SmallTech
Consulting Team
 Leslie
Field, Ph.D. |
| Shalini Venkatesh, Ph.D. |
| Janelle Gunther, Ph.D. |
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 (B. Sc. in Physics, Ph.D. in Medical Physics, both from the University of Aston in England) with extensive experience in optics and photonics. 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 would be of value.
Janelle Gunther, Ph.D.
Dr. Janelle Gunther is a materials scientist (B.S. in Materials Science, Ph.D. in Materials Science/Polymer Physics, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with expertise in self-assembling nanomaterials and materials characterization. Dr. Gunther has worked with many classes of materials including polymers, self-assembling nanostructures, biomaterials, semiconductors and nuclear materials. Janelle particularly enjoys working with companies in designing characterization or quality control programs to improve their product yield, and in bringing concepts from the design to prototype and production stages. She specializes in the complex nature of creating products that combine multiple types of materials in the same device, from early research and development stages all the way through to commercial production, including cost/benefit analyses for characterization and equipment purchase budgeting. At MIT, Dr. Gunther worked on liquid crystals and block copolymers as well as total joint prostheses. As a postdoctoral associate at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, she transitioned to nanomaterials and surface science analyses through her work on atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) applied to self-assembling nanostructures. At Agilent Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory some of her projects included failure analysis of DNA and protein array products, target characterization and development for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), and multiple projects involving semiconductor devices and microfluidics. She has expertise in AFM, XPS, STM, DSC, TGA and Auger. In addition, she has close collaborators for projects requiring SIMS and Nuclear Microprobe analysis. Janelle has over 20 publications and presentations in refereed journals and scientific conferences and several patents in biotechnology, and has served as a journal article reviewer in polymer science. Dr. Gunther is a faculty member teaching Chemistry and Biochemistry at San Francisco State.