| R. Judd Jessup Chief Executive Officer & President |
Karine` Hovanes, PhD, FACMG Laboratory Director |
| Scott Burell Chief Financial Officer |
Michelle Strecker, MS, CGC Director of Genetic Counseling Services |
| Tim Flores Vice President of Sales and Marketing |
Jeff Hayes Director of Oncology |
| Shelly Gunn, M.D., Ph.D. Medical Director |
Greg Studdard Director of Sales – East |
| Lony Lim, Ph.D., SI (ASCP), CMS (CA) Vice President of Operations |
R. Judd Jessup
Chief Executive Officer & President
R. Judd Jessup has over 35 years of experience in the healthcare and managed care industries. Most recently he was Chief Executive Officer of US LABS, a national laboratory which provides cancer diagnostics and genetic testing services, from 2002 to 2005. He has extensive background in the managed care industry having served as President of the Health Plans Division for FHP International from 1994 to 1996 as well as President of TakeCare, Inc., a publicly traded HMO operating in California, Colorado, Illinois and Ohio until it was sold to FHP. He is a successful entrepreneur with the ability to execute strategic plans to achieve the optimum level of performance for stakeholders. He has repeatedly built effective management teams utilizing his effective leadership and management style. Mr. Jessup currently serves on the Board of Directors of Corvel Corporation and NovaMed, Inc., both publicly traded companies. Mr. Jessup received a B.A. degree in Biology from Knox College and an M.B.A. from University of Denver.
Scott Burell
Chief Financial Officer
Scott Burell was promoted to Chief Financial Officer of CBMX in November 2006. Prior to this, Mr. Burell had served as our Vice President of Finance since November 2001 and as our Controller from February 2001 to November 2001. From May 1999 to first joining CombiMatrix in February 2001, Mr. Burell was the Controller for Network Commerce, Inc., a publicly traded technology and information infrastructure company located in Seattle. Prior to this, Mr. Burell spent 9 years with Arthur Andersen's Audit and Business Advisory practice in Seattle. Mr. Burell obtained his Washington state CPA license in 1992 and is a certified public accountant (currently inactive) and holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Accounting and Business Finance from Central Washington University.
Shelly Gunn, M.D., Ph.D.
Medical Director
Dr. Gunn earned her Bachelor’s and Masters degrees from Trinity University, and a Doctorate degree in genetics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Her doctoral work focused on the detection of cryptic chromosomal abnormalities in pediatric patients with normal cytogenetics and central nervous system dysmyelination. She went on to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree from the UTHSCSA Medical School where she also completed her internship and residency in Clinical Pathology, and now serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology. While at UTHSCSA, Dr. Gunn was the recipient of the Association for Molecular Pathology’s Young Investigator Award for outstanding research, and the Klein Award for the “most outstanding report illustrating the correlation of clinical medicine, pathology, and pathophysiology.” She has published papers and abstracts related to array-based Comparative Genomic Hybridization (CGH) and has been a featured speaker at various scientific meetings and symposia. Her current translational research interest is the development of array CGH based clinical assays for scanning tumor genomes in hematological malignancies.
Lony Lim, Ph.D., SI (ASCP), CMS (CA)
Vice President of Operations
Dr. Lim brings a wealth of more than 10 years of experience in the Clinical Reference Laboratory, Anatomic Pathology and In-Vitro Diagnostics industries. He served as Director of Scientific Affairs, Director of Flow Cytometry and Director of Anatomic Pathology at US LABS and Scientific Director - Division of Immunology at AmeriPath Specialty Laboratories. He was one of the pioneers in the genesis of Luminex Corporation’s Multi-Analyte Profiling technology (xMAP®) and was instrumental in delivering the initial clinical acceptance of xMAP® technology, which is now widely used in both protein and molecular profiling applications across numerous clinical laboratories. He brings to CombiMatrix, the assurance of best laboratory practices in providing services that include quality test-result-reporting, competitive turn-around-time, productivity cost-management, and regulatory compliance for both laboratory and personnel. His scientific acumen in assessment and implementation of new tests and technology platforms provides innovation, creativity and development of the product pipeline. Dr. Lim received both his Bachelor’s and Doctorate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed the William McLendon Clinical Immunology Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of North Carolina Hospitals, Chapel Hill. He has professional memberships in ASCO, ASH, ASCP, NSH, AACC, ASM and AMLI. He has published and presented numerous scientific papers and abstracts.
