Years of research, applied.

Laura Yecies is the CEO of SyncThink, a neurotechnology company with foundational IP in eye tracking.  A Silicon Valley veteran, she has successfully led multiple startups and top brands.

Yecies was previously the CEO of two venture-backed startups.  As CEO of SugarSync, she led the company for four years through an aggressive business and product growth phase growing from zero to $25M in revenue and signed several strategic partnerships leading to significant valuation increases. SugarSync was later acquired by J2Global. She joined the Catch.com team as acting CEO to help develop the company’s business model, where they expanded the product footprint and built strategic alliances, before successfully selling the company to Apple in 2013.  

For the six years after leaving Informix, she was the Vice President of the Netscape browser division at AOL where she was responsible for the development of Netscape 7.0 and the launch of the Netscape browser in 23 languages. After leaving NetScape, she joined Yahoo where she served as the Global General Manager for the Yahoo Mail division. Following her time at Yahoo, Yecies was the VP of Marketing at Check Point Software where she served for three years.  Prior to the aforementioned, Yecies led marketing programs and Latin American sales at Informix Software Corp for six years.

Yecies received her MBA from Harvard and an MSFS from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. She received her A.B. Magna Cum Laude in Government from Dartmouth.

She’s been the recipient of many awards such as the 2011 Gold Medal and 2012 Silver Medal for Female Executive of the Year for the Stevie Award for Women in Business, the Inc. 500 — Top Female CEO of 2012, and was a previous U.S. Department of State TechWoman Mentor.

Dr. Ghajar, MD, PhD, FACS, is a board certified neurosurgeon, Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery, Director of the Stanford Concussion and Brain Performance Center, and President of the Brain Trauma Foundation in New York City and Palo Alto.

Mr. Beeler joined SyncThink in 2010 and serves as CTO. He was recruited for his expertise in image analysis and carries three patents. Dan has worked closely with Dr. Ghajar for over five years to invent and implement new technologies for SyncThink.

Doug joined SyncThink as the SVP, Business Development in June 2018. Prior to SyncThink, Doug was the CEO/founder of SNYPR, Inc., a sports technology company that tracked and gamified sports practice in youth athletes using wearable technology. Prior to that he was the general manager of the lacrosse division at Easton-Bell Sports and the CEO/founder of Talon Lacrosse, a developer of innovative lacrosse equipment. In his previous career, Doug was a corporate lawyer where he served as general counsel for public and private companies including Shutterfly, CBS MarketWatch and Handspring, as well as in private practice with Morrison & Foerster.

Lee Martin MA, ATC joined SyncThink in 2018 after a 7-year tenure at Stanford University, most recently as Associate Athletic Trainer. Her clinical expertise spans multiple sports, settings, and athletes, including 8+ years in the Division-I football setting. She has extensive experience in utilizing the SyncThink platform as a clinician and worked closely with Stanford Sports Medicine Staff and Dr. Ghajar to help implement technological solutions in the care of student-athletes at Stanford.

Virginia is a Boston native and a graduate of Suffolk University. She comes to Syncthink with over 15 years of medical sales experience with a focus in Neurology and Neurosurgery. She has be instrumental in launching and growing novel products in pharmaceutical and medical device sales industry, over the course of her career.  She is an award winning top sales performer and looks to leverage her sales experience with Synthink. and the eyesync technology to assist patients and athletes in their journey to recovery!

Umesh Rajashekar received the B.E. degree in electronics and communication engineering from The Karnataka Regional Engineering College, India, in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Texas at Austin in 2000 and 2005, respectively. His dissertation involved an analysis of the impact of low-level image features on human eye movements. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Vision, New York University from 2006 to 2011 working on the perceptual quality assessment of images. He worked as a Scientist at the Brain Trauma Foundation in New York from 2011 to 2017 investigating the utility of eye movement metrics as potential indicators of attention. He has worked closely with SyncThink since 2011 assisting in the development of eye movement metrics.

