AWAK is a patient-centric medical technology company with a mission to enhance the lives of people with kidney disease and their caregivers by providing solutions to deliver better outcomes along with improving their quality of life.
Suresha is the Chief Executive Officer of AWAK Technologies. He has spent over a decade in the medical technology space, enabling company growth, increasing revenues, and developing various innovative medical devices.
Prior to becoming CEO at AWAK Technologies, he worked for Hill-Rom, a US$5.4B (market cap) medical devices company (NYSE: HRC), as the Director for Front Line Care business, where he was responsible for developing and commercialising new products, and spearheading innovation culture. He joined as the first engineer in the newly formed division in Hill-Rom Singapore, helped the team to grow it substantially, and commercialized five medical devices across the globe.
As the leader of the Innovation and Technology Integration team, Suresha was instrumental in driving the patent portfolio of the Singapore division, which not only resulted in numerous patent applications but also opened avenues for new market growth.
He has acquired deep domain expertise in areas such as Respiratory Care, ECG/Cardio, Remote Patient Monitoring and Therapy Surface Technologies, and has navigated many complex products in these domains through 510 (K) and CE clearance processes.
Before joining Hill-Rom, Suresha was a technical leader at Robert Bosch, world’s largest automotive component supplier with a revenue of Euro 73B , where he provided leadership to a talented team of engineers in the development of cutting-edge engine control system solutions for world-renowned companies such as Daimler Chrysler and Mercedes.
For more than a decade he has cultivated extensive experience in the fields of Marketing, R&D, IP, QA/RA, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Clinical Affairs and Regulatory Affairs.
Suresha received a Master of Science degree in Computer Control Systems from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, India.
Mandar Gori
Mandar joined AWAK Technologies in July 2017 as the Director of Marketing & Business Development to lead the commercial activities.
Mandar has a proven track record of 12 years in the medical devices industry with a wide-ranging experience in marketing, sales, product development and innovation in both Asia and US. Before joining AWAK he was Deputy Director at A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), a Singapore government agency with a mission to advance science and develop innovative technology to further economic growth and improve lives. In this role he worked with the medtech industry, educational institutions and different government agencies in Singapore and abroad to forge public-private partnerships to train entrepreneurial talent and bring their innovations from idea to market.
Until 2015 he was the Regional Sales and Marketing Manager for Hill-Rom Inc. a global $5.4B (market cap) medical device company (NYSE: HRC) where he covered ASEAN, North Asia and Indian subcontinent, a large territory consisting of 17 countries. In his prior job between 2005 and 2010 at Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) and CareFusion (NYSE: CFN) he led successful development and launch of 2 first-of-its-kind clinical informatics products. Today MedMined™ Surveillance Advisor is used across US and is ranked by KLAS as #1 for eight years in the last 9 years.
Mandar was a mentor for Junior Achievement in Singapore, one of the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring and preparing young people to succeed in a global economy. He has a MBA from Nanyang Business School (Singapore), MS in Healthcare Informatics from University of Alabama at Birmingham (USA) and BE in Information Technology from Mumbai University (India).
Carol Lim
Carol is the Finance and HR Director at AWAK Technologies Pte Ltd. She has previously worked at Ernst and Young for 4 years and has prior experience in auditing companies that are also in the Medical Technology industry. Carol is a Chartered Accountant and a member of Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants. She also holds a degree in Accountancy from Nanyang Technological University.
Joel Fernandes
Joel is the Senior R&D Director at AWAK. In his role, he will be leading all the activities related to Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Connectivity. He also has additional responsibility of managing QMS and Regulatory functions.
Joel joined AWAK from Hill-Rom where he was managing multiple teams towards commercialization for the Respiratory Care business unit. He has experience of over 10 years in R&D, majority of which is in Medical Devices industry. Prior to Hill-Rom, Joel has worked in multitude of industries such as Aerospace, Automotive and Semiconductors. During his career, he has worked on some of the world’s well-known programs such as Boeing 787, Volvo Trucks, AMD APUs to name a few.
Joel has experience in executing New Product Development projects, Early Innovation programs and has been actively involved in new innovation. He is also an avid inventor with multiple patents pending. During his tenure in the New Product Development, he was actively involved in strategizing the device connectivity platform, conceptualised and launched Hill-Rom’s first healthcare analytics platform which is being used actively by thousands of patients in the US. Additionally he spearheaded various efforts in different areas like V&V, System Software, Manufacturing, Mobile App development to name a few.
