Personnel | NEPDC

NEPDC Co-Directors

Richard Greenwald, PhD

Co-Director
Rick is an entrepreneur and biomedical engineer with over 25 years of experience in building companies, developing novel technologies, and motivating the process of technology commercialization in the medical device industry. His expertise includes technology and intellectual property development, evaluation and licensing, strategic financing, and business development. He is the founder and CEO of Simbex (Lebanon, NH), was founding CEO of venture-funded iWalk (now BionX), and Executive Director of the non-profit National Institute for Sports Science and Safety. In addition to being Co-Director of NEPDC, Rick is Co-Director of the NIH funded Center for Translation of Rehabilitation Engineering Advances and Technology. He is Professor (adjunct) at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Rick previously served as a small business expert on of the National Advisory Child Health and Human Development Council of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and on the Council of Councils, Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and holds 15 US Patents, with 4 patents pending.

Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD

Co-Director
Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD is the Director of the Pediatric Neurosurgery Department at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is a pediatric neurosurgeon who performed all types of pediatric neurosurgery with a particular emphasis on epilepsy surgery and trauma. As well as being a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School, she runs a brain trauma laboratory at MGH focused on understanding the immature brain and its response to injury and other conditions early in life, with the goal of helping infants and children. Tina is directly responsible for all clinical aspects of NEPDC, and together with Dr. Greenwald, coordinates all activities within NEPDC, including the MGH site, and helps facilitate involvement and continued productivity of collaborators in various other institutions and consortia. Specifically, she acts as a linkage and communication among pediatric-based clinicians at all sites, oversees regular web-based and phone conferences, and streamlines processes for submission of ideas via CIMIT that provides practical access for clinicians with limited time flexibility. As a practicing pediatric neurosurgeon, researcher (including bioengineering collaborations, large animal translational research, and pediatric clinical trials), and technology innovator, she serves as the main clinician link to the other members of the team.

Key Personnel

All

Administrator / Manager

Business Development

Clinical Effectiveness

Product Evaluation

Technology Development

Jonathan Beckwith, MS

Associate Director
Mr. Beckwith is the Associate Director for NEPDC and is responsible for evaluating nascent technologies and assisting clients to overcome technical design hurdles. As a biomechanist with a background in mechanical engineering and experimental design, Jonathan has spent his career developing novel technologies, integrating those technologies into new products, and then using those products to better understand the underlying mechanisms of human injury. These novel devices, which have required combinations of mechanical, electrical, software, and advanced algorithm design, have been used in a broad range of applications to evaluate injury mechanisms such as the mechanics of mild traumatic brain injury, fall kinematics in elderly populations, wrist fracture mechanics, and classifying gait abnormality for children with cerebral palsy. Mr. Beckwith received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Tennessee Technological University and a MS in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on human interface design at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jeffrey Chu, MS

Director, Pediatric Technology Development Core
Jeff Chu is Vice-president of Engineering at Simbex and is responsible for the creation and development of nascent technologies from ideation through transfer to manufacturing. Mr. Chu has spent the past 15 years delivering multiple products to market based on a wide spectrum of technologies focused in the area of biofeedback. Mr. Chu has served as PI on several federally funded research programs funded by the NIH and Department of Defense in the areas of rehabilitation, blast, and impact biomechanics. His work has received national recognition from Time Magazine, Sybase, and Computerworlds. Prior to Simbex, Mr. Chu worked as an advance concepts consultant for several companies in the sporting goods industry and taught courses in the areas of clinical biomechanics and computer modeling. For NEPDC, Mr. Chu will lead the Pediatric Technology Development Core, providing both strategic medical device development guidance and coordinated engineering support from Simbex and other partnering institutions. Mr. Chu received his BS, MS, and completed PhD course work/exams at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Biomechanics.

Michael Dempsey, BSEE

Co-Founding and CEO – Pediatric Technology Sourcing and Needs Assessment
Mike Dempsey is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). Mike’s primary responsibility is to lead the CIMIT team which focuses on finding, funding and facilitating innovations that are to be handed off to industry within twelve to eighteen months. Mike and his team works closely with the project teams to not only advance the technology, but also to develop and execute a complete strategy for getting the innovation into practice Mike has been working in the field of medical devices for more than 25 years; during this time he has invented or worked on products that have treated over twelve million people. He was a co-founding and CEO of Radianse, a venture-backed company that develops indoor positioning systems for hospitals. Prior to founding Radianse, Mike worked as a technical strategist for wireless solutions at Hewlett-Packard/Agilent Technologies (now Philips Medical Systems). He has helped to develop and introduce dozens of successful products, holds over 40 patents in wireless medical device communications and has ten more patents pending. Mike received a special citation from the Commissioner of the FDA for ‘exceptional initiative and leadership to protect the public health.’ He has a BSEE from The University of Michigan.

