David Drajeske, President and CEO

Prior to co-founding Applied Dexterity, David Drajeske led Biotech BD, LLC, a consultancy providing strategy, business development, and licensing services to life science companies. Clients included companies focused on medical devices, drug development, drug delivery, bioprocessing and industrial biotech. David has helped a number of companies to refine and adapt their business models and achieve early revenue. He has guided technology platform providers in tailoring their systems to meet the needs of a wide range of collaborators. He has served in a Business Development role at companies ranging from a bootstrapped start-up in a technology incubator, through a VC backed clinical stage drug developer, and including large public technology and therapeutics companies. These companies include Amgen, Immunex, Koronis Pharmaceuticals, Helix BioMedix, ThermoGen, MediChem Life Sciences, and Motorola New Enterprises. David received an M.S. in Biotechnology from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Center for Biotechnology and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University.

Blake Hannaford, Co-founder

Blake Hannaford co-developed RAVEN^TM at the University of Washington where he directs the BioRobotics Lab. His interests include haptic displays on the internet, surgical biomechanics, and biologically based design of robot manipulators. Prior to coming to the University of Washington, Blake supervised the Man-Machine Systems Group in the Automated Systems Section of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, where they worked on the remote control of robot manipulators. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where he pursued thesis research in multiple target tracking in medical images and the control of time-optimal voluntary human movement. Before graduate study, he held engineering positions in digital hardware and software design, office automation, and medical image processing. Blake received the B.S. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University. He was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Early Career Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

Jacob Rosen, Co-founder

Jacob Rosen co-developed RAVEN^TM at the University of Washington, where he served as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering, with adjunct appointments with the Departments of Surgery, and Mechanical Engineering. He then continued to advance the robot’s design as a professor at the Department of Computer Engineering, University of California – Santa Cruz (UCSC) where he directs the Bionics lab. His research interests focus on medical robotics, biorobotics, human centered robotics, surgical robotics, wearable robotics, rehabilitation robotics, neural control, and human-machine interface. Jacob received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University. Prior to graduate study, he served as an officer in the IDF studying human-machine interfaces. During his graduate work, he developed and studied the EMG based powered Exoskeleton at the Biomechanics Laboratory. During the same period of time he held a position in a startup company developing innovative orthopedic spine/ pelvis implants. Jacob has developed several key systems in the field of medical robotics in addition to RAVEN including the Blue and the Red Dragon for minimally invasive surgical skill evaluation that is commercialized by Simulab as the EDGE, several generations of upper and lower limb exoskeletons and most recently the Exo-UL7 – two wearable robotic systems. He is a co-author of 70 manuscripts in the field of medical robotics and a co-author and co-editor of a book entitled “Surgical Robotics – Systems, Applications, and Visions” published by Springer.

Andrew Lewis, Roboticist

Prior to joining the Applied Dexterity team, Andrew was a mechanical engineering graduate student in the BioRobotics lab at the University of Washington. His work in the BioRobotics Lab was focused on the development of new surgical robots, dynamically evaluated gravity compensation and EMG controlled iRobot Roombas. Andrew earned his B.S. in Robotics Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2011 where he completed his senior project in surgical robotics in the WPI AIM Lab. During his undergraduate career, Andrew held several internships with iRobot in their Home Robotics division. His interests include mechanical design, systems development, ethics in robotics engineering and befriending robots.