Joel holds an Engineering degree in Electronics and Communications from the Visvesvaraya Technological University, India.
Sanjay Singh
Sanjay Singh, Ph.D. joined AWAK in 2018 and since then he is responsible for the development of the sorbent, with a multi-disciplinary team, for application in wearable dialysis device and other related chemistry. He has also taken a role in overseeing pre-clinical research activities including validation of sorbent in animals and other in-house projects. In his present role, he also supports the innovation team in scouting new emerging technologies based on the strategic direction of the company.
Prior to joining AWAK, Sanjay was Section head, Medicinal Chemistry at Curia Inc (formerly Albany Molecular Research Inc), where he was responsible for driving multiple pre-clinical drug discovery research projects and providing analytical support for drug discovery programmes with a team of experienced medicinal and analytical chemist respectively. The key therapeutic area of research included Thrombosis, Oncology and Autoimmune disorder.
Sanjay earned his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from Central Drug Research Institute, CSIR, India, where he worked on the isolation and screening of natural products of medicinal values and high-throughput solid-phase synthesis of organic molecule library and peptide library of biological interest.
Jiang Cong
Jiang Cong joined AWAK Technologies in January 2019 as the Director of System Engineering and QA&RA. In this role, he is leading the Quality, Regulatory, and System Engineering teams to ensure that AWAK products are designed and built with quality and fulfill the expectations of both customers and regulatory bodies.
Prior to AWAK, Jiang Cong had over 12 years of experience in the areas of system and quality engineering. In his previous roles in Hill-Rom and Life Technologies (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific), he provided technical leadership to several successful projects of various scales which enhanced the competitive edge of the companies. He has championed the creation and maintenance of these products’ DHF per FDA 21 CFR PART 820, EU MDD/MDR, and ISO13485 guidelines. He was also experienced in ensuring the quality is built into the design of the products and led the team in navigating through several major audits including FDA audit, notified body audit, etc. He also has in-depth knowledge of FDA premarket notification/approval submissions and CE clearance processes.
Jiang Cong is a system engineering expert with extensive knowledge in system definition, system development, and system integration of medical products. He is also experienced in acting as the technological leader in the product commercialization processes following design for six sigma (DFSS) and customer-oriented product design approaches. He has broad exposure over quality management of medical devices.
Jiang Cong holds a M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He received his B.Eng. (first-class honor) from the same school.
Koh Yau Luong
Yau Luong joined AWAK Technologies in July 2021 as the Director of Research & Development to lead technology development and engineering activities.
Yau Luong has 10 years of experience in product development, operations, supply chain and business development roles for life sciences, consulting and investment companies. Before AWAK, he was Head of Business Development at Trendlines Labs Singapore, the innovation unit for Trendlines Medical, an Israel-based technology incubator, tasked to set up and advance the presence in the Asian region. In this role, he worked with government agencies, healthcare institutions, MNCs and Startups to kickstart commercialization of seed technologies for medical applications.
Till 2020, he served as Associate Director for Product Development for Biolidics Ltd(SGX: 8YY), a Singapore med-tech company providing oncology and acute disease diagnostic solutions. He led the product development team that launched the world’s first label free CTC(Circulating Tumor Cell) isolation system and COVID-19 Antibody detection kits. From 2014 – 2020, he was founder of a product development agency, Buildlabs Pte Ltd, that consulted for companies in the medical and consumer electronics space, serving to provide development strategies and technical solutions to help them get to market.
Yau Luong has an Exec MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology(Washington DC), BE in Bioengineering from National University of Singapore(NUS) and Minor in Technopreneurship from NUS Overseas Colleges.
Suresh Palale
Dr. Suresh Palale joined AWAK Technologies in October 2020 as the AWAK India Head, R&D, at AWAK Technologies India PVT. LTD to set up and lead the AWAK India site.
Suresh has more than 14 years of experience in New product development and led teams in Research & Development and Engineering divisions. His product development experience is wide spread in various domains like automotive, Consumer electronics and Healthcare. Suresh has a proven track record of setting up Research and development centres and new businesses in a multicultural environment both in Singapore and India.