Donald Lombardi, MS

Co-Director, Pediatric Device Clinical Evaluation Core
Donald Lombardi is founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Pediatric Innovation (IPI), a collaborative nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing unmet medical product needs in pediatric care. Under Mr. Lombardi’s leadership, IPI has formed partnerships with key leaders in the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals, universities, and pediatric advocacy leaders to create medical devices and drugs specifically for children. Mr. Lombardi uses his experience in higher education, intellectual property, and biomedical business to overcome the barriers to making medical innovations commercially available for treating children. His experience in pediatric medical product commercialization spans 15 years as Chief Intellectual Property Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital plus seven years as CEO of IPI. Mr. Lombardi is also Coordinator of the Global Alliance for Pediatric Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical industry collaboration to develop best practices for pediatric drug development. He consults on intellectual property strategy and management for healthcare and research organizations worldwide, and is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine. He earned an MS in Life Sciences from MIT and a BA in Biophysics from Amherst College.

Jonathan Lurie, MD, MS

Core Director, Comparative Effectiveness/Research Design
Jon Lurie MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Orthopaedics, and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He received his MD from Stanford University and a Masters Degree in Evaluative Clinical Sciences from Dartmouth. He currently practices Hospital Medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. He has extensive experience in comparative effectiveness research as Physician Investigator on the Spine Patient Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT) and a Co-Investigator on the Multi-Centered Prospective Study of Quality of Life in Adult Scoliosis. He serves as Director of the Clinical Trial Unit at TDI, Associate Director of the Multidisciplinary Clinical Research Center in Musculoskeletal Diseases at Dartmouth, and T2-T3 Portal Director for SYNERGY: Dartmouth Center for Clinical and Translational Science. He is the Principal Investigator of randomized clinical trials of fall prevention in the elderly and decision coaching in lumbar spinal stenosis, and he is Program Lead for Dartmouth-Hitchcock to the High Value Healthcare Collaborative.

Scott Holson

Project Lead
Scott Holson is a NEPDC Project Leader for Business Development and helps companies commercialize innovations in pediatric devices. His career has spanned from manufacturing in consumer goods, business ownership in the automotive field and food products, retail in food and household goods, sales of computer hardware and software, consulting on government contracting, research and development funding options and commercialization. Scott volunteers his time as the co-director at the Horizons Observatory where they integrate learning about astronomy and their curriculum. Scott enjoys the outdoors hiking, skiing, snowshoeing and for fun he can be found flying his remote control airplanes and helicopters. Scott received his BS at Western New England College, Springfield, Massachusetts.

Christine McDonough, PhD, PT

Project Lead
Dr. Christine McDonough serves as an advisor for all consortium projects with respect to the development, selection, and application of outcome measures. She provides guidance on all Comparative Effectiveness/Clinical Research Design Core efforts related to outcome measurement. Dr. McDonough is a research assistant professor in Health Policy and Management in the Health & Disability Research Institute at the Boston University School of Public Health. She is also an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Research interests include the epidemiology of disability, application of contemporary measurement methods such as Item Response Theory (IRT) and Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) in the measurement of function. She also provides expertise in measurement for the NIH Center for the Translation of Rehabilitation Engineering Advances and Technology.

Cassie Brugger, MA

Cassie Brugger, Program Administrator for NEPDC, is responsible for grant management, marketing, and outreach for the consortium. Cassie is also a subject matter adviser in medical device reimbursement and helps NEPDC clients communicate the value of their product to stakeholders within our healthcare system.

Previously, Cassie was the Senior Clinical Coordinator for the High Value Healthcare Collaborative and managed a number of quality improvement, data analytics, and healthcare delivery science projects for the HVHC’s Health Care Innovation Award from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). These projects focused on high cost, high variation care including congestive heart failure, diabetes, joint replacement, sepsis, and spine surgery. While earning her graduate degree, Cassie worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator at the Denver VA Medical Center and University of Colorado Hospital for multiple industry sponsored and PI-initiated studies.

