Leadership

Prior to joining as CEO, Mr. Kappers was a consultant for The Coretec Group since 2018. Mr. Kappers has extensive transactional and operational experience working with both startups and publicly traded companies. Matthew also serves as a Managing Director at Concordia Financial Group, an investment bank and consulting firm since 2011. He has experience in operations, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic planning. Mr. Kappers earned a B.A. degree from Vanderbilt University and a M.B.A. degree from Miami University.

As CFO, Mr. Hoffman manages organizational growth, financial reporting, modeling, and system development. Mr. Hoffman has worked with early-stage, high growth businesses for the past 15 years in financial and operational capacities. His start-up experiences produced 30-40% annual growth through acquisition, first as the Controller at Adaptive Materials (AMI), a portable power development and manufacturing company, acquired by Ultra Electronics. He also served as CFO of MI Bioresearch (MI Bio), a CRO for pre-clinical drug discovery, who was acquired by Covance (LabCorp). Prior to working for startups, Mr. Hoffman began his professional career in public accounting at Weidmayer, Schneider, Raham & Bennett. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Western Michigan University, a license as a Certified Public Accountant in the State of Michigan, and a Secret level (inactive) DoD clearance.

 

Dr. Ramez Elgammal has a broad background in science, engineering, and entrepreneurship. He is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Tennessee where he manages a broad spectrum of projects in energy storage and energy generating devices including fuel cells, flow batteries, and lithium-ion batteries. He served as Director of New Applications for Sylvatex Inc. developing advanced lithium-ion battery materials and prior to that he co-founded two clean-tech companies: Novoform Technologies (which develops catalysts for gas-to-liquid conversion and was acquired in 2014) and Saratoga Energy Research Partners (focused on electrochemical CO2 conversion process to synthesize carbon nanomaterials for lithium-ion battery anodes). He has over 40 publications and conference proceedings and 7 patents pending. Dr. Elgammal earned his M.Sc. in Applied Physics and Ph.D. in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a Rosen Fellow and holds an honor’s B.S. in Chemistry from Central Michigan University where he was a Centralis Scholar.

 

Dr. Michelle Tokarz, VP of Partnerships and Innovation, works closely with our global research institutions as they evaluate CHS to further the patenting of our intellectual property and customers as they integrate CHS into their proprietary processes. Michelle has a long history of working for startups. Michelle spent seven years working in the pharmaceutical industry holding research chemistry and subsequent production roles for Merck and Eli Lilly. Michelle participated with and assisted several teams in NSF ICorp customer discovery sessions leading several teams through the initial, as well as the full-scale, national program, and has also participated in several NSF SBIR review boards. Michelle earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and a dual Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Dr. Nathanael Downes, Research Scientist, is working to discover optimized routes for the preparation of CHS and to design recipes for its application in technologies such as lithium ion battery anodes and LEDs. Nathanael is a recent doctoral graduate of the Chemistry department from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While there, he demonstrated a novel tandem electrochemical and metallurgical route for the preparation of macroscopic epitaxial crystalline Si thin films at ambient temperature and pressure. Further, he extensively explored the viability of several novel molecular silanes electrolyte bath, therein gaining intimate familiarity with their behavior and reactivity. Nathanael acquired extensive training in air-sensitive inorganic molecular synthesis during his independent research at Allegheny College.

Lindsay McCarthy began her career in the intellectual property law industry, before moving into business and healthcare marketing and event planning. Subsequently, she managed the office operations for a software technology firm while launching a social media and web content marketing consulting company to assist clients with set-up and streamlining of their outreach efforts. As Office Manager for the Coretec Group, Lindsay handles the office operations, project management, and relationships with vendors and shareholders. Lindsay is a graduate of American University.