Before joining AWAK he was a Senior Program Manager at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business solutions, India, and was tasked to develop new business in the domain of Electromobility. He was instrumental in forming a new team and developing a business model and digital platform solution to monitor electric vehicles, charging stations and to bring-in battery intelligence using Artificial intelligence algorithms. In this role, he worked with several start-ups, educational institutions, different government agencies and large corporate customers in India. Before this, he was a Senior Manager at ROBERT BOSCH (SEA) PVT LTD, Singapore and was responsible to strategically build new Research team and R&D domains for Bosch in South East Asia. During 10 years here Suresh was able to build highly cross functional team, R&D facility and successfully developed 3 new products in the domain of Consumer electronics and Healthcare. Until 2009 he was a Product Manager at Fosroc Technology Centre, Bangalore and was responsible for New product development.
He was a Postdoctoral fellow at Hydrocarbon Research Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA and worked under the tutelage of the late Dr. George Olah who is a Nobel laureate in Chemistry. He has his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India) and MSc in synthetic chemistry from Mangalore University (India). He owns 6 US patents and about 15 Journal publications in high impact Journals.
Jason Lim
Jason is the R&D Manager for AWAK and has more than a decade’s worth of experience in medical device design & development. Prior to joining AWAK, he spent 8 years working as a Design Engineer and was involved in the development of more than a dozen various medical devices. Jason has been with AWAK since 2013 and is currently overseeing product design development as well as pre-clinical & clinical testing. He holds a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham.
Peter Haywood
Peter has a rich hands-on experience of 12+ years working in both Singapore and Australia. He has broad research experience working in academia and industry in a wide range of industries including medical devices, food & water testing, semiconductors and natural products. In the medical field, Peter has formulated of anti-microbial coatings for hospital surfaces as well as enzymatic detergents for cleaning surgical instruments. Additionally, he has worked in analysis for nutritional panels and in manufacture of semiconducting thin films by chemical vapour deposition.
Peter completed his BSc(Hons) in Chemistry from UNSW, Sydney, Australia. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals on natural products and inorganic synthetic chemistry. He is currently completing a Grad Cert in Intellectual Property Law and is part of the team overseeing the AWAK patent portfolio.
Dr. Marjorie Foo is the Director of Singapore General Hospital Peritoneal Dialysis Program and heads the Renal Medicine unit. She is also the Clinical Senior Lecturer at National University of Singapore and associate professor at Duke-NUS Medical School.
Dr. Foo actively engages across several committees working to strengthen kidney care and dialysis efforts globally. She is the Chair of Clinical Privileging and Competency committee and Chair of Renal Medicine Senior Residency Examination Committee. She’s involved in the Part time physician scheme (PTPS) Ministry of Health , Singapore and co-chairs the Clinical Integration Committee at SGH.
She graduated from Queen’s University Belfast in 1989, MB ChB. BAO ( Belf), and attained MRCP (UK) 1992, FAMS 2003 and FRCP (Glasgow) 2004. In the UK, Dr. Foo was trained in University College Hospital, The Middlesex Hospital and Hammersmith Hospital London. Her training in Nephrology was completed in 2001.
Dr. Foo is fully trained in all aspects of Nephrology; i.e. transplantation, general nephrology, haemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis. Her main subspecialty interest is in peritoneal dialysis and the use of telemedicine in monitoring of chronic disease and treatment.
Dr. Arsh Jain
Dr. Arsh Jain is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario. He is a practicing Nephrologist at the London Health Sciences Centre and his clinical expertise is in the area of Peritoneal Dialysis. Dr. Jain conducts clinical and health services research to improve health outcomes for patients with kidney diseases. He is the lead physician for peritoneal dialysis access and is Program Director for the Home Dialysis Fellowship.
