Bay Materials Principals
Ray Stewart
Ray Stewart is a scientist, manager, and entrepreneur with a successful track record in conducting breakthrough applied research, and creating and growing new business ventures. Prior to establishing Bay Materials, Dr. Stewart was the founder and chief scientist of Landec Corporation, a public company that successfully developed and commercialized a new class of temperature responsive polymers, Intelimers®, and products enabled by them. As the founder of Landec, Dr. Stewart initially led business development, venture capital financing activities, and technical efforts.
Dr. Stewart also led the development of new materials and products in diverse markets including food packaging, agricultural products, industrial adhesives, and medical devices. Before founding Landec Corporation, Dr. Stewart was a scientist at Raychem Corporation, a Fortune 500 materials science company.
Jim Reed
Jim has a background in Mechanical Engineering and Business, and has thirty five years experience in business activities ranging from start-up incubators to mature global entities. Mr. Reed has a proven track record in managing the development of technology, products, and markets. From a practical perspective, Mr. Reed has spent most of his career involved with the development and deployment of new products that are based on new technologies; most developments were related to the application of custom or unique polymers. Mr. Reed has also had broad responsibility for maintaining large volume production of polymer based products on a world wide basis.
Prior to co-founding Bay Materials, Mr. Reed had a 19 year career at Raychem Corporation where he was involved in polymer based products related to oil production, gas and oil pipelines, electrical power generation, power transmission and distribution, and corporate wide technology management.
Collectively, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Reed have multiple patents covering a broad range technologies that were successfully converted into commercially successful products.
Senior Staff
Debi Dunson
Dr. Debra Lynn Dunson (Debi) is Staff Scientist at Bay Materials, specializing in research, development and analysis of polymers and materials. She has extensive experience in preparing and analyzing polymers, coatings, films and adhesives. The classes of materials in her development portfolio include: thermosetting adhesives, polyurethanes, polyimides, poly(amic acid)s, hydrogels, and acrylic resins.
Since joining Bay Materials, Debi has assembled, operated and maintained the thermal analysis lab, including DMA, DSC, TGA and TMA. She has expertise in designing thermal analysis experiments for evaluating polymer properties, and has extensive experience in analyzing thermoplastic films, semicrystalline polymers, waxes, thermosets, hydrogels and adhesives.
Debi received her Ph.D. in polymer chemistry at Virginia Tech (VT), under the direction of Dr. James E. McGrath. While at VT, Debi designed and led studies in the areas of polymer synthesis, characterization and processing, which resulted in several journal publications. She enjoys writing/editing scientific publications and documents, and continues to make contributions in these areas at Bay Materials.
John Lahlouh
John Lahlouh joined Bay Materials in 2002 with a background in polymer science & engineering and a specialization in materials and product development. He has extensive experience formulating thermoplastic, elastomeric and thermosetting compounds. John is competent with processing equipment used in continuous mixing, extrusion, injection molding, thermoforming, lamination and similar processes.
Prior to joining Bay Materials John spent nineteen years at Raychem, working in various technical capacities and responsibilities, developing innovative materials and processes for the automotive, electronics, industrial and telecommunication industries. He has expertise in conductive polymer composites, based on carbons, graphite, metallic particulates and other conductors. John holds eight US Patents.
John has extensive experience with amorphous engineering resins including Nylons, acrylics, polycarbonate, polysulfone, urethanes and with optical polymers, cyclic olefin copolymers, adhesives, epoxies, silicones, encapsulants and coatings. He likes to be challenged, so come by and let him help solve your problems.
Aimee Luthringer
Aimee Luthringer has 10 years of experience in quality systems and operations management. She develops and maintains our manufacturing quality system and provides feedback upstream to improve manufacturing processing and yields. She enjoys statistics and applying the scientific method to test hypotheses and solve challenges. In addition Aimee leads Bay Material’s facility safety program.
Chris Vogdes
Chris Vogdes joined Bay Materials in 2007 with a background in materials based product development. Chris has been responsible for developing and launching new products in Automotive, Medical, Electronics, and Consumer industries; managing projects in Raychem Corporation, Dow Corning Corporation, Cordis Corporation, and Pionetics LLC. She managed a QS9000 silicone gels business unit that supplied materials to major OEM companies producing automotive connectors, flat-screen TV’s, and military/aircraft communications equipment. She holds 8 issued US patents and usually a coffee mug.
Significant areas of experience and interest: thermally conductive materials, silicone gels, radiation crosslinked polymers, polymer stabilization, ion exchange materials, and hydrogels.
Staff
Bay Materials retains a staff of Chemists, Chemical Engineers, and Process Engineers to support the contract and routine analysis business. The current staff has over 80 years industrial experience with diverse companies such as ReadWrite, Tyco Electroncis, Dow Corning, Cordis Corporation, and Alza.
