Meet our team
Gene Parilov
Co-founder and CTO
Dr. Parilov brings 15+ years of experience (PhD, Computer Science) in developing industrial simulation software, advanced computer graphics, and math modeling. Gene (Evgueni) Parilov co-founded (2007-2015) Simphotek Inc., a company that provides a wide range of modeling tools for biomedical, nanotechnology, military, material science applications. Simphotek software can dramatically reduce the time and cost in developing and testing new or existing Photonics devices that are based on photo-active materials, including multi-photon absorbers, rare earth, and quantum dots. This led to forming Simphotek Medical Devices (2016-present). He was instrumental in developing products for both companies.
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Simphotek Medical Devices provides critical light treatment planning information to physicians using a combination of laser light and light drugs to produce a photo-chemical reaction that kills cancer cells. Light therapy, a.k.a. Photodynamic therapy (PDT), is significantly less toxic to the patient compared to conventional cancer therapies and can be repeated as many times as needed as adjunct or primary therapy. The Simphotek Medical Devices team believes that personalized treatment of cancer with light, enabled with the company's accurate dosimetry, will make PDT as a standard alternative cancer cure option offered by cancer facilities of any size and level.
In addition, Gene was a Marketing Manager for L’Oreal (Paris). He has two issued patents, two provisional patents and many (25+) technical publication, conference presentations and abstracts.
Mary Potasek
Co-founder and CSO
Dr. Potasek has more than 22 years of experience (PhD, Biophysics/optical physics) in molecular models, nanotechnology, biophotonics, and photo medicine. In addition to significant technical background, she has extensive experience in industry and product development. She was a member at AT&T Bell Labs (1980-89), research Professor at Columbia University (1990-94), Senior Scientist at Air Force Research Lab (1994-2001) and research Professor (2001-2007) at New York University. She co-founded Simphotek (2007-2015) leading to Simphotek Medical Devices (2016-present).
She was the leader in raising multi-million dollars in government funding with University of Pennsylvania and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY. She also has prior startup experience (2011) as Director of Optics at a startup company in Dallas, TX. She is a Phi Beta Kappa member, a Fellow of SPIE, Senior member of OSA and IEEE. She has also received NSF postdoctoral Fellowship (Princeton) and NATO postdoctoral Fellowship (Max Planck, Germany). In 2014 she was one of three technical leaders to represent New Jersey to the US Congress and in 2016 she was selected as NJBiz Best Fifty Women in Business. She has numerous (~100) technical publications, conference papers and presentations. She has two issued patents and two provisional patents.
Karl Beeson
Co-founder and VP of Technology
Dr. Beeson has more than 20 years of product development experience (PhD, Physics) in both small and large technology organizations and Simphotek is not his first startup — he previously co-founded Goldeneye Inc., based in Carlsbad, CA. He has industrial experience at both Corning and Honeywell. He was at AlliedSignal/Honeywell, Inc from 1989-99 and led the product design and simulation group for new-ventures. From 2000-2002 at Corning, Inc. he led device development in a new venture group (Corning Polymer Photonics) where he led device design, prototype fabrication, and device testing in polymer thermo-optics and tunable gratings. He co-founded Goldeneye, Inc in 2003 and led the group in LED sources until 2007 developing high-brightness LED-based optical sources for projection display. Then in 2007 he co-founded Simphotek for light-drug optical simulations and expanded it to Simphotek Medical Devices in 2016.
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He is an inventor or co-inventor on 67 issued U.S. patents and has published over 40 technical papers, abstracts and conference presentations.