Officers
Paul V.C. Hough, Ph.D., President & CEO
Dr. Hough is the inventor of the basic logic used in LifeScan, covered by 3 US patents, and is founder of LifeAFM.
He graduated from Swarthmore with High Honors and from Cornell University where he received the Ph.D. under R.R. Wilson, R.P. Feynman and H.A. Bethe.
In a multi-faceted career in nuclear physics and elementary particle physics at the University of Michigan and Brookhaven National Laboratory, he invented the Hough transform, a widely used element in Artificial Intelligence, particularly Machine Vision.
The Hough-Powell digitizer, developed with Brian Powell at CERN, under a Guggenheim fellowship, was incorporated into bubble chamber film analysis systems used world-wide. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
On a second Guggenheim, he interned in Molecular Biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and began a second career in Structural Biology at Brookhaven as an innovator in scanning transmission electron microscopy of DNA-protein structures. He served as instructor for 5 years in the Cold Spring Harbor course ”In Situ Hybridization and Immunocytochemistry” covering the EM and STEM of DNA-protein interactions. He is the author of more than 60 publications in high energy physics and structural biology.
Iris A. Mastrangelo, Ph.D., Vice President & COO
Dr. Mastrangelo, a longtime scientific collaborator of Dr. Hough, is co-founder of LifeAFM.
Her training was in Cell Genetics at Indiana University and New York University, where she received the Ph.D., and in Cell Genetics and Structural Biology at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow. She carried out early somatic hybridization experiments by chromosome and gene transfer between distant evolutionary species.
As a staff scientist in Structural Biology at Brookhaven, she studied protein-DNA structures in DNA replication and RNA transcription using EM and scanning transmission EM. She was an instructor for 4 years in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course “In Situ Hybridization and Immunocytochemistry” covering the EM of DNA-protein interactions, and is the author of some 35 publications in cell genetics and structural biology.
Corporate Development
Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C., New York City has been retained as advisor for business and financial affairs and company development. Mintz, Levin is a large law firm with substantial experience in forming and advising start-up companies in biotechnology and life sciences, communications and information technology, high technology, and health care. They pride themselves on the quality of their strategic thinking.
Intellectual Property and Patents
Morgan and Finnegan, LLP, a noted New York City and Washington DC intellectual property law firm with specialized practice groups that include biotechnology and life sciences, computers, electronics and nanotechnology has guided the successful patent applications of LifeAFM. It is particularly noted for rigorous intellectual property protection and litigation. Lawyers on our team have dual backgrounds in jurisprudence and the life sciences, engineering, and chemistry.
Advisory Board
Professor Steven O. Smith, Director of the Center for Structural Biology, Centers for Molecular Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY. Professor Smith is a Chemist and Structural Biologist specializing in the structure and function of membrane proteins and in their structure determination by solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. He has served as advisor and host for LifeAFM, Inc. during the period that the research capability of the lifeScan AFM was established.
Kenneth Sonnenfeld, J.D, Ph.D. Partner at Morgan & Finnegan, New York, NY. Dr. Sonnenfeld received the Ph.D. from Columbia University in Pharmacology and the J.D. from Fordham University Law School. He was the lead attorney in obtaining the basic patents in the Company’s intellectual property portfolio.
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