Paul Stein

Experience

I was born in Rhode Island, and am proud to be an alumnus of the Warwick Public School system. I earned my B. S. with Distinction in Life Sciences from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an M. S. in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of North Dakota, and a Ph. D. in Physiology from Albany Medical College. My research was pretty varied, in the fields of thermoregulatory and respiratory physiology and circulatory shock and trauma.

Needing to focus in one field, I performed post-doctoral research at Indiana University, the Medical College of Ohio, and the University of Kansas, all in cardiovascular physiology. In that experience, however, I found that academia was not for me. I was unable to scope out decades of research in my mind, something absolutely necessary to succeed. Besides, I’ve always considered myself as a generalist, a very bad trait in academia. I needed to head to industry where I could find a project, triumph, and move on to the next.

I became a Staff Scientist position at Medtronic, Inc. in Minnesota, spending 15 years there, first in cardiac pacing research and later as a Study Director at the company’s animal research facility. Going into medical devices was absolutely the best move I could have made. It fit my personality perfectly and I could see first hand how my education, experience, and talents could directly help people around the World. My efforts there were instrumental in bringing many implantable and interventional cardiac rhythm management, heart failure, and sleep apnea devices into clinical studies and market release.

I then moved to ev3 Inc., also in Minnesota, as a Senior Pre-Clinical Specialist to gain more expertise, choosing and monitoring contract research facilities around the United States for various cardiac and peripheral vascular products. Feeling a bit limited there, I became a Principal Scientist and department manager at St. Jude Medical Inc. where, for six years, I was responsible for overseeing all scientific and regulatory aspects of their California pre-clinical facility. I also served as the Chairman of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. For a time, I was appointed the Facility Director and implemented a continuous improvement program that significantly enhanced and optimized all operations that doubled the laboratory’s work capacity in just six months.

Always looking for something new and different, I transitioned to the startup medical device world to see what that was like as the Director of Research and New Product Development at Onciomed, Inc., an obesity medical device company in California. After five years, I left to initiate my own medical device and wellness startup company seeking to develop unique products to treat unmet medical needs.

I possess a Lean Transactional Yellow Belt and a Six Sigma Green Belt, have co-authored eight manuscripts and 26 abstracts, and hold thirteen patents for a wide variety of class III medical devices. Throughout my career, I have found my generalist “executive niche” to point out opportunities, new and alternative directions, possibilities, pitfalls, correlations, distillations, tangents, and outright landmines that others seem to miss to help complete a better, more overall “big picture” and markedly strengthen arguments. I hope to use that ability, and to some a significant annoyance, to work towards a logical scientific and engineering blueprint to solve global warming and many of the other big problems in the World.