Jon Allen has spent over a decade working in the theoretical physics, healthcare, hardware, computation, and data science spaces. As a researcher in relativity at the University of Texas at Austin, Jon worked on numerical stability for gauge theories and numerical computations of gravitational radiation from galactic collisions. After leaving academia, Jon worked closely with a hardware team from MIT’s Media Lab and developed novel AI solutions taking inertial moment unit sensor data to automate lameness detection in horses, solutions he later applied to surface electromyography wearables for performance athletes. As an entrepreneur, Jon co-founded a company, later sold to W2O group, using large-scale data analysis techniques to optimize marketing for web-scale platforms, techniques later utilized while at Grockit. While at Health 2047, a subsidiary of the American Medical Association, Jon worked on outcome-based medicine payment models to replace aspects of CPT, HIPAA data storage platforms, and patient ownership, and streamlining, of electronic medical records. At Habit, Jon designed and implemented data pipelines to maintain both security and access to data for computation while building models to help identify optimal nutrition paths for end users.

Jay Stevens is a successful Medical Device Business Owner and Sales Manager. Jay attended Oklahoma State University, BS. Prior to joining the SyncThink team, he spent 15 years with DJO Global a World Leader in Medical Devices. During the time with DJO, he led a very successful sales team that set the standard for DJO. Jay Stevens lives in San Diego, CA.

A born and raised Floridian, Michelle Kafka is the co-founder of Kafka Media Group and a PR professional. She graduated from Florida State University with her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is an avid Seminoles fan. Kafka is passionate about sports technology and works with SyncThink to help spread the word about their role in the advancement of eye-tracking technology and concussion awareness.

Allison has more than 15 years of regulatory experience, with 10 years at the FDA and over 5 years in the medical device and biotech industry. At FDA, Allison provided specialized and strategic direction to academia, industry and government partners for alignment of novel, innovative medical device development efforts with regulatory expectations. Allison served as a policy and scientific adviser in several product areas including traumatic brain injury, IVDs, mobile medical apps, advanced physiological monitoring, critical care devices and conducted pre-market reviews for cardiovascular devices and combination products. Allison is currently using the valuable experience and knowledge gained at FDA to advise medical device companies on their regulatory strategies as they pursue marketing approval. Allison has a biomedical engineering degree from Virginia Tech, a graduate degree from Georgetown University in Biothreats and Emerging Infectious Disease, and graduated from the Harvard School of Public Health’s National Preparedness Leadership Institute.

Solaris is an experienced technical lead that specializes in frontier technologies. He has helped numerous companies to fully realize software projects utilizing emerging tools and hardware. His most notable clients include Google, Microsoft, Warner Bros, Airbnb, Within, Lifeproof, Spaces, and Upload. Throughout his career, Solaris has assumed the roles of developer, project manager, founder, educator, and advisor.

Jan is thoroughly addicted to Virtual Reality. Originally from New York City, Jan obtained his B.A. from Boston College in both Philosophy and Medical Humanities while also working on the Virtual Reality retelling of Joyce’s Ulysses, Joycestick. Concurrently, Jan conducted his undergraduate research at the Stanford Concussion and Brain Performance Center, where again technology and humanity intersected through VR. It is precisely this nexus of humanity and science that Jan works to explore, promote, and propagate. Technology for Humanity!

Rob Tow joined SyncThink in 2018 as Technical Lead. He has forty years of computer science and engineering experience, including stints at Xerox PARC, Interval Research, AT&T Labs, Sun Labs, and Texas Instruments. He has worked in VR and AR since 1993, and has 14 patents granted and 1 pending in color scanning, steganography, video processing, robotics, wireless sensor networks, gesture UI, AR, and affective computing.

Jeffrey Kutcher, MD, FAAN is the founder and Global Director of The Sports Neurology Clinic. With offices in Michigan and Utah, Dr. Kutcher specializes in the diagnosis and management of concussion, post-concussion syndrome and neurological conditions in athletes. Dr. Kutcher was a member and co-author of the International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport in Zurich (2012) and Berlin (2016.) Prior to launching The Sports Neurology Clinic, Dr. Kutcher founded and directed the University of Michigan NeuroSport Program where he established the first fellowship in Sports Neurology in 2012. He has also founded the Sports Neurology Section of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), serving as the section’s first chair, and established and co-directed the annual Sports Concussion Conference for the American Academy of Neurology.

