monitoring division - advisory board

advisory board

Founding Advisory Board Members:

Joe Goodman             Founding member
Alex Dickinson           Founding Member
Bjoern Christensen     Founding Member
Steve Frisken             Founding Member
Terry F. Unter             Founding Member - now on mdi Board view Bio

Kaveh Hushyar Joined Advisory Board June 2009

Diana Bell Joined Advisory Board July 2009

David Wright Joined Advisory Board December 2009

Dan Pitt Joined Advisory Board January 2010

Joe Goodman

Joseph W. Goodman received an A.B. Degree from Harvard, an M.S degree and a Ph.D. degree, both from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering. After 4 years on the research staff at Stanford, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering. He chaired the department from 1989 to 1996, following which he served as Senior Associate Dean of Engineering until 1999. He retired from Stanford in January of 2001.

Dr. Goodman is the author of the books Introduction to Fourier Optics (now in its 3rd edition), Statistical Optics, Speckle Phenomena in Optics, and co-author of Fourier Transforms: An Introduction for Engineers. He is the author of more than 200 scientific and technical papers, and has been primary research supervisor for 49 Ph.D.s. He has received numerous awards from the I.E.E.E., the A.S.EE, the O.S.A., the S.P.I.E ., including the highest awards given by the latter two societies.

Dr. Goodman was a co-founder of Optivision, Inc., ONI Systems (now part of Ciena), and served as a member of the board of directors of E-TEK Dynamics (now part of JDS Uniphase). He is currently an advisor to a number of promising start-ups.

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Alex Dickinson

Co-founder, Luxtera and President and CEO, Helixis, Inc.

Alex served as Luxtera's founding President and CEO for the six years prior to August, 2007. Presently he is the President and CEO of Helixis, a venture-funded molecular diagnostics company based in Carlsbad, CA.

Previously, Alex was CEO and later chairman of Ethentica, a venture-backed company that in partnership with its investors Philips Electronics NV and Hewlett-Packard developed and shipped the world’s first flat panel display biometric sensors.

Earlier Alex held the position of director in Lucent Technologies’ New Ventures Group where he was responsible for identifying promising Bell Labs technologies and creating venture-backed companies for their commercialization.

Alex is also the co-founder of two successful Australian technology companies. Alex began his technology at AT&T Bell Labs and has been awarded over 50 US and international patents.

He holds a B.E. and Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and an MBA from Columbia University.

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Bjoern Christensen

Bjoern Christensen, Partner, was President of Business Development in Siemens’ Network Access Division before he founded the VC fund Mustang Ventures in 1998. Bjoern invested in some of the most successful startups (COM21, Efficient Networks, Extreme Networks, Phone.Com, Virata, Sycamore Networks, Cambridge Silicon Radio).

Later Bjoern served as Managing Director of Siemens Venture Capital (SVC), with worldwide responsibility for all Siemens AG venture investments. SVC had over Euro 600M under management in five funds. Bjoern SVC to become one of the worlds most prominent and successful Corporate Venture Groups with 70+ direct investments and 30+ fund investments and with offices in San Jose, Boston, Munich and Tel Aviv.

Bjoern has extensive experience in successful growing high-tech startups until exit, a strong international work experience in USA, Europe and Asia and has lived in Silicon Valley since 1997.

Education: M.S., Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark.

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Steve Frisken

Steve Frisken is Chief Technology Officer of Finisar Australia. Dr. Frisken has 17 years experience in the optical communications and photonic components industry. His achievements include the first introduction of a telecommunications style optical circulator – the design of which has been widely adopted in the industry - and passive and dynamic EDFA gain flattening filters leading to the first laboratory DWDM amplifiers.

Dr. Frisken was a co-founder of Photonic Technologies in 1993 where he successfully developed and protected the IP that culminated in the successful acquisition of Photonic Technologies by Nortel Networks in 2000. He was the Interim CEO of Nortel Networks (Photonics) until 2001 after which time he became the Director of R&D. More recently Dr. Frisken co-founded and led Engana, a wavelength switching startup, before its acquisition by Optium and subsequently Finisar.

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Kaveh Hushyar

Kaveh Hushyar is a retired officer of AT&T, as Senior Vice President for AT&T Network Planning and Engineering Group. His responsibilities included managing the development and deployment of advanced access, switching, video and routing technologies for the company. Under his leadership, among other milestones, AT&T established as the world’s leader for the transformation of the global network to a single all IP/MPLS network with global reach.

