a B.S. degree in metallurgy from the Colorado School of Mines. He has published 42 papers and has been awarded 14 United States Patents.

Hans started his career in Europe where he worked for 10 years as “Automation Specialist” for Siemens building custom high throughput automation for the semiconductor industry. His job responsibilities included building, testing and troubleshooting of automation equipment and working with manufacturing to implement them into the manufacturing process. The last 5 years of his employment with Siemens he attended evening classes at HTL Graz (Austria) were in 1995 he received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering.

After moving to the US in 1995 he joined CCS (Carl Creative Systems) that later became CCS Packard as ME where he was involved in the development of a wide range of automation equipment including the PlatStak, PlateTrak and MultiMeks.

In 2001 he joint Matrical as senior mechanical engineer with over 15 years of automation experience.

Bernie joined Matrical, Inc. in October, 2002 with 25 years of experience in automation and electronics. With a wide range of experience, he was uniquely suited for developing the variety of instruments in the Matrical product line. At General Instrument, American Sign and Indicator, and Accucare he designed and programmed embedded microprocessor systems for various applications including keyboards, controller and driver systems for displays used in outdoor advertising, sports scoring systems and transportation information systems, and bedside medical records information systems. At Thermoguard Equipment, Inc. he broadened his experience to include design and programming of factory automation equipment incorporating programmable logic controllers and robots. He is a 1971 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.

Andrew came to Matrical in March 2006 with extensive knowledge of automation utilizing robotics, hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical drives. Previously Mr. Holt was employed with Alliance Machine Systems International within their Research and Development Team. They produced automated material handling equipment for the packaging industry increasing plant productivity and improving plant efficiency. He led projects from the design of Robotic Palletizers to Semi-Automatic Material Handling solutions and Corporate Cost Reductions of key product lines. Supervision of projects continued on working with corporate customers to define product specifications and leading plant installations. Before departing Alliance, his latest project was presented the first place award of INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR at the industries SuperCorrExpo. His teams design efforts led to patent submissions for key features that allowed customers to make a quick return on their investment. In 1994 he obtained a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Idaho.

Mr. Cassida has been with the team for four years and has been responsible for architecting Matrical’s flagship automation platforms, Vitesse® and Onda®, and leading a team of computer scientists toward the next generations of enterprise process scheduling, data tracking and device automation applications. He brings Matrical over ten years of engineering and leadership experience which he has established through his roles as the president of the Eastern Washington University (EWU) chapter of ACM, as an independent software engineering consultant, and as an enterprise software engineer for the Department of Health and Human Services institution, Early Head Start. Mr. Cassida is a firm advocate of object-oriented analysis and design, formalized problem solving and Agile development methodologies and regularly lectures on such topics for the EWU Computer Science department and Spokane-based user groups. He is a member of ACM, and attended Eastern Washington University for a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Mathematics with concentrations in information theory and algebras. In his spare time, Mr. Cassida is a pianist and operates a home-based recording studio.

Craig started his professional career twenty years ago as a Staff Biochemist in the HTS-Automation group at Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. After six years in the lab he developed a passion for working with automation and decided to move into the industry with a focus on Liquid Handling and Automation. Craig then became the Domestic Applications Scientist for Packard Bioscience Corporation. He was an integral part of the launch of the MultiProbe and MultiProbe II systems and focused on creating and implementing customer training classes and assisting with sales demonstrations and installations. During almost 10 years at Packard (and later Perkin Elmer Life Sciences), he moved from Applications into sales— specializing in Packard/PE Liquid Handling and CCS Packard Automation. Since leaving Packard/PE, Craig has held Senior Sales positions with Thermo-CRS Robotics (2002-2004), REMP (2004-2005) and Caliper Life Sciences (2006) briefly. In May, 2006, Craig joined the Matrical family as the East Region Sales Manager. It was like a reunion for Craig—having worked with Dan for several years while at Packard/CCS and having Kevin as a customer during the same time period until they founded Matrical.