Nathan Hayes, Founder and CEO

Nathan Hayes is an entrepreneur, mathematician, and software architect with more than 30 years of experience working in these combined fields. Mr. Hayes is the inventor of ALiX. He has been instrumental to the development of modal interval arithmetic and served six years as a committee member of the IEEE 1788 Standard for Interval Arithmetic. Mr. Hayes founded two companies leveraging modal interval arithmetic to significantly improve performances in machine learning and computer graphics, and he continues to develop innovative products and solutions based on modal interval arithmetic.

Prior to his modal interval arithmetic years, Mr. Hayes was a software management executive at CyberOptics Corporation, a high-precision sensing technology manufacturer, for nearly a decade. Mr. Hayes has studied film production and animation at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and mathematics at the University of Minnesota.

Susan Kaplan, EVP and CMO

Ms. Kaplan was Founder and President of Quality Management Solutions (QMS). She led and restructured organizations in healthcare, government, manufacturing and service sectors to improve profitability with QMS clients’ executive management.

Ms. Kaplan received her BAS and MAS in education, and she held key leadership roles at these top performance excellence organizations: Minnesota Quality Award and Florida Sterling Award. Additionally, she was an integral part of think-tanks for healthcare reform, including the National Department of Rural Health and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest USA health philanthropy.

Dale Mahaffy, CFO

Dale Mahaffy is an accomplished senior executive and strategic financial expert offering more than 25 years of CFO level experience with companies ranging in size from startup to $300 million. He has broad industry knowledge, including relevant experience in the software and technology industries.

Dale is a Certified Management Accountant (CMA). He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University, majoring in marketing. Dale also received an MBA from the University of Michigan, specializing in accounting and finance.

Manny Villafana, Ph.D., S.C.

Dr. Villafana is a serial entrepreneur who never stops dreaming for himself and for others. He was born in the Bronx, of Puerto Rican descent, and came to Minnesota in 1967 to become Medtronic’s first international sales administrator. From there Manny, also known as the “Cardiac Kahuna,” moved forward to design breakthrough technology in the cardiac realm and went on to found many companies to implement these ideas.

In 1971, Dr. Villafana was the founder, chairman and CEO of Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc., now part of Boston Scientific. Through this company he changed cardiac history by introducing the lithium battery into pacemakers. He then went on to found St. Jude Medical in 1976 and introduced the first bi-leaflet mechanical heart valve, which reduced the frequency of blood clots in patients. It still dominates the mechanical valve replacement market. In 2017, St. Jude Medical was acquired by Abbott for $25 billion.

Dr. Villafana has started several other successful companies, and is now developing his newest company, Medical 21, Inc.

Anthoula Lazaris, Ph.D.

Dr. Lazaris is a scientist at the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute (MUHC-RI). Her current research focuses on metastatic disease and translational research, with an emphasis on precision therapy through the application of liquid biopsy. Together with her colleagues, their research on predictors of therapeutic responses to antiangiogenic agents in the context of disseminated colon cancer has led to a ground-breaking study demonstrating that different histological types of metastasis have distinct patterns of vascularization and immune profiles. They reported that patients with predominant angiogenic lesions receiving anti-angiogenic therapy plus chemotherapy have a more than double 5-year overall survival compared to patients with non-angiogenic lesions. Extension of this work revealed that these phenotypes are reflected in extracellular vesicles (EVs) circulating in the blood of cancer patients, with considerable implications for future EV biomarker development and translation.

Dr. Lazaris has spearheaded the Quebec Extracellular Vesicle consortium and is Scientific Director of the MUHC-RI Liver Disease Biobank. She has over 26 years combined experience in academia (McGill University), biotechnology, management, and senior level positions. In 2002, she led the team awarded by Scientific America for the category of Research Leader in Chemical and Materials Science.

Dr. Lazaris received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from McGill University, where she made the discovery, under the supervision of Dr. Sonenberg, that eIF-4E acts as a proto-oncogene, a seminal discovery which led to new scientific avenues in cancer research. She further worked as a postdoc in the area of gene therapy for hemophilia at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and then as a Senior Scientist at Nexia Biotechnologies, heading the molecular and cellular biology teams developing transgenic animals which produce recombinant proteins in their milk.