Previously, Mr. Hushyar was responsible for AT&T’s business services, billing, account management and revenue assurance systems. Under his supervision, AT&T achieved 60 percent improvement in billing accuracy for business customers in less than two years and more than 60 legacy billing systems were integrated into one, efficient system. Mr. Hushyar has cross-industry expertise in business transformation, including telecommunications, dedicated web hosting, manufacturing, printing and management consulting. He has a high level of expertise in scaling sophisticated networks from an initial architecture position to full operation readiness. Mr. Hushyar joined AT&T in 1984 and has held positions of increasing responsibility in multiple disciplines, including systems engineering, operations planning, process engineering, program management and operations.

Mr. Hushyar graduated from Stanford University with a master’s degree in industrial engineering. He has been awarded several patents, including a patent for “Method of Drawing a Network Configuration” and has been published in well-recognized technical journals and symposiums.

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Diana Bell

Diana Bell was a Senior Vice President for the Hewlett-Packard Company based in Silicon Valley until her retirement in May 2007. In that role, she led the company’s WW Total Customer Experience & Quality functions as well as Corporate Affairs. In the Corporate Affairs role, she was responsible for the HP’s global citizenship efforts, i.e. Philanthropy, Environmental Sustainability, Privacy, and Ethics. She was promoted to Senior Vice President in 2005.

Diana was formerly Vice President and General Manager for HP’s multibillion dollar Mobile Computing Division. In that position, she had profit and loss responsibility for the laptop computers sold by HP in both the commercial and consumer markets. During her 32 year tenure at HP, she held a number of senior leadership roles in a range of business segments. She also represented HP on South Africa’s IT Advisory Council (PIAC) convened by then President Thabo Mbeki. She joined HP as a Programmer Analyst in 1975.

Diana currently serves as a director for the Northern California Girl Scouts, the Peralta Community Colleges Foundation Board in Oakland, CA, and on the Dean’s Advisory Board for Michigan State University’s College of Natural Science. She also serves as Board Chairman for the Imani Community Church, Oakland, CA.

Diana holds a B.Sc. in mathematics from Michigan State University, an MBA in finance from Clark Atlanta University and completed an executive MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

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Terry F. Unter

Founding Member - now on mdi Board view Bio

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David Wright

David Wright co-founded Monitoring Division inc.(mdi) and served as CEO and President since the company commenced its business in March 2008 until November 2009. From September 2006 Mr Wright was the Director of Commercialisation at NICTA Ltd up until mdi spun out of NICTA. As a serial entrepreneur, Mr Wright co-founded and served as joint CEO of T3 Communications (sold to Pacific Internet), Slice Wireless (merged with U-Turn) and One.Tel Networks. At One.Tel Networks, Mr Wright lead a team commencing with three staff that within 2 years raised $2Bn in project finance and developed, constructed, launched and operated a nationwide wireless mobile business in Australia. Mr Wright holds degrees in Commerce (BComm) and Law (LLB, GDLP) and is admitted as a Solicitor and Barrister of the Federal and High Court of Australia and Supreme Court of A.C.T.

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Dan Pitt

Dan Pitt is president of Palo Alto Innovation Advisors, helping startup companies and research organizations commercialize their innovations. Dan has advised NICTA since its inception and CSIRO's ICT Centre since the mid-1990s.

From 2002-2007 Dan served as dean of engineering at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, and held a chair in computer science, following a 20-year career in industry. He founded the Bay Architecture Lab and was vice president at Bay Networks, reporting to CEO Dave House, from 1997-1999, leading the company's architecture, technology, and standards efforts for IP, ATM, and quality of service. Following the acquisition of Bay Networks by Nortel, Dan was vice president of the Enterprise Solutions Technology Center from 1999-2002, spanning nine cities on four continents.

At Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto from 1992-1997 Dan was manager of multimedia systems and program scientist for home systems, developing the architecture for the company's broadband video server and leading HP's strategy in residential broadband and video on demand. From 1990-1992 Dan headed the customer premises networks research group at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, managing applied research on integrating telecom and enterprise networking technologies, which led to commercial products and industry standards. Dan started his career with IBM Networking Systems in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Dr. Pitt holds a B.S. degree in mathematics, magna cum laude, from Duke University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois.

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