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.

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.

Matt Mills, MA, ATC joined SyncThink in 2017 after working as an Associate Athletic Trainer and the Director of the Advanced Athletic Training Fellowship at Stanford University. He has extensive experience in utilizing the SyncThink platform as a clinician and worked closely with Dr. Ghajar and a multidisciplinary concussion workgroup to help implement technological solutions in the care of athletes at Stanford.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Athletics, 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.