Marie Wesselhoft, President & Cofounder
Marie Wesselhoft has spent the last fifteen years involved in the southern Arizona bio start-up community. Currently President of ZelosDx and a Mentor-in-Residence at the University of Arizona, Marie previously served as the Director for the University of Arizona Center for Innovation Business Incubator. During her 20-year career at Baxter, she held several senior management positions including General Manager of the diagnostic business unit. At Baxter she launched multiple $25-50 million diagnostic product lines. Early in Marie’s career she was a hospital laboratory director for one of the Humana facilities in the Chicago healthcare market. She earned a B.S. in Medical Technology from the University of Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago Business School and the University of Arizona McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.
Uwe Müller PhD, VP of Product Development
Dr. Uwe Müller has 32 years of experience in industrial research and product development that includes positions as CSO (NeoClone), EVP for Product Development (Banyan Biomarkers), VP for Applied Science (Nanosphere), Technology Director (Corning), and Director of Advanced Technology (Vysis, now Abbott Molecular). Leading national and international teams, his R&D activities have focused on DNA and protein-based diagnostics, including DNA probes, arrays and immuno-assays. He received his B.S. from Justus Liebig University (Germany), and M.S. and Ph.D. from Kansas State University. After his postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dr. Muller joined the faculty at East Carolina University School of Medicine as Assistant and later tenured Associate Professor. He has authored/co-authored 57 research publications in peer-reviewed journals, co-edited a book, and holds 11 issued US patents.
Ramesh Nayak PhD, Inventor
Dr. Ramesh Nayak has had a 30-year academic and company research career in immunology and neurology. Ram has held positions as Research Associate Professor, Department of Ophthalmology, University of Arizona; Staff Investigator, Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston; Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University College of Medicine; Research Fellow, Harvard Medical School; and doctoral student in the Department of Neurochemistry, Institute of Neurology, Queen Square London. His expertise enabled him to lead the discovery of our technology process and drive the intellectual property process.
Melita Ball, Director of Regulatory & Quality
Melita Ball has over 30 years’ experience in regulatory compliance and quality systems for medical device and diagnostic companies. She is a globally recognized leader in her field and brings expertise in regulatory compliance, quality system development, computer software validation (CSV), supplier qualification and management, quality auditing, regulatory and quality training, CAPA, project management, and management responsibility. She has worked with large and small companies over her career including companies such as Third Wave Technologies (Now Hologic), Ventana Medical Systems, Intuitive Surgical, Ethicon Endo Surgery, Medtronic, Stryker, Boston Scientific, Siemens Healthineers, and many others.
Betty Weaver, CPA, Controller
Betty Weaver provides financial management. She has extensive experience in public accounting, including several years as principal of her own accounting firms in Arizona and Texas. Betty provides tax, review, and consulting to both public and early-stage private companies.
Evan Craig, PhD, Research Scientist
Dr. Evan Craig has over 6 years of primary research experience in academic research labs with focuses in immunology, parasitology, and drug discovery. His experience in cell biology, fluorescent microscopy and ELISA techniques provides support in the development of rapid, cell-based biomarker assays as part of the Window into the BrainTM technology. Dr. Craig received his Ph.D. degree in Microbiology and Cell Science from the University of Florida and his B.S. degree from Middle Tennessee State University. In that time, he has held primary authorship on 3 research publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Vanessa White, MS, Research Associate
Vanessa White brings nearly a decade of experience with a rigorous process-oriented and engineering approach to bio challenges, leveraging design, verification, and certification of airborne electronics products and customized compute engines. Vanessa is one of the initial ZelosDx team members, contributing to assay development and validation, research grant projects, quality controls, and sample testing. Ms. White holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and completed a Professional Science Masters (PSM) in Applied Biosciences from the University of Arizona in 2014
Board Members
We have an active board and thought-leader advisors.