Dr. Kutcher is currently a Team Physician for US Ski and Snowboard and served as the Team Neurologist for the U.S. Olympic Team at the 2014 and 2018 Winter Games. He also serves as the Director of the NBA concussion program and works as an advisor to the National Football League (NFL) Players’ Association and National Hockey League (NHL) Players’ Association.

Kristen Steenerson, MD is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery and Neurology at Stanford University. She specializes in otoneurology and brings unique expertise in the study of the relationship between the inner ear and brain disorders. Additionally, Dr. Steenerson’s clinical focus includes vertigo, vestibular migraines, postural-perceptual dizziness, and Ménière’s Disease. Dr. Steenerson is a board-certified Neurologist, and completed her Neurology Residency at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, which is where she first found her interest in balance disorders. She also completed an Otoneurology fellowship at Barrow Neurological Institute.

Gordon Matheson MD, Ph.D. is a world-renowned primary care sports medicine physician, thought leader, and academic. He has authored more than 200 publications and given more than 250 lectures in 16 countries. He founded the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, chaired the Board Governance Committee for the International Justice Mission, served as an expert for the World Anti-Doping Agency, and headed the International Olympic Committee Disease Prevention Working Group. Dr. Matheson has also been a past President of the Canadian Academy of Sports Medicine, team physician for the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League and the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association. As Professor and Director of Sports Medicine at Stanford University from 1994-2016, he established the first Head Division of Sports Medicine in the medical school and was a member of the Medical Senate. Dr. Matheson also taught many undergraduate courses at Stanford to students in Human Biology and established the fellowship program in primary care sports medicine. Currently, he serves as Chairman of the Board for Worldplay, a video technology company.

Dr. Herget is a Senior Physical Therapist, Sports Clinical Specialist, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, Certified Clinical Instructor and Certified Emergency Medical Responder at the MGH Sports Medicine Center and serves as the Rehabilitation Consultant to the MGH Sports Concussion Clinic and Boston Bruins and is a member of the New England Patriots Medical Staff. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre and Psychology from Wheaton College in 2000, her Masters in Education degree from SUNY in 2005 and her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree from MGH Institute of Health Professions in 2009.

Dr Herget’s practice includes rehabilitating athletes who have sustained a sports concussion, most specifically evaluating and treating high school through professional level athletes with concussions and assisting in their safe return to play. Her research has focused on management of athletes with post-concussion syndrome and the efficacy of pre-season and post-season visuo-vestibular testing to aid in return to play decision making as well as managing care for the female athlete triad diagnosis. She has lectured nationally on the topics of concussion and the non-acute management of athletes with post-concussive syndrome. Her clinical expertise is in the cervicogenic contributions and visuo-vestibular treatment of athletes who sustain concussions as well as the progression of exercise through exertional protocols. Additionally, Dr. Herget focuses her orthopaedic practice on the biomechanical assessment and management of lower quarter injuries.

Marie Boo, DPT, SCS, CSCS joined SyncThink as an advisor in 2018. As a physical therapist at Stanford University in the Department of Sports Medicine, she utilizes the SyncThink platform as a critical tool in her vestibular-ocular assessment and treatment. She also works closely with Dr. Ghajar as part of a multidisciplinary team managing Stanford student-athletes after sports-related concussions, and she advises the company on the growing use cases for how the technology can treat various conditions.

Maya Yutsis, Ph.D., ABPP-CN is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is an Associate Director of the Clinical Core at the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease research center, a Team Neuropsychologist for San Francisco 49ers, attending neuropsychologist for Stanford Concussion and Sports Medicine Clinic and Neuropsychology Centers. She specializes in sport-related concussions and their acute and late-life effects and brings unique expertise in the study of sport-related concussions and cognitive aging. Additionally, Dr. Yutsis’ clinical focus includes cognitive functioning in age-associated neurodegenerative conditions such as
Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, autoimmune disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis, and developmental disorders such as ADHD. Dr. Yutsis is a board certified clinical neuropsychologist who completed her post-doctoral residency in neuropsychology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, clinical internship at the Minnesota VA Medical Center, and received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Palo Alto University, in Palo Alto CA. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was the lead neuropsychologist at the VA Palo Alto Polytrauma Transitional Rehabilitation Program and for the Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center Telehealth Neuropsychology clinic.