Prof. Edwina Brown
Professor Edwina Brown’s main research interests are peritoneal dialysis, dialysis outcomes in older people and renal palliative care. She is currently the principal investigator for the study Kidney Transplantation in Older People (KTOP). She organises an annual meeting on Renal Supportive Care and co-organises the UK PD Academy. She co-chaired the ISPD guideline committee (2014-2020) and has overseen the development of the 2020 guideline on ‘Prescribing high quality, goal-directed peritoneal dialysis’. She is the co-chair for the KDIGO controversies conference on symptom-based complications in dialysis (May 2022) and is the president-elect for the ISPD (2020-2022); she will become the president in August 2022
Dr. Htay Htay
Dr Htay Htay is a senior consultant at Department of Renal Medicine and also a Deputy Director of Peritoneal Dialysis Program, Singapore General Hospital. She graduated from University of Medicine Yangon, Myanmar and received Master of Medicine from the National University of Singapore. She completed advanced specialist training in Nephrology at Singapore General Hospital. She received Health Manpower Development Programme (HMDP) Award and underwent one-year fellowship training at Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane, Australia. She is a fellow of Royal College of Physician and also a member of International Society for Peritoneal Dialysis, and Singapore Society of Nephrology. She was awarded as ISN-GKHA (Global Kidney Health Atlas) fellow (2016 -2020) by International Society of Nephrology.
She has been appointed as clinical assistant Professor in Duke-NUS Medical School. She is also a clinical lecturer at National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. She is also a visiting lecturer for Advanced Diploma in Nursing in Nanyang Polytechnic. In addition, she is interested in clinical research and has published original papers and review articles in international peer review journals.
Mr Abel Ang is the Group Chief Executive Officer of Accuron MedTech, where he has overall responsibility for Accuron’s Medical Device activities.
Abel has a proven track record in the medical device sector. He has served as the Senior Advisor to the CEO of Greatbatch Inc (NYSE:GB), providing guidance relative to the commercialization of medical device technologies in the cardiac, neurology, vascular and orthopaedic markets. Prior to Greatbatch, Abel was President, Asia/Pacific for Hill-Rom Inc. a US$1.7B revenue medical devices company (NYSE: HRC) where he was responsible for leading, developing and implementing the strategy to expand Hill-Rom’s presence in the Asia/Pacific markets. He formerly served as the Chief Technology Officer for Hill-Rom for 3 years. In that role he had overall responsibility for Hill-Rom’s global R&D operations which are distributed across sites in the U.S., Mexico, France, and Singapore. At Hill-Rom, he also held the positions of Vice-President and General Manager of Hill-Rom’s US$420MM Global Surfaces and Therapy Business Unit; and Vice-President for International Business and Technology Development. He formerly headed the global Medical Technology and Biotechnology industry groups in the Singapore Economic Development Board’s (EDB) Biomedical Division.
Ang sits on the Board of Economic Development Innovations Singapore, a privately-held company headquartered in Singapore with offices in Germany and the US. With expertise honed in conceiving and managing townships in India, Vietnam, China and Indonesia, EDIS’ core business is in investing, managing and developing integrated cities globally. Ang also sits on the Board of Exploit Technologies which provides access to Singapore’s largest pool of intellectual property and knowledge generated by over 2,000 researchers at A*STAR’s research institutes. In addition, he sits on the Boards of the following Accuron Medical Device Operating companies: Dornier Medizintechnik, Veredus Pte Ltd, and Advanced Materials Technologies (AMT) Pte Ltd.
Abel is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Nanyang Business School in Singapore and Waseda University in Japan, where he teaches in their respective MBA programs.
Mr Ang has a Master of Science in Computational Biology from Rutgers University in New Jersey, which he pursued while on an EDB scholarship. He attended Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program in 2012.
Mr Mhamed Mengad
Mhamed is a Vice President at Vickers Venture Partners, a global deep tech venture capital firm with $650M assets under management, and is based in New York City, USA. He is part of the fund investment team and is involved in the full investment cycle, having contributed to transactions in the US, Europe and Asia mostly in the Healthcare and Fintech sectors.
Before joining Vickers in Singapore and now New York City, Mhamed was a management consultant in Paris, France and worked on several strategic and regulatory consulting assignments. Before that, he worked as a structured products sales at HSBC Global Banking and Markets with a portfolio covering institutional clients.
Mhamed holds a Master’s degree “Grande Ecole” in Finance from IESEG Business School and a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance from Dublin Business School.
Mr Soo Kee Wee
Mr. Soo is the Managing Director of Pristine Capital Pte Ltd, an asset management company from 2013 till to date. Prior to that, he was an Executive Director with UBS AG, Singapore branch, managing the Ultra High Net Worth clients within the UBS Wealth Management business. Mr. Soo has been active investing into the start ups, and other private companies, involving quite substantially with the investee companies with aim to bring them to public listing. Mr. Soo graduated from Materials Engineering from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore in 1995. He started out as an engineer for 3 years at semiconductor manufacturing company before joining Citibank, NA to be banker till late 2012.
