Board of Directors

Arvind Purushotham

Arvind Purushotham represents Menlo Ventures on the NovaTorque Board of Directors.  He started his career as a chip designer working on low power versions of the Pentium ProcessorŪ in the Mobile Group at Intel Corporation. Later he became the Program Manager of the Mobile Pentium IIŪ Processor effort and contributed to several successful product launches. His professional career includes brief stints as an investment banking intern at Robertson Stephens and as an associate at the Summit Accelerator Fund. Arvind joined Menlo Ventures in 2001, and in addition to NovaTorque's Board, he also represents Menlo Ventures on the boards of Kazeon, Mobius Microsystems, nCircle, and Vhayu Technologies. He is also involved in Menlo's investments in Cavium Networks, Jobfox, Matisse Networks, Nexxo and Solidcore. Arvind is a graduate of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business (M.B.A.), Case Western Reserve University (M.S. in Electrical Engineering) and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering). He also serves as a Charter Member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs).


Ronald Hoge

Ron Hoge serves as NEA's representative on the NovaTorque Board of Directors.  He is currently a Venture Advisor in the energy tech practice at New Enterprise Associates. From 1971-1999, Ron had a number of global executive roles at Cummins, Onan Corporation, AlliedSignal and MagneTek. Since 2000, he has been involved in several venture-backed startups. Overall, Ron has led eight businesses on three continents through startup, growth, reorganization and disposition challenges. They have varied in size and scope from a $1.5B NYSE manufacturing company to an IT services startup.

Ron has served on many boards throughout his career. He is currently Chairman of Glacier Bay and a director at Cleeves Engine and NovaTorque, Inc. In the non-profit world, he is a board member of Chrysalis LA, on the President’s Advisory Council of ACCION International (the world’s largest microfinance institution) and a Trustee of the EARTH University Foundation.

Ron has a B.A. in Mathematics from Amherst College and an M.B.A. in Marketing from Stanford University. He speaks Portuguese from his five years living in Brasil.


Forest Baskett, Ph.D.

Forest Baskett, Ph.D. serves as a Board Observer at NovaTorque. Forest joined NEA in 1999 as a Venture Partner and became a General Partner in 2004. Forest focuses on information and energy technology investments. He is the NEA representative on the boards of Arch Rock, Audience, Chelsio Communications, Fulcrum Microsystems, Luxtera, Serious Materials, and SiBEAM. He also assists Aprius, Azuray, Bandgap Engineering, Conviva, Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), Fusion-io, Illumitex, NovaTorque, Solar Junction, Tableau Software, Telegent Systems, and T-RAM Semiconductor as either a board member, observer or advisor, usually in conjunction with another member of the NEA investing staff. In the past he has worked with, among others, Aeluros, Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR), E2O, Nanochip, Newisys, and RingCube Technologies. Forest also previously held advisory positions with FineGround, PolyServe, ReShape and SMIC.

Prior to NEA, Forest was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. He founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation from 1982 to 1986 before joining SGI. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1971 to 1982. He also spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory building an operating system for the original Cray-1 computer and a year and a half at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Principal Scientist doing VLSI research. At Stanford, he worked with Andy Bechtolsheim on the SUN workstation project, with Jim Clark on the Geometry Engine project, and with John Hennessy on the MIPS microprocessor project. Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.


Bruce M. McWilliams, Ph.D.

Bruce McWilliams, Ph.D. joined the NovaTorque Board in April 2009.   Bruce is executive-in-residence at U.S. Venture Partners, and chairman of Tessera’s board of directors, a position he has held since joining the company in 1999. He was also the company’s chief strategy officer from August 2008 to April 2009, focusing on strategic issues facing the company, including growing its foundational intellectual property (IP) and expanding its presence in the debate over public policy issues involving IP. Prior to this, Bruce served as Tessera’s president and chief executive officer from 1999 until August 2008, during which time he defined the company’s growth and profitability strategy, steering it from an operating loss to a 65 percent CAGR rate between 2002 and 2006.

Bruce has more than 20 years of executive and technical management experience in the semiconductor industry. He has held numerous executive management positions, including senior vice president at Flextronics International, a position he assumed upon Flextronics’ acquisition of nCHIP, Inc. A co-founder of nCHIP, a multi-chip module packaging company, he served as the company’s president and CEO until its acquisition. Bruce was previously president and CEO of S-Vision, a silicon chip-based display company, which he also co-founded.

Bruce is a member of the board of directors for Intermolecular, Inc., a molecular engineering electronics company, NovaTorque, a high efficiency permanent magnet motor company, and is also on the board of trustees of Carnegie Mellon University. In 2005, he was awarded Ernst & Young’s Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year award. He holds bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees, and a doctorate in physics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Emily Liggett

Emily Liggett joined NovaTorque as CEO in March 2009 after 30 years experience as engineer, technology entrepreneur and CEO. Her passion is to successfully commercialize new technology-based products, which she has done many times in her career.

She began her career at DuPont as a process engineer and worked through a variety of assignments in manufacturing, development, strategic planning and customer technical support. She joined Raychem Corporation in 1984 and enjoyed assignments in Sales, Marketing, Operations and General Management, including GM of the Raychem Telecommunications Division and CEO of Elo TouchSystems, the global leader in touch technology products. Emily became CEO of Capstone Turbine in 2002, the world's leading producer of low-emission microturbine systems, and later became CEO of Apexon, a supply chain analytics provider for discreet manufacturing companies. Emily has had several international experiences; Lausanne Switzerland with EPFL, Sydney Australia with McKinsey consultants, Tokyo Japan with TouchPanel Systems and Brussels Belgium with the European Community Task Force for Industrial Innovation.

She has a chemical engineering degree from Purdue University and an MBA and a MS in Manufacturing Systems from Stanford University.

 

John Petro

John Petro is founder and CTO of NovaTorque Inc.  John has a strong background in innovative product design, with particular expertise in electromechanical design, magnetics, control theory, and vendor relationships (including international sourcing).

John obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1973 from the University of Virginia. After working for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), he attended Stanford University, where he received his M.S.E.E. in 1977.   John worked for SRI International for nine years.  After SRI he went on to do robotics work at Phase II Automation.

John founded Quizix, Inc. in 1987, where he served as President for 18 years. Quizix designs and manufactures precision pump systems for use in oil field research labs. Quizix has sold pumps to all the major petroleum companies in the world. In addition to his management duties there, John served as lead engineer in the development of the control electronics and mechanical design of the SP-5000, SP-6000, and QX high pressure pump systems. John sold Quizix to Ametek, Inc. in 2005 so that he could focus his efforts on the high potential motor innovations introduced through NovaTorque, Inc.

 
He is the holder of three patents and is the inventor on a number of new patents which have been filed on NovaTorque Inc's new motor technology.