Victor Esch, President & CEO
Dr. Esch has successfully led product development in diverse organizations, from venture funded start-ups, to large integrated programs with more than 100 engineers and $100MM budgets. His diverse practical technical experience spans many disciplines, from interventional neuro catheters to free-space laser communication, and he has made significant contributions in these diverse areas. He has 23 issued patents, and more than 20 applications in prosecution. He received his Ph.D. in Optical Sciences in 1990.

Dr. Esch was Director of Research and Development at Indigo Medical, responsible for all product development. Indigo was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 1996. Following this he was CTO of EndoVasix, a company that produced an ischemic stroke treatment system. Endovasix was eventually acquired by W.L. Gore. Dr. Esch is a co-founder of PowerVision, a company successfully developing an accommodating intra-ocular lens to treat presbyopia. Dr. Esch’s design innovations have been honored by R&D 100 and Photonics Circle of Excellence.

Sergey A. Dryga, PhD, MBA, VP of Immunochemistry
Sergey Dryga has over 20 years of experience in the development of expression and vaccine systems, development of diagnostic systems and controls, and protein purification. He was Director of Analytical Research at Alphavax Inc., where he established reagent production capability to support vaccine development and was responsible for the development of two new vaccines. In his role as Director, Virology/Immunology at SeraCare Life Sciences, Inc. he led the development of several new products (e.g. a line of HPV controls) and was responsible for government and commercial contracts. He has 16 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, and an inventor on 9 patents and several applications.

Sergey holds a Masters Degree in BioOrganic Chemistry from Novosibirsk State University (1986), a PhD in Molecular Biology from Institute of Molecular Biology, NPO Vector, Koltsovo, Russia (1994), and an MBA from Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (2004). He completed post-doctoral study at Washington University in St. Louis in the laboratory of Prof. Sondra Schlesinger where he studied viral biology and development of replication-deficient vectors.

Colin W. Dykes, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr Dykes has over 25 years experience across R&D in the pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries and has participated in several successful rounds of fund-raising for venture funded companies, including an IPO.

Prior to joining NanoMR as Chief Scientific Officer in February 2010, he served as Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice-President of OpGen Inc. in Gaithersburg, MD, where his responsibilities included leadership of the company’s Scientific and Business Development programs and establishing collaborative preclinical studies with leading clinical microbiology labs. He also played a major role in raising over $30m in private equity financing.

Previously, Colin had served as Vice-President of Research at Variagenics, a Cambridge, MA-based pharmacogenomics company (now Nuvelo), where his duties included building a pharmacogenomics service business with Pharma/biotech partners and raising capital, including a successful IPO in July 2000.

Colin was appointed Director of GlaxoWellcome’s UK Genetics Division in 1997, after establishing human genetics and genomics programs that resulted in the identification of genes involved in susceptibility to diseases such as migraine, psoriasis and early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Colin also served as a Member of GlaxoWellcome’s Genetics Directorate, with responsibility for formulating policies on patents, diagnostics, genetics applications in clinical trials, and public policy.

After obtaining his Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and PhD in Biochemistry from University College, Cardiff, Colin performed post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Tadashi Inagami at Vanderbilt University, studying the role of the renin-angiotensin system in blood pressure regulation. He now serves as Chief Scientific Officer and Chairman of nanoMR’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Andrew McDowell, Ph.D., Chief NMR Scientist
Andrew McDowell received his PhD degree in physics from Cornell University, in the area of solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. After a post-doctoral appointment at Washington University in St. Louis and Grinnell College, he took a position in the Physics Department of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, achieving tenure and election as Chair Pro-Tem of the Faculty. At Knox, he co-lead an NSF-funded research effort consisting of two separate NMR labs and resulting in numerous publications with student co-authors. He joined New Mexico Resonance, a non-profit research lab in 2002, focusing on using fluorinated gas MRI to characterize porous ceramics and software and hardware development for a compact MRI system from MRTechnology. In 2005, he co-founded ABQMR, Inc. with Eiichi Fukushima, where he pursued the development of ultracompact NMR devices, work that has been recognized as a finalist for the 2009 Industrial Physics Prize of the APS. He has published 23 articles in refereed journals, is an inventor on four patents pending, and continues to be an invited speaker at international conferences.

Scientific Advisors

Eiichi Fukushima, Ph.D.
Dr. Fukushima performed his first NMR experiment as a graduate student in the physics department of University of Washington in 1960 and has been in the field ever since. He performed solid state NMR in a chemistry group at Los Alamos for 18 years before coming to Albuquerque to do flow NMR/MRI at Lovelace Medical Foundation. The experiments the group performed included flow of granular matter as applied to handling fossil fuel (i.e., coal), lung imaging, quantifying urine collection in space, characterizing slurry flow, and looking for subsurface gasoline that had leaked out of storage tanks in Siberia. Currently, projects include microcoil NMR with nanoMR, development of compact MRI for small animal imaging, and development of portable single-sided NMR detector for characterizing ripeness of fruits on the vine.

Dr. Fukushima was the chair of AMPERE’s Division of Spatially Resolved NMR for four years and sponsored the semi-annual meeting in Albuquerque in ’97- the first time the meeting had ever left Europe. Dr. Fukushima is also on the editorial board of Journal of Magnetic Resonance, the premier journal in the NMR field. He has published over 100 papers. He authored a how-to NMR book in 1981 and it is still in publication. He also edited a collection of fundamental papers in biomedical NMR as well as co-editing several conference proceedings.

He now reviews many manuscripts and gives historical or tutorial lectures at meetings. He travels to Japan twice a year to visit collaborators as well as his son’s family and other relatives. In between, he tries to ride his bicycle to work every day. He recently took part in the 40th anniversary climb of Mt. Vinson in Antarctica, whose first ascent he did in 1966.

Laurel O. Sillerud, Ph.D.
Dr. Sillerud took Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics, with minors in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Human Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Minnesota. His thesis work for the Ph.D. involved both Nuclear Magnetic, and electron spin resonance studies. After the completion of his Ph.D., Dr. Sillerud accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. There he successfully attracted NIH funding and joined the Yale Faculty as a Research Staff Scientist. After six years at Yale, Dr. Sillerud was recruited to lead a new Biomedical NMR Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, for 13 years, he led a group of a dozen staff members, postdocs, graduate and medical students and visiting scientists in the study of cellular, organ and whole animal metabolism using NMR techniques and stable isotopic labeling.

Dr. Sillerud moved from Los Alamos to Albuquerque and joined the Faculty at UNM in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as a Research Associate Professor. He served as an NMR consultant for Somatogen Inc. during their development of hemoglobin-based human blood substitutes, where he conducted a large series of metabolic NMR studies on animals during and after total blood replacement. His current funded research in nanoparticle technology includes the novel use of magnetic nanoparticles for MRI. Dr. Sillerud has more than 30 years of experience in the application of NMR to a variety of problems in Biochemistry, Physiology, and human Medicine.