Cassie holds a Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Colorado, Denver with an emphasis on public health and health behaviors. She graduated with a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a minor in Political Science and Certification in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Jeff Hovis

Jeff Hovis is Managing Principal at Product Genesis, an MIT spin-out strategic innovation management consulting firm. Jeff is responsible for executive-level interface for global innovation strategy client programs on six continents. Jeff serves as a senior advisor to Global 2000 CINO’s, CMOs and CTOs on strategic innovation and new business creation activities. Before moving into strategic consulting more than fifteen years ago, Jeff served as Senior Vice President at Thermo Electron (now Thermo Fisher Scientific), where he managed multi-continent business units, and created strategic innovation, technical and marketing partnerships in North and South America, Europe and Asia. Jeff has extensive experience in strategic marketing and technology landscape projections for advanced materials, industrial, commercial, medical, life sciences, healthcare and consumer products, and is involved in all aspects of innovation strategy development, ranging from trend and convergence projections, market analysis, market opportunity identification and business case synthesis, to platform, roadmap, product, service, and solution requirements generation. Jeff has been involved with innovations for pediatric healthcare for more than a decade. Programs have included Product Imagination Workshops with Boston Children’s Hospital; pediatric burn treatment innovations with MassGeneral Hospital for Children and The Shriners Hospital for Children – Boston; mentoring pediatric and other medical device innovations from the MIT Deshpande Center, and support for the Institute for Pediatric Innovation’s program for the past 10 years.

Karen Page, PhD

Karen Page, PhD serves as a grant application reviewer and client advisor with an extensive background as a biomedical researcher, grant writer, patent liaison, and program administrator in both academic and start-up environments. She has a graduate degree from Dartmouth College in Molecular Biology.

John Collins, PhD

John M. Collins, PhD, is the Chief Operating Officer and Technology Implementation Director at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). Before joining CIMIT, John spent his career in industry as a leader in technology-driven businesses, with more than 25 years of international experience focused on the accelerated development and commercialization of innovative technologies, products and services. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a frequent speaker and holds over 20 US patents on new products and manufacturing processes, including trocars and staplers for MIS, blood fluid warmers, and tendon and ligament repair methods.

Marion Pierson, MD, FAAP

Dr. Pierson is a partner in pediatric private-practice in Prairie Village, Kansas. As a 17-year-old medical student, she discovered early on that hard work and determination are only the beginning of achieving your goals. Persistence, team-building and networking are also extremely important. Dr. Pierson has been involved in the field of pediatric device innovation since completing her residency at Georgetown University Children’s Medical Center in 1996. Her work with fragile neonates requiring intubation fueled her passion to improve infant endotracheal tube securement. Accordingly, Dr. Pierson founded EM Medical Products in 2007. She has collaborated with several organizations including the Institute for Pediatric Innovation to further develop her securement concepts and was even recently recognized by the Central Exchange of Greater Kansas City as a Rising Trendsetter, in part for her work with medical device development. She remains active in her local medical community volunteering on hospital Quality Control committees, in Pediatric Department Chair positions as well as service as Medical Staff President. Dr. Pierson served two terms as a Gubernatorial appointee to the Missouri Health Facilities Review Committee. Dr. Marion Pierson comes to NEPDC to share expertise from a physician-inventor perspective.

Paul Tessier

Paul is an experienced medical device developer, manager and entrepreneur. He is the Founder of Technology Innovators – a company that deeply researches specific medical problems, then invents solutions to those problems, prototypes and patents the solutions and finally licenses the technology to others. He is also a Co-Founder of Radianse, the real time location company, and served as the VP of R&D for that company. Prior to Radianse, he worked at Philips Medical where he was a business program manager for the cardiac resuscitation business – in this role he was responsible for leading the Marketing, Regulatory, Manufacturing, R&D, Quality and Finance teams around the ~$70M business focused primarily on defibrillators. Before this, he held various leadership positions in marketing and R&D for a diverse set of products which included physiological monitors, telemetry devices, telehealth, infusion pumps, and arrhythmia processing algorithms.