Ms Kimberly Oleson
Ms. Kimberly Wong Oleson has over 30 years of proven clinical research experience in helping companies realize the commercialization of new medical technologies, including Class III devices. Ms. Oleson’s career includes industry roles that cover all stages of a medical device’s product lifecycle: product development, preclinical testing, first-in-human trials, pivotal clinical trials, regulatory registration, market launch and clinician adoption.
Currently, Ms. Oleson is the Principal Consultant of her own company, Lucent Clinical Consulting, founded in 2020, focused on serving the healthcare industry in accelerating the global commercial launch of products that improve public health.
Prior to founding Lucent Clinical Consulting, Ms. Oleson was at Danaher Corporation as the Vice President of Global Clinical Affairs, Danaher Life Sciences & Diagnostics Platforms, where she oversaw the group’s large clinical trial portfolio and established best-practice standards that improved on-time trial completion from 25% to 92%. Prior to her expanded role at Danaher, Ms. Oleson was the Senior Vice President of Clinical Affairs at Sunshine Heart, Inc, a start-up medical device company focused on commercializing an implantable Class III PMA medical device for end-stage heart failure patients.
Before Sunshine Heart, Ms. Oleson worked at Medtronic Inc for nearly 28 years, holding positions of increasing responsibility. In her last position with Medtronic as the Vice President of Global Clinical Operations, she established the company’s centralized global clinical operations group that supported a portfolio of >350 trials for the Medtronic Clinical Research Institute (MCRI). In prior roles at Medtronic, she was instrumental in directing global clinical and regulatory teams that completed pivotal trials for Class III devices for cardiac electrical mapping and ablation of heart rhythm disorders, oversaw clinical programs for a new steerable cardiac pacing lead design that opened new markets in cardiac HIS bundle pacing, created new preclinical research capabilities that accelerated the development of the world’s first MRI-compatible implantable stimulation devices and filed provisional patents on risk-based trial conduct. An early highlight in Ms. Oleson’s lengthy clinical research career at Medtronic was successfully leading the InterStim™ multicenter pivotal trial with an adaptive trial design that earned the company a Class III original PMA, two PMA supplements and U.S. Medicare reimbursement coverage for a novel implantable neurostimulator device.
For the International Standards Organization (ISO), Ms. Oleson is currently appointed by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) as a Clinical Expert for Technical Committee TC210/WG4 that authored the ISO 20916:2019 (Good Study Practices for In-vitro Diagnostic Products) and as a Liaison Clinical Expert for Technical Committee TC 194/WG3 ISO 14155:2020 (Good Clinical Practices for Medical Devices).
Ms. Oleson graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Biometry/Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota, USA.
Mr Suresha Venkataraya
Suresha is the Chief Executive Officer of AWAK Technologies. He has spent over a decade in the medical technology space, enabling company growth, increasing revenues, and developing various innovative medical devices.
Prior to becoming CEO at AWAK Technologies, he worked for Hill-Rom, a US$5.4B (market cap) medical devices company (NYSE: HRC), as the Director for Front Line Care business, where he was responsible for developing and commercialising new products, and spearheading innovation culture. He joined as the first engineer in the newly formed division in Hill-Rom Singapore, helped the team to grow it substantially, and commercialised five medical devices across the globe.
As the leader of the Innovation and Technology Integration team, Suresha was instrumental in driving the patent portfolio of the Singapore division, which not only resulted in numerous patent applications but also opened avenues for new market growth.
He has acquired deep domain expertise in areas such as Respiratory Care, ECG/Cardio, Remote Patient Monitoring and Therapy Surface Technologies, and has navigated many complex products in these domains through 510 (K) and CE clearance processes.
Before joining Hill-Rom, Suresha was a technical leader at Robert Bosch, world largest automotive component supplier with a revenue of Euro 73B , where he provided leadership to a talented team of engineers in the development of cutting-edge engine control system solutions for world-renowned companies such as Daimler Chrysler and Mercedes.
For more than a decade he has cultivated extensive experience in the fields of Marketing, R&D, IP, QA/RA, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Clinical Affairs and Regulatory Affairs.
Suresha received a Master of Science degree in Computer Control Systems from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, India.
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