Cathy Owen, CEO and President

Ms. Owen, President and Director, brings more than 28 years of executive leadership, general business and entrepreneurial experience to Nanopoint, Inc. Her successful 21 year career at IBM and leadership of two early-stage information technology startup companies in Silicon Valley and Hawaii has helped to accelerate Nanopoint’s business strategies and product plans. Ms. Owen raised the $2.15M Series A financing round which closed in 2005 and hired the product engineering team focused on delivering the first miniaturized live cell-based imaging products to customers in 2006.

Ms. Owen was the president and chief financial officer at hotU inc., a computer software company based in Hawaii. Under Ms. Owen’s leadership, the company created an innovative online interactive career fair product used by Fortune 500 companies including Accenture and Verizon Wireless and a career fair registration system used by College Career Services centers across the nation.

Prior to her relocation to Hawaii, Ms. Owen was the Director of Product Management at Cardonet, a Silicon Valley startup company. Working with the Israel-based chief technical officer, Ms. Owen was able to bring products to market which are still use in by companies such as Cargill, Hoover’s Online, and Newark Electronics. Ms. Owen led the technical due diligence efforts during Cardonet’s $14M Series B fundraising resulting in a significant investment by Sequoia Capital and GE Capital.

Ms. Owen also has professional experience in the design, development and deployment of complex, enterprise-scale systems. During her tenure at IBM, Ms. Owen was responsible for scaling and managing a critical software development and integration project from 12 to 150 employees spread across multiple U.S. locations, Canada and Germany. She was the financial portfolio manager responsible for IBM’s application and database software business, as well as the strategic marketing manager for its multi-million dollar Business Intelligence business. Ms. Owen also managed key strategic partnerships with complementary solution providers.

Len Higashi, Vice President of Engineering

Len Higashi has 13+ years of experience in mechanical engineering and system integration for complex instrumentation and sensor-based systems. Len is one of the key inventors of the cellTRAY Imaging System and led the cross-functional development efforts from concept to commercial availability. His previous employers include Boeing, Hawaiian Airlines, and BAE Systems Spectral Solutions. Len has a BS (Michigan State) and MS (University of Washington) in Mechanical Engineering, as well as an MBA (from University of Hawaii).

Maile Giffin, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Director of R&D

Dr. Giffin obtained her Ph.D in Physics from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her area of expertise was in solid state lasers, in particular in the development of tunable lasers using direct laser action of organic dye molecules in solid matrices of modified MMA-based polymers, as well as by nonlinear frequency up-conversion of tunable vibronic solid state lasers operating in the infrared. She came to Hawaii in 2001 and was involved in a variety of research projects including fiber laser based LIDAR systems for aerosol detection, Non-Imaging Space Object Identification, and Raman spectral studies of cancer and benign biological cells.

Paul Catterton, Director of Sales

Paul Catterton is a technology-focused sales specialist with over 15 years experience in Life Sciences, including sales to Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Clinical laboratories. Paul is experienced in selling both capital equipment and consumables. He was formerly the Western Regional Sales Manager for Amnis selling equipment priced between $310,000 and $520,000. His previous employers include Marketing Decision Science, Invitrogen, Proligo LLC and Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc.