With a "Hand" in Developing the New New Thing

“My work with Intel is about making sure there is a clear technological strategy for developing business—the Intel business that intersects with consumers.”

—Brendan Traw ’87
Intel Fellow and CTO

“I most enjoy being on the front edge of new technology waves, looking over the horizon for non-obvious opportunities.”

—Gil Kliman ’76
Interwest Partners, Menlo Park, CA

“I work with start-up companies and inventors in many different areas of technology who want to patent core technology.”

—Nick Ulman ’84
Woodside IP Group

 

At home in the storied land of technological exploration and innovation, Silicon Valley, Gil Kliman ’76, Nick Ulman ’84 and Brendan Traw ’87 are each agents who enable change, working where science and business converge.

For Gil Kliman, M.D., now a venture capitalist with Interwest Partners in Menlo Park, California, interest in technological innovation came during his opthamology fellowship at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. At that time, the late 1980s, researchers at Mass Eye and Ear were exploring new uses of lasers in eye surgery. “I liked surgery,” Gil says, “and I liked helping to develop new technologies. I enjoyed looking at the unsolved problems of the eye and addressing how you figure out something new that is safe, effective and reliable.” In Boston, after his medical training, Gil divided his time between eye surgery and consulting in venture capital before heading to business school at Stanford to focus full time on medical technology development. “Over the past 20 years,” Gil states on Interwest’s Web site, “I have had the privilege of diverse life experiences as a practicing physician, start-up company founder, and technology venture capitalist.”

A partner at Interwest for 10 years, Gil has been a backer of a number of breakthrough technological advances that couple life sciences with new technology. Epocrates, for instance, is a comprehensive and up-to-date, software-based reference for drug prescribing, disease diagnosis and laboratory test information, that physicians access on mobile handheld devices like PDAs and cellphones. Interwest has also been a major investor for IntraLase, an eye laser company with a technology that makes LASIK vision surgery safer and more accurate by using ultrashort pulsed laser energy instead of the manual cutting tool with a metal blade used in traditional LASIK procedures. Spinal Dynamics is a third example of these life science/technology investment ideas supported by Interwest. The company developed one of the first artificial disks for spine surgery, where instead of the old-fashioned method of fusing together vertebral bones around collapsed disks, the Spinal Dynamics technology replaces the damaged disk with a mobile artificial one that moves just like the original.

“There’s an old saying in Silicon Valley that the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” Gil says. “I first was inspired by invention at Milton, learning about scientists and inventors. Now, 30 years later, having backgrounds both in science and business helps me pick which inventions will be major drivers of the future of healthcare.”

Today, at Woodside IP Group, Nick Ulman applies his understanding of physics and engineering, as well as his ability to write about complicated inventions, to produce patent applications and provide product development consultation for inventors and start-up firms. Nick’s science trajectory includes earning a B.S.E. in electrical engineering at Princeton, followed by a Ph.D. in physics at MIT, and postdoctoral study at Stanford in electrical engineering. Nick was a staff scientist in the Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford University where he developed silicon microfabrication techniques for biological applications. He was a founder and chief technology officer of Proteomic Systems, Inc. Reflecting on whether his skills and interests had changed over time, he described his own pathway from Milton in 1984 to the present, in simple summary, as “a slow oscillation from practical gadgets, toward science research, back to technology, and now leaning to business.”

Nick explains that he works in many different areas of new technology, but one example would be his work with micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS is described at www.memsnet.org as “the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through microfabrication technology. MEMS promises to revolutionize nearly every product category by…making possible the realization of complete systems-on-a-chip. MEMS is an enabling technology allowing the development of smart products, augmenting the computational ability of microelectronics with the perception and control capabilities of microsensors and microactuators and expanding the space of possible designs and applications.”

Toward a layperson’s understanding of this technology, advances in the design of accelerometers—the tiny machines that trigger airbags—depend upon MEMS technology, as do digital light processors (DLP’s) that provide the display in digital televisions.

“I’m most effective,” Nick says, “when understanding physics and technology is important, and when the need is to describe something very clearly. I’ve always enjoyed describing technical things. The first task is to talk with the technical people to understand what the invention is, and what it does, and then to understand the patentable part of it: discerning what is new, relative to what has been around for some time. Success with that depends upon asking the proper questions. You can waste plenty of time writing at length about something that is interesting, but is not patentable. I like this work because I get involved in a lot of different things. I keep abreast of new developments, the latest, hottest things.”

Brendan Traw is an Intel Fellow. “Intel Fellows,” according to the company’s Web site “are selected for their technical leadership and outstanding contributions to the company and the industry.” Brendan joined Intel immediately after earning his Ph.D. in computer information science from the University of Pennsylvania and, after 10 years with the company, is responsible for the architecture of Intel’s consumer PC and consumer electronics platforms as CTO of Intel’s Digital Home Group.

He explains that his role now represents a migration toward guiding business development—understanding the consumer landscape and the emergent technology well enough to identify the strategically superior approach to product development. “I did spend time as a specialist,” Brendan says. He previously led the Intel team that developed Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), the basis for content protection in today’s digital home networks. Brendan explains that even that work was interdisciplinary. “An expert in system architecture, cryptography and networking,” as the Web site notes, Brendan says he had been “working in that space that brings together the stickiest of issues: Internet privacy of movies and music brings together technology, law and public policy. That was a great springboard to my current role, which rather than focusing on a specific technological area, covers a range of technologies important to Intel’s business. While it is important that people work in specific areas of science, the way for me to be most successful at Intel is to bridge the sciences with other areas and with how it relates to people’s lives.”

Looking back from a straight-line academic trajectory from Milton through a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania to his ten-year career at Intel, Brendan says he always had an interest in the natural world. “I was always collecting things, looking for insights, trying to figure out what was happening in the world around me—so I had a sense I would do something in science. By the time I was a teenager, engineering and computing was a hobby. I took AP Pascal from Mr. Seigfried and spent time with him out of class. So even when Milton’s science facilities weren’t that great, we had access to faculty members who were clearly experts, and were just as curious as we were. These sorts of experiences shaped me and helped light a fire. Today I apply the same critical thinking skills that I learned at Milton—in the humanities and in the sciences.”

Cathleen Everett

 

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