Karen LeVert - Co-founder, President & CEO (email Karen)
Karen LeVert’s business experience encompasses both corporate and entrepreneurial worlds with over twenty years successful leadership experience in entrepreneurial ventures, executive management, finance, and information technology. She spent the early years of her career with a Fortune-500 company assuming roles from computer programmer, to controller, to general manager of a 500-person operation. Her first entrepreneurial venture was the launching of a franchise bioremediation company in 1998 that she later sold in 2001. Before co-founding STI, Karen co-launched a Silicon Valley venture-funded software company in San Francisco, CA where she served as Executive Vice-President of Business Development. Karen holds an MBA from the University of Dayton and an Information Technology undergraduate degree from Eastern Michigan University.

Along with her current professional duties she serves as a Board member for Southeast TechInventures, Board member for Duke University’s Fuqua Minority Business Consulting Program and an Advisory Board Member of Engineering World Health Organization.

Chongchang Mao – Chief Technology Officer (email Chongchang)
Dr. Chongchang Mao's technical experience spans both academia and industry. Before joining STI, Mao worked at Chorum Technologies, an optical telecommunications company. He led Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and R&D projects to develop commercial optical communication devices.

In this position, he and his team invented and developed several products such as optical variable attenuator (VOA), optical switch, optical harmonic equalizer, and optical blocker. These products have been widely used in telecommunication systems, demonstrating his experience in transferring research projects to commercialized products.

Before Chorum, Mao was employed by the Research Center of Motorola as a senior staff engineer where he led the architecture design of a free space optical interconnect and CMOS chip design to control the system. After receiving his Ph.D., he worked as a research scientist at University of Colorado, inventing a high resolution confocal scanning microscope, a distorted helix ferroelectric liquid crystal spatial light modulator, and a semiconductor laser-based sensing device.

Mao received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder. He has several issued patents and has published more than 20 referred papers.

Ashok Mendiratta – Chief Commercialization Officer (e-mail Ashok)
Dr. Ashok Mendiratta’s expertise stems from extensive technology and business leadership experience in both corporate America (GE and Honeywell) and in startup operations. He started his career with GE’s Corporate Research & Development Center as a scientist. Ashok was with GE for 17 years – holding technology and business leadership positions in increasingly responsible positions. . Ashok was also heavily involved for 4 years in M&A and JV formation activities. In 2004 he co-founded Liquidia Technologies, a startup company with an innovative micro- and nano-technology platform. At Liquidia, Ashok drove various initiatives like negotiating licensing intellectual property rights from UNC Chapel Hill, forming strategic technology and commercial alliances, fundraising, and securing initial customers. Ashok earned his BS, MS and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering. He has been issued 21 patents, 6 of which are in commercial use in GE operations.

Amir Fardad - Senior Engineer
Amir Fardad received his B.Eng (Hons) degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering biased to optical fiber communications from South Bank University (UK, 1991), and his PhD in Integrated Optics from Imperial College (UK, 1995). His doctoral thesis reflects extensive study of active and nonlinear materials and devices on silicon.

Amir completed two years postdoctoral research at McGill University and Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal where he worked on optical amplifiers, gratings, DWDM and EO modulators. While there, he invented a new method for the fabrication of integrated optical devices. He then spent two years as Assistant Research Scientist at Optical Sciences Center of Tucson working on the design and fabrication of multimode interference devices and DBR chemical sensors. Amir also spent five years with NP Photonice, Inc. as the Manager of Integrated Optical Modules where he was awarded $3.1 million by DOD and NIST-ATP to work on the development of fiber-amplifier based lossless splitters, AWG and pump-sharing modules. At the end of 2004, Amir rejoined Optical Sciences Center as an Assistant Research Professor and was responsible for working on organic electrooptic modulators, fabry-perot filters and rare-earth doped sol-gel materials.

Amir has three patents and more than 30 peer reviewed papers. He joined Southeast TechInventures in 2006.