Scientific Advisory Board

Craig Beeson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences,
Medical University of South Carolina

Dr Beeson received a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Irvine and he completed postdoctoral training in biophysical chemistry and immunology at Stanford University. During his postdoctoral studies he began using the Cytosensor microphysiometer and he has continued to develop new modalities to extend its use into new areas of cell biology. His current research efforts include the study of mechanisms that regulate bioenergetics in cardiovascular tissues. These studies involve the development of new assays to correlate cellular pathologies with unique metabolic signatures for the use in clinical screening, drug discovery and toxicology.

Dean Hafeman, Ph.D.
VP Research & Development, Protein Discovery, Inc.

Prior to PDI, Dr. Hafeman was a Senior Research Fellow at Caliper Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: CALP) where he worked as a special scientific advisor within the company. Before joining Caliper, Dr. Hafeman was a co-founder of Signature Biosciences, Inc. and a co-founder of Molecular Devices Corporation (NASDAQ: MDCC).

At Molecular Devices, Dr. Hafeman was instrumental in developing the company¹s core technology, the light-addressable potentiometric sensor, for use in both the Threshold Immunoassay System and in the Cytosensor Cell Analysis System which is used to monitor the rate of extra-cellular acidification (a measure of cellular metabolism). Dr. Hafeman played a key role in building the company from its founding to over 400 employees and taking the company public in 1995.

Dr. Hafeman has a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology at the Stanford University Medical Center and in Physical Chemistry at Stanford University with Harden McConnell, PhD.

Richard Kemp, Ph.D.
Professor, University of Wales - Aberystwyth

Dr. Kemp's primary research area is in the application of nonequilibrium thermodynamics to solving problems in cell biology relevant to the efficiency in batch and fed-batch culture of mammalian cells, early detection of apoptosis in large scale mammalian cell cultures, the discovery of alternatives to animals in medical research, the anthropogenic effects on the plankton food web and the biology of bacteriophage infection. Specialized instrumentation necessary for this work is heat conduction batch and flow microcalorimetry and dielectric spectrometry.

Jack Owicki, Ph.D.
President, Owicki Consulting

Jack Owicki Ph.D., is an independent consultant, emphasizing fluorometric assay technologies and interdisciplinary analytical problems. He received a Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry from Cornell Univ., after which he was a post-doctoral fellow in biophysical chemistry at Stanford Univ. As Associate Professor of Biophysics and Medical Physics at U.C. Berkeley he studied intermolecular interactions in biological membranes and consulted in the biomedical technology field.

Leaving academia for high-tech industry in Silicon Valley, Dr. Owicki became Associate Technical Director at Molecular Devices Corporation and then Vice President for Research at LJL BioSystems, Inc. In these positions he helped invent and develop a variety of assay systems for drug discovery, including the Cytosensor microphysiometry, a technology for real-time monitoring of cellular metabolic activity using a semiconductor-based sensor.

Dr. Owicki is the author of 70 technical articles and patents. Since 1999, he has been on the editorial board of the Biophysical Journal, Journal of Biomedical Optics, and Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure. He currently is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biomolecular Screening and Journal of Fluorescence.