Ryan Ratts MD, PhD

Dr. Ratts serves on the NEPDC Technical Advisory Board as the clinical representative from Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth (CHaD). Ryan completed his MD/PhD at Boston University and his residency training in the Harvard Combined Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program with Internal Medicine training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Pediatrics training at Children’s Hospital Boston. He is currently working as both an Adult and Pediatric Hospitalist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. In addition to attending on the wards, Ryan also splits his time doing basic science research on the mechanism of entry of diphtheria toxin into host cells. This research is an extension of his PhD work performed in John Murphy’s, PhD, laboratory, and focuses on how the toxin exploits basic protein sorting and vesicle trafficking pathways to gain access into targeted cells. This research allows for rational re-engineering of the toxin translocation machinery as a nano-device for the delivery of biological macromolecules inside specifically targeted cells.

Peter Masiakos, MS, MD, FACS, FAAP

Dr. Masiakos is a Pediatric Surgeon and the Director of Pediatric Trauma Service at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Masiakos has an extensive background in chemistry, biophysics and tissue engineering. He is a pediatric surgeon who is an expert in treating tracheoesophageal fistulas. His laboratory work is aimed at accelerating the development of a new generation of biodegradable tissue engineered “plug” devices, which when applied using minimally invasive or catheter technology, can be used to close congenital or acquired fistulas and foramina seen in children and adults, including tracheoesophageal fistulas, bronchopleural fistulas, enterocutaneous fistulas, congenital cardiac septal defects, hernias, and vascular anomalies.

Sydney Cash, MD, PhD

Dr. Sydney Cash, MD, PhD is a board certified neurologist receiving his MD, PhD from Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. As well teaching at Harvard Medical School, Sydney runs a laboratory dedicated to trying to understand normal and abnormal brain activity, particularly oscillations, using multi-modal and multi-scalar approaches with long term goals of improving therapies for patients with epilepsy. Sydney is providing his expertise in pre-clinical/clinical studies to NEPDC.

Craig Shoukimas

Craig Shoukimas serves as a Subject Matter Expert for NEPDC. Craig is an experienced senior supply chain management and contract executive in healthcare operations. He has extensive knowledge in group purchasing contracting and strategic sourcing. He has been recognized for providing sound operational, clinical and financial recommendations to healthcare organizations for over 20 years. Craig is the Founder of NM² Healthcare Consulting – a start-up niche consulting company focused on the underserved supply chain and contracting needs of healthcare organizations and medical device companies. Prior to NM², Craig was Vice President of Contracting and Strategic Sourcing at Yankee Alliance, a 14,500+ member owned group purchasing organization. In this role, he oversaw and monitored over $3.7B in annual contract sales, while delivering over $96M in annual member savings. Prior to Yankee Alliance, Craig was Director of Materiel Management for a 100-bed nonprofit community-based hospital serving New Hampshire’s Seacoast Region.

Tiffany Brazile

Tiffany Brazile is a 4th year medical student and Medical Education Scholar at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. At Geisel she has been an active participant in curriculum redesign as a medical student representative. Additionally, she proposed and co-developed a medical innovation elective course for both medical and engineering students to accelerate collaboration on medical innovation projects, supported by Douglas Van Citters at the Thayer School of Engineering. Tiffany is also a mentor for “1000 Girls, 1000 Futures”, a program for female high school students interested in STEM careers, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences’ Global STEM Alliance.

Justin Starbird

Jessica Cummings

George Price

As Administrative Assistant of the Massachusetts General Hospital NEPDC team, George aids in the collaboration of clinicians and NEPDC administration. He has worked for Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime since 2014; originally as an Undergraduate Research Assistant and currently as the Lab Manager of the Duhaime Pediatric Neurosurgery Laboratory at MGH. George graduated from Boston College with a BS in Biology and a supplementary focus in English.

Chris Coulter

Chris Coulter serves as a client adviser for NEPDC and is Senior Systems Engineer and Project Manager for Simbex. A problem solver by nature, Chris has been helping medical device and biotechnology companies overcome challenges throughout his career. He has been instrumental in developing new products as well as the methods and equipment to manufacture them. His portfolio of products includes in vitro diagnostics, medical catheters, surgical instruments as well as electro-mechanical scientific instrumentation.

Chris has an affinity for advancing entrepreneurial ventures and has worked in multiple start-up companies. In 2002 Chris started his own business, Adaptive Engineering, LLC, a consulting company focused on assisting Vermont based bioscience and medical device companies. Chris is proficient with all aspects of product development – from market research, concepts and prototyping to project management, production and market launch. Chris graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a mechanical engineering degree. He lives with his family in Richmond, VT.