Management Team
Jeff Berkley, PhD - Founder, Chairman and CEO
Jeff is well known as a leader in the fields of surgery simulation and real-time finite element modeling. He has published numerous articles and has been invited to show his computer demos and speak at a wide variety of conferences. He has published and served as a reviewer for various journals such as IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Modeling, Virtual Reality, and the Electronic Journal of Haptics Research and Medical Imaging. Jeff helped found Mimic Technologies with the goal of providing the haptic technologies necessary for widespread acceptance of surgery simulation.
Jeff brings over fourteen years experience in the mathematics, engineering and healthcare disciplines focused on technology and virtual reality applications. Jeff has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in Biomedical Engineering and received minors in Chemistry and Psychology; a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University; and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington's HIT Laboratory, one of the world's premier virtual reality labs. Jeff also served in the Naval Reserves for eight years as a medical corpsman where he received experience in field medicine and nursing.
Seahak Kim, PhD - Director of Hardware Development
Seahak obtained his PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology under Professor Makoto Sato, a world-renowned expert in the field of haptics. Seahak has become a recognized expert on haptic devices and has published numerous articles and been quoted on several nationwide Japanese broadcasts, such as the NHK, TV Tokyo and Nihon Keizai Shinbun. He has been invited to participate as an author and exhibitor in international conferences held in Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, France, and United States. He is also a member of Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ), and was responsible for writing the VRSJ newsletter for a time.
Seahak received his Bachelor of Science degree for Engineering in Control and Instrumentation Engineering from Chosun University of Korea; a Master’s degree at Aichi Institute of Technology at Toyota in Japan where his focus was optimal design for linkage based haptic devices; and a PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Rob Blanding, PhD – Director of Software Development
Rob earned his PhD in industrial engineering at the Human Interface
Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington in 2003, building
on a BS and MS in mechanical engineering. In the course of his doctoral
work he developed virtual reality interfaces and simulation software
with a focus on real-time deformation and haptic interaction. From 2004-2007
Rob worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Intel Corporation within
the Lithography Modeling Group where he applied his extensive expertise
in computational geometry, algorithms, and simulation to the optimization
of photolithography for microchip manufacture.
Rob joined MIMIC in October of 2007. He brings over twelve years of experience in computational geometry, computer graphics, and human-computer interaction, as well as over twenty years of software development experience.
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