Management Team
PAUL MEISSNER (CEO, Santur Corporation)
Paul
is an industry veteran with over 18 years of leadership experience in
optics and semiconductors. He joins Santur from Coherent,
where he most recently served as the EVP of Global Business Operations.
Prior to that, Paul held several executive management and technology
leadership positions at KLA-Tencor and Applied
Materials. In addition, he advises entrepreneurs through the
Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University, and through
the Digital Visions Program at Stanford University. Paul holds an undergraduate
degree from the University of California, Berkeley in materials science
and engineering, and he obtained both his masters and doctorate degrees
in materials science and engineering from Stanford University.
RICK WILMER (COO, Santur Corporation)
Rick
is an industry veteran with over 20 years of Technical and Operations
experience. Rick was most recently at Aruba Networks where
he was the company’s original VP of Operations. At Aruba, he successfully
built the manufacturing organization and moved it offshore and up a significant
ramp in support of the company’s growth and eventual IPO. Rick also served
in the same capacity at 2Wire and Procket.
He spent twelve years in the disk drive industry at Maxtor and Seagate,
which included a two year assignment in Malaysia running a high volume
factory. Rick has more than 24 years of operations and engineering management
experience in high tech Silicon Valley companies. Rick holds his B.S.
from U.C. Berkeley in Chemistry.
SABEUR SIALA (VP, Engineering)
Sabeur
joins Santur with an impressive track record of highly relevant experience
in the telecommunications industry. Most recently, he was Vice President
of Engineering and Manufacturing for Redfern Integrated
Optics. Before
Redfern, Sabeur played key management roles in engineering and operations
with K2 Optronics (acquired by Emcore). He was with SDL (acquired by JDSU)
before co-founding LuxN (acquired by Sorrento/Zhone
Technology).
MILIND GOKHALE (CTO, Santur Corporation)
Prior
to joining Santur, Milind was the founder and CTO of ASIP and Apogee
Photonics (acquired by Cyoptics) from 2000
to 2007, where he led technology and product development of advanced
high-speed lasers and detectors for access and metro applications. Before Apogee,
Milind spent five years at Princeton University working on new materials,
photonic integrated circuits and high power lasers. He has authored numerous
publications and patents, including a novel photonics integration technique
that lead to the first commercial uncooled 10Gb/s electroabsorption modulated
laser. Milind obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University
on Connecticut in 1995 and B. Tech in electrical engineering from Indian
Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
ED VAIL (Director of Advanced Product Development & Founder)
Ed Vail received his BS from Caltech in 1991 and Ph.D. from Stanford
in 1996 both in Electrical Engineering. His thesis work
included demonstrating the first working micromechanical
tunable VCSEL, a technology now being commercialized
by several companies. Ed then joined SDL (now
part of JDS Uniphase), and worked on
a number of different research and development projects
including red lasers, high speed lasers, 2.5 Gb/s transceivers,
and Raman pumps, before helping to found Santur
in 2000.