SmallTech
Consulting Team
Our core team consultants have advanced degrees as well as substantial experience and deep expertise in their technical and business areas. Our advisory and extended team provide additional expertise in our core areas, as well as a broader range of capabilities.
 Leslie
Field, Ph.D. |
MEMS, Microfluidics, Biomedical, Patents, Electrical Eng., Chem. Eng. |
| Shalini Venkatesh, Ph.D. |
Patents, Optics/Photonics, Physics, Biomedical |
| Geetha Dholakia, Ph.D. |
Nanotechnology, Materials, Physics, Grants |
Leslie Field, Ph.D.
Dr. Leslie Field is the Founder and Managing Member of SmallTech Consulting, LLC and the Founder and CEO of MEMS Insight, Inc. She also serves as a Consulting Professor in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Leslie has a background in Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, corporate R&D, and consulting. Dr. Field, through her consulting companies, has provided consulting services to a broad spectrum of companies for technical and strategic projects since 2002. Previously, Dr. Field worked in MEMS R&D at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories/Agilent Laboratories and while there, played a key role in starting HP Labs' Micromechanics group and worked on a variety of MEMS projects and devices. Farther back, Leslie's work at Chevron Research Company resulted in improved commercial refining methods for various petroleum-based products. Dr. Field has served on conference technical program committees and as a scientific reviewer for NIH. She is an inventor on thirty-seven patents and an author on fourteen technical publications. Dr. Field earned PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley's Sensor & Actuator Center, and MS and BS degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT.
Shalini Venkatesh , Ph.D.
Dr. Shalini Venkatesh is an applied physicist (Ph.D. in Physics, University of Aston, England) and a USPTO-registered Patent Agent. She has extensive R&D lab experience in optics and photonics, and four years of experience in patent prosecution. She is interested in consulting on projects where expertise in optics is called for, as well as in exploring new areas of technology and business where a physics background coupled with strong communication skills may be of particular value.
Geetha Dholakia, Ph.D.
Dr. Geetha Dholakia brings her broad experience in physics, materials science and instrumentation to SmallTech Consulting. Her research experience includes synthesis of multifunctional nanomaterials for photovoltaic and flexible LED applications, device fabrication and testing, materials characterization of nanoscale and bulk materials, and AFM and probe microscopies. She received her M.Sc in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T), Madras, India and her Ph.D. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science (I.I.Sc.), Bangalore, India, where she also did her Post Doctorate work, and was a Visiting Scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY. She has been a Sr. Research Scientist at Santa Clara University, a Sr. Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, USA, and has served as Adjunct Professor at Santa Clara University. At NASA she was the group lead for the Molecular Electronics Project and the nano-satellite project. She executed project management responsibilities and has systems engineering experience. She also actively participates as the executive committee member of IEEE SF Bay Area Nanotechnology Council, has chaired IEEE Nano conferences in “Nanotech Enabled Energy Generation”, taught many courses in SCU, SJSU and other Silicon Valley organizations on emerging research areas, including “Flexible Electronics and Plastic Green Technologies” and “Nanotechnology”, volunteers as a judge for bay area K6-12 science fairs, and is a referee for various physics and materials science journals (JAP, Nanoletters, APL etc) and NASA SBIR, STTR.