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GRT-INC.COM > Management Team and Personnel - The People Behind GRT, Inc.
GRT has a talented team of employees and works extensively with internationally renowned chemists, process engineers and Fortune 500 strategic partners. A culture has been fostered to promote imaginative solutions to difficult problems while maintaining strict attention to safety and the environment.
GRT's greatest assets are the dedicated and creative men and women who are making the GRT vision a reality. GRT management includes Dr. Eric McFarland, President & C.E.O; Dr. Daniel Auerbach, C.T.O.; Dr. Jeffrey Sherman, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development; and Phillip Grosso, Head of Engineering (see below for additional detail on the GRT Board of Directors and Management Team). Approximately 60-65% of our staff hold Ph.D. degrees in science or engineering, 20-25% hold Masters degrees, and 10-15% hold Bachelors degrees. All bring to GRT enormous energy, talent, and the desire to succeed. GRT has grown from 2 full-time employees in 2001 to 21 employees in May 2008 and this will grow as the business needs. We have benefited from our relationship with UCSB through direct access to their top young technical graduates and their world class faculty, most notably Professors Michael Doherty and Galen Stucky.
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Dr. Eric McFarland, President and Chief Executive Officer
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Eric W. McFarland, Ph.D., M.D., is the President and C.E.O. for GRT, Inc. Within this capacity, Dr. McFarland heads the management team and is responsible for GRT's overall business strategy and technology development efforts. Dr. McFarland is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara and contributes technically to the Company's technology development. Dr. McFarland holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. From 1996-1998, he was a founding Director of Symyx Technologies where he helped to build and lead a team of scientists and engineers in the development of combinatorial chemistry methods for materials science, which resulted in the development of a number of technologies spanning the entire chemical industry. Dr. McFarland has published over 100 scientific papers and holds over 30 U.S. patents.
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Dr. Daniel J. Auerbach, Chief Technology Officer
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Daniel J. Auerbach, Ph.D., has over 30 years experience in the high-tech industry. He served as head of the Science and Technology department at the IBM Almaden Research center and managed a large, diverse, high-power team that contributed key technologies to IBM including the first fabrication of structures by manipulation of individual atoms, the discovery of single-walled carbon Nanotubes, and the development of Giant Magnetoresistive sensors which propelled the magnetic Hard Disk Drive industry towards explosive growth in storage capacity. Dr. Auerbach holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago and has a worldwide reputation in studying the fundamentals of chemical reactions on surfaces. He holds over 10 U.S. patents and over 150 technical publications.
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Dr. Jeffrey H. Sherman, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development
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Jeffrey H. Sherman, Ph.D., is the founder of GRT and a co-inventor of the GRT technology. As Vice President of Strategic Development for GRT, Dr Sherman's responsibilities include directing company development in Santa Barbara as well as working with the CEO on business strategy. Dr. Sherman is working to develop additional alliances with strategic partners and coordinating the Company's Intellectual Property Program. Dr. Sherman has invented and developed numerous technologies for several industries, and holds over 27 United States Patents. Dr. Sherman holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and has extensive business experience at the vice president level and above in several companies. Prior to founding GRT, Dr. Sherman has served as Chief Technology Officer for Avista Resources, Inc. Avista's primary business is the re-refining of base lube oil.
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Mr. Phillip Grosso, Head of Engineering
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Mr. Philip Grosso, Chemical Engineer, serves as the Head of Engineering for GRT. Mr. Grosso has over 40 years of experience in industrial engineering, including long term employment with DuPont and Kaiser Chemical, mostly at least at the Vice President level. Mr. Grosso has substantial experience in the design of new chemical processes and is an expert at reducing costs in existing chemical processes. Mr. Grosso holds a Master's Degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University.
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Dr. Sagar Gadewar, Senior Program Manager
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Sagar Gadewar, Ph.D. is a Senior Program Manager at GRT, responsible for the development of GRT's bio-feedstock conversion technology. Dr. Gadewar holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to joining GRT, Dr. Gadewar worked for PDC Inc., where he helped Fortune 500 companies in the chemical, pharmaceutical and consumer products sector to formulate conceptual design solutions for new process and product development. Dr. Gadewar has substantial experience in developing process alternatives for capital and operating costs reduction using hierarchical design and optimization.
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Institutional Research Sponsorship: University of California, Santa Barbara
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Despite having its own laboratory facilities and employees in Santa Barbara, GRT continues to benefit from a strong interaction with the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Two Professors, each with strong international reputations, Michael F. Doherty and Galen Stucky serve as consultants to GRT. Of particular note is Professor Stucky. Professor Stucky is amongst the world's leading inorganic chemists with a research record managing large productive groups spanning several decades in both industry and academia. He has managed large federally supported research sponsored by NASA, DOE, and NSF and demonstrated his productivity as the 64th most cited chemist in the world.
UCSB is one of the select institutions belonging to the Association of American Universities, which comprises only the top one and one-half percent of all the universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. A survey of U.S. universities in 21 fields by Science Watch ranked UCSB among the top ten highest impact universities, based on the citation rate of research papers by their faculty. Faculty members include two 2004 Nobel Prize winners, one in Physics and one in Economics; two 2000 Nobel Prize winners, one in Chemistry and one in Physics; a 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry; a 1997 National Humanities Medal winner; Guggenheim fellows; fellows of the National Endowment for the Humanities; recipients of the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology; and members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.
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