Conrad Plimpton, Board Chair
Conrad Plimpton concurrently serves as Chair of Sustainable Botanicals International Inc., Chair of Plimpton & Company, and partner of CDI Global. Conrad & his wife are majority owners of INOLEX, their 125-year-old family owned skincare business brought to IPO as a pharma biotech company in the late 1960's by Goldman Sachs. He was also founding Chair and major shareholder Exide Electronics that Alex Brown (now Deutsche Bank) took public; sold to INVENSYS in 1997 for $600 million. Along with Exide Electronics he had several other business aggregating $1 billion revenues. He also founded of NeuroHealth Foundation in Zug, Switzerland to sponsor Multiple Sclerosis research at the University of Zurich, where interferon was discovered. He is an active Desert Angel in Tucson, Arizona.
Mike Sember, Board Vice Chair
Mike Sember is currently the CEO of Regulonix, a manager at the UAVenture Capital Fund, and a board member of Desert Angels. Recently he was a Mentor in Residence at the University of Arizona Tech Launch AZ. He has over 40 years of experience in the life science and pharmaceutical industries. Earlier in Mike’s career he was with Marion Merrell Dow (now Sanofi). While at Élan, he served as Executive Vice President of Business Development, completing over 80 transactions while leading investment activities, licensing deals, and partnering initiatives. Notable deals include licensing and member of the boards of AMPYRA and Acorda Therapeutics.
David McCaleb, Board Member
David McCaleb is an active angel investor and board advisor to a number of biotech and technology companies. He has been in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries for almost 40 years and has played a significant role in establishing initial commercial operations for Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Cephalon, and CV Therapeutics. He is an active participant in the Arizona business and start-up community and is on the Board and Screening Committee of Arizona Tech Investors. As the former SVP of Commercial Operations at Gilead Sciences/CV Therapeutics, Mr. McCaleb was responsible for developing the company’s commercial infrastructure their first product, Ranexa®. He directed the worldwide introduction for several billion-dollar products, including Merck’s Vasotec® and Amgen’s Neupogen®.
Marie Wesselhoft, President and Board Member
Marie Wesselhoft has spent the last fifteen years involved in the southern Arizona bio start-up community. Currently President of ZelosDx and a Mentor-in-Residence at the University of Arizona, Marie previously served as the Director for the University of Arizona Center for Innovation Business Incubator. During her 20-year career at Baxter, she held several senior management positions including General Manager of the diagnostic business unit. At Baxter she launched multiple $25-50 million diagnostic product lines. Early in Marie’s career she was a hospital laboratory director for one of the Humana facilities in the Chicago healthcare market. She earned a B.S. in Medical Technology from the University of Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago Business School and the University of Arizona McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.
John Grant, Phd., Business Advisor
Dr. John L, Grant currently is the principal of Lemnos Advisory, LLC, a boutique consultancy which serves clients such as operating companies, transaction advisors, investment banks and venture investors. Dr. Grant is a NACD Certified Director and serves on two startup BODs, three non-profit BODs, is an advisory board member at two startups and works with BioTools Innovator (Los Angeles) as a mentor. Additionally, he provides strategic support to CXO Advisors (Phoenix), an impact-focused incubator. He also invests in early-stage companies and is on the Investment Committee of Purple Arch Ventures (Chicago) and invests through angel groups such as TCA-LA (Los Angeles), Gopher Angels (Minneapolis) and Chemical Angels Network (SoCal). Previously, he was an executive at 3M and led global strategy and external business development in several 3M divisions within 3M’s Healthcare and Industrial Business Groups. In these roles, he led and participated in 25 acquisitions, divestitures and minority corporate venture investments in advanced materials, filtration, medical devices, biotechnology, industrial adhesives, and enterprise software. His educational background consists of an MBA from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and a PhD from Northwestern University.
