Leadership Team

Board of Directors

  • Ajay Mody (Vice President of Operations, Magellan)


Founders


Other

 


Biographies

Frederick T. Krein became President and Chief Executive Officer of SmartSpark Energy Systems, Inc. in July 2005. He was previously President of Jarvis Castor Group in Massachusetts. He holds a B.S. in metallurgical engineering from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and an MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology. He has led successfully the sales, development and manufacture of medical, consumer, industrial consumable, and durable products in multiple locations and multiple product operations both domestically and internationally. He has extensive practical experience with implementation and execution of strategic operational planning and logistics, lean manufacturing techniques, quality assurance, sales management, and marketing strategy. He has held senior executive positions at Standex International and at Foseco, PLC over more than twenty years, and was formerly General Manager of the Quality Group at C.H. Stuart, Corp. Many of his assignments have involved business formation and development at the division level of these firms. His business units regularly received annual corporate awards for outstanding performance. He is a member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.

Philip Krein is a founder and current Board Chairman of SmartSpark. He also holds the Grainger Endowed Director’s Chair in Electric Machinery and Electromechanics at the University of Illinois. Dr. Krein is widely regarded as one of the top experts and innovators in power electronics, with more than 20 years experience. He is recipient of the IEEE William E. Newell Award, the highest international honor in the field. He is the author of a respected textbook on the subject and has served as President of the IEEE Power Electronics Society. Dr. Krein holds the B.S. in electrical engineering and A.B. in economics and business from Lafayette College. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds eleven U.S. patents with additional patents pending.

Jason Matlof joined Battery Ventures in January 2005 and focuses on investments in clean energy, networking and security technologies. In addition to SmartSpark, Jason is currently a board member at Agito Networks and SunEthanol, and a board observer at Advent Solar.

Ajay Mody is currently the Vice President of WW Operations at Magellan GPS. Prior to that Ajay has held various executive and senior management positions with companies in the fields of Alternate Energy, Networking, Manufacturing and Semiconductors.

Patrick Chapman is a founder and current CTO of SmartSpark. He also is Associate Professor and Grainger Associate at the University of Illinois. Dr. Chapman holds a Ph.D. degree from Purdue University (2000) and BS and MS degrees from the University of Missouri-Rolla. He is a recipient several prestigious awards including the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the Richard M. Bass Outstanding Power Electronics Engineer Award. He has over ninety publications in various journals and conferences.

Jonathan Kimball is a founder and Senior Engineer for SmartSpark. He also works as an Assistant Professor at Missouri S&T (formerly University of Missouri-Rolla). He has seven years industrial experience at Motorola and Baldor. At both firms, he worked on product development in power electronics and electronic drive systems up to 200 kW. Subsequently, he worked for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for five years, where he performed research in power converter control techniques. Dr. Kimball holds the B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and the M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He was an early developer of ripple correlation control and has extensive experience in power converter design, modeling, and simulation.

Brian Kuhn is a founder and Senior Engineer at SmartSpark. He has a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla. At SmartSpark, Mr. Kuhn handles most testing and design problems on the battery equalizer and fuel cell power management technologies. For six years, Mr. Kuhn worked at Purdue University as a research engineer, investigating power electronics based systems. Specifically, he designed and implemented many power converter circuits at power levels up to 50 kW. He managed Purdue’s laboratory for power electronics, which involved two faculty members, another research engineer, and up to fifteen graduate students. In addition to engineering tasks, Mr. Kuhn has published ten journal papers.

Jeff Layton joined SmartSpark Energy Systems in December 2007 to lead the team to successful product commercialization of key technologies. Prior to joining SSE, Jeff was VP of Operations and Engineering at NovaCentrix, a NanoTechnology startup, where he drove improvements in yield and cycle time while leading the development and manufacturing of Photonic Curing Systems and advanced nanomaterials. Prior to NovaCentrix, Jeff was VP of Operations at Coldwatt and brought that startup to Series A funding & manufacturing volume. Jeff's proven leadership in process and institutional change necessary to scale operations served him well in various Product Development leadership roles while he was at Dell from 1995 to 2004. Most recently, he was the Director of Power and Reliability Engineering for all Dell hardware products. Prior to his time at Dell, Jeff held various Operations & Engineering leadership roles at 3M and as an Officer in the US Navy Nuclear Submarine Service. Jeff graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a degree in Electrical Engineering and studied graduate-level Nuclear Engineering in the US Navy Nuclear Power school.

Robert Balog is a Senior Engineer at SmartSpark. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey. He began his professional career as an engineer at Lutron Electronics, Coopersburg, Pa. where he led and contributed to lighting control product development. After leaving Lutron, he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He was the first Fellow in power electronics of the IEEE International Telecommunications Energy Conference. He was a consultant for the US Army Construction Engineering Research Labs (USACERL) on a scoping study for advanced energy systems. Dr. Balog is a key contributor to the development of SolarBridge technologies. His current responsibilities include solar and micro fuel cell product development. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, holds two U.S. patents with additional patents pending and has authored thirteen journal and peer-reviewed conference papers including a plenary session paper in 2007.

Brian Precious, SmartSpark's Director of Marketing, joined the team with over 6 years experience as a consultant and project manager. He has led system design and implementation, change management, and business process redesign engagements, with both PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Accenture. As an M.B.A. student, Brian and two classmates launched a startup organization in 2005 offering financial, marketing and business development services to University of Illinois startup companies. Brian holds a B.S. in Management Information Systems and an M.B.A. both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.