Karine` Hovanes, PhD, FACMG
Laboratory Director
Dr. Hovanes received her B.S. degree in Genetics from the University of California, Davis, and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Irvine. She completed her clinical cytogenetics and clinical molecular genetics trainings at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and University of California Los Angeles Intercampus Medical Genetics Training Program. She is a diplomate of the American Board of Medical Genetics as a Clinical Cytogeneticist and Clinical Molecular Geneticist. Her research projects in molecular biology have focused on characterization of structure and function of a number of genes implicated in human diseases. Prior to joining Combimatrix Diagnostics, Dr. Hovanes held positions as Assistant Director at the Molecular Laboratory at Esoterix and at the Genetics department at US LABS.
Tim Flores
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Tim Flores joined CombiMatrix as Director of Sales in December 2010. Mr. Flores brings over 25 years sales management, sales leadership and corporate account development to CombiMatrix. Mr. Flores recently held the position of Director of Corporate Accounts at Ventana Medical Systems and prior to that he was the Regional Sales Director in the West Region for Ventana. Mr. Flores spent 16 years with Abbott Diagnostics in various sales, marketing, management and senior management roles. Mr. Flores earned his Bachelor’s Degree from San Jose State University.
Michelle Strecker, MS, CGC
Director of Genetic Counseling Services
Michelle Strecker earned her Bachelor’s of Science in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Washington and her Master’s of Science in Genetic Counseling from the University of Texas—Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. A board-certified genetic counselor with over a decade of clinical experience, Ms. Strecker began her career in 1999 as a prenatal genetic counselor at the University of Texas – Houston Medical School, where she also actively participated in the instruction and clinical supervision of UT Houston genetic counseling students. She then spent a year in the private sector providing prenatal genetic counseling and laboratory support for a cytogenetics and cystic fibrosis carrier screening laboratory. From 2004-2010, Ms. Strecker worked as a pediatric and adult genetic counselor with the University of California, San Francisco, where she saw patients in a number of specialty clinics, and worked closely with Division Chiefs Dr. Charles Epstein, and later Dr. Anthony Wynshaw-Boris, to help streamline clinic operations to improve patient care. In 2010, Ms. Strecker joined CombiMatrix Diagnostics as the Director of Genetic Counseling and Communications. She remains committed to patient-centered care, and works support CombiMatrix’s clients by providing them with the most relevant and up-to-date information about their patients’ results and their implications for clinical care.
Jeff Hayes
Director of Oncology
Hayes brings more than 20 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical and cancer diagnostics industries to the position, having held marketing management positions with Schering-Plough and Eli Lilly, as well as sales management roles with US LABS (now a division of LabCorp) and PLUS Diagnostics. He has also held multiple corporate national sales training positions, and most recently, was the top performing Sales Representative with Agendia.
Greg Studdard
Director of Sales – East
Greg Studdard brings to CombiMatrix over 20 years of experience in selling genetics services. He most recently served as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing and Managed Care at GeneCare Medical Genetics Center (later Alere Genetics), an international leader in genetics diagnostics and screening. Mr. Studdard was responsible for growing GeneCare/Alere Genetics from a regional laboratory to an internationally recognized leader in Specialty Diagnostics in his 19 years there. A strategic leader, Greg has a history of directing effective specialty sales teams against industry giants. Greg earned his B.S. degrees in Marketing and Management at the University of Virginia and an MBA later at Chadwick University.