Phil Lefebvre, MS, Business Advisor
Phil is a Senior Medical Products Business Development Leader with over 30 years of experience in strategic innovation and collaborative product development from startups to large corporations. Phil had extensive exposure to neuroscience clinical research at Northwestern University Medical School, neuroscience-related product development research at Nanosphere, and neuroscience business development activities at Abbott Laboratories. He has developed a broad, prominent network of leaders within neuroscience-related commercial, academic and government organizations.
Scientific Advisory Board
David A. Stumpf, MD, PhD
Stefania Mondello, MD, MPH, PhD
Stefania Mondello, MD, MPH, PhD
Dr. David Stumpf is Professor Emeritus of Neurology at Northwestern University, and President of Woodstock Health Information and Technology. Dr. Stumpf had a successful clinical and research career in neurology, including Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chica
Dr. David Stumpf is Professor Emeritus of Neurology at Northwestern University, and President of Woodstock Health Information and Technology. Dr. Stumpf had a successful clinical and research career in neurology, including Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. In 2005, Dr. Stumpf accepted the position of Medical Director of UnitedHealthcare, Illinois, where he became the national Medical Director for Physician Engagement and Improvement, and Senior Vice President for Clinical Data Strategies at the corporate level, where he worked with physicians and their professional societies on plans to help them improve quality and reform payment methods. As a medical informaticist, he worked with the National Quality Forum (NQF and HITAC), the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI), and was a part of several early-stage healthcare information companies.
Stefania Mondello, MD, MPH, PhD
Stefania Mondello, MD, MPH, PhD
Stefania Mondello, MD, MPH, PhD
Dr. Mondello is a physician scientist (MD, MPH, PhD) with a sub-specialty in critical care medicine and extensive experience in clinical neurotrauma, biomarker research and statistical analysis methods. She have worked at Banyan Biomarkers (Florida, USA), Inc. as Director of Clinical Research for 5 years leading the pioneering effort whi
Dr. Mondello is a physician scientist (MD, MPH, PhD) with a sub-specialty in critical care medicine and extensive experience in clinical neurotrauma, biomarker research and statistical analysis methods. She have worked at Banyan Biomarkers (Florida, USA), Inc. as Director of Clinical Research for 5 years leading the pioneering effort which contributed to the development of new biomarkers of brain injury being used in clinical studies worldwide and recently approved by FDA. Currently Dr. Mondello has an appointment at the University of Messina (Italy) as Tenure-track Assistant Professor, and at the Oasi Research Institute-IRCCS (Troina, Italy) as Biostatistical Manager and Research Director of the Biomarker Development Program. She is spending most of her clinical and research career analyzing and studying novel biochemical markers for TBI and other neurological disorders in clinical studies as well as in animal models. Her experiences in industry and academia bring a unique skill set combining the best of two different worlds.
Daniel Kantor, MD, FAAN
Stefania Mondello, MD, MPH, PhD
Daniel Kantor, MD, FAAN
Daniel Kantor, MD, FAAN practices neurology in Coconut Creek, Florida. His professional pursuits include symptomatic treatment of MS, headache in MS, patient-centered neurologic care, medical ethics, and medical education. He is a principal investigator in multiple MS clinical trials (phase 1-4). He is founder of the Medical Partnership 4
Daniel Kantor, MD, FAAN practices neurology in Coconut Creek, Florida. His professional pursuits include symptomatic treatment of MS, headache in MS, patient-centered neurologic care, medical ethics, and medical education. He is a principal investigator in multiple MS clinical trials (phase 1-4). He is founder of the Medical Partnership 4 MS (MP4MS) and Chief Medical Correspondent for MSWorld. In addition, Dr. Kantor is a member of the Florida NeuroAlliance, and an active member of the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation Healthcare Advisory Board and the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America Healthcare Advisory Council. After receiving a B.A. (English -- Literary Theory) and B.S.E. (Computer Science & Engineering) from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kantor received his M.D. from the Columbia University Medical Center – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Medical School Collaboration for International Health and Medicine. He interned at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey/Cooper University Hospital and trained in neurology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.