Senior Executive Officers
William M. Caldwell, IV
Chairman and CEO
Mr. William Caldwell serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Company and has a 30-year management career working with emerging technologies and restructuring distressed corporate environments. During his career, he has served in senior executive positions both in marketing and finance. He has worked with Booz Allen and Hamilton; the Flying Tiger Line Inc.; Van Vorst Industries; and Kidder Peabody. He started a firm specializing in corporate financial and strategy planning, which was instrumental in restructuring over $1.0 billion of debt for over twenty companies and partnerships. He was a pioneer in the satellite radio auctions as president of Digital Satellite Broadcasting Corporation; assisted in the financing, and became president and ultimately CEO in the restructuring of CAIS Internet. He has advised corporations, both public and private, in technology, telecommunications, retailing, real estate, hospitality, publishing, and transportation. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Southern California and was a Multinational Enterprise Fellow at the Wharton Graduate School of Finance. He serves as a director of Lee Pharmaceuticals (LPHM.PK) and King Koil Franchising Corp.
Robert Lanza, M.D.
Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Lanza joined ACT in 1999. Dr. Lanza has over 25 years of research and industrial experience in the area of stem cells and regenerative medicine. From 1990 to 1998, he was Director of Transplantation Biology at BioHybrid Technologies, Inc., and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has several hundred scientific publications and patents, and has authored/edited 20 books, including the “Handbook of Stem Cells” (as Editor-in-Chief), Principles of Tissue Engineering, XENO, the Yearbook of Cell & Tissue Transplantation, and One World: The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century (as editor, with forewords by C. Everett Koop and former President Jimmy Carter). He is a former Fulbright Scholar, and studied as a student in the laboratory of Richard Hynes (MIT), Jonas Salk (The Salk Institute), and Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman (Rockefeller University) and Rodney Porter (Oxford University). He also worked closely (and coauthored a series of papers) with the late Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. Dr. Lanza received his B.A. and M.D. Degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar.
Jonathan H. Dinsmore, Ph.D.
Senior VP – Regulatory and Clinical
Dr. Jonathan H. Dinsmore serves as Senior VP – Regulatory and Clinical of the company and was formerly responsible for all aspects of Mytogen’s cell production operations, basic science program, and research and development efforts. He was also actively engaged in evaluating partnership opportunities and complementary technologies. Prior to his position with Advanced Cell Technology and Mytogen, he directed both clinical and preclinical research programs at Diacrin and GenVec. He has research and clinical experience in the development of therapeutic products to treat Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, epilepsy, stroke, spinal cord injury, chronic intractable pain, liver disease, and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Dinsmore received a B.S. in Biology from Boston College in 1983 followed by a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College in 1988. He then trained four years as a Post-doctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after which he joined Diacrin in 1992. His extensive accomplishments include numerous awarded and pending patents as well as diverse published studies on myoblast transplantation technology.
Ivan Wolkind
Senior VP – Finance, Administration & Chief Accounting Officer
Ivan Wolkind is our Senior VP – Finance, Administration & Chief Accounting Officer. Prior to joining the Company in March, 2005, Mr. Wolkind served as the Executive Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer for Eyematic, a technology company providing software solutions for delivering animated content to cell phones. Between 1999 and July, 2001, Mr. Wolkind was the Chief Financial Officer for eLease, a company providing software solutions and back end automation for the capital equipment leasing market. Prior to his appointment at eLease, Mr. Wolkind served as the Vice President of Finance for Ventro Corporation, where he was instrumental in the raising of capital in the company’s initial public offering and subsequent debt offerings. Before his tenure at Ventro Corporation, Mr. Wolkind served as the Vice President of Finance at Onsale, Inc., a publicly traded Internet auction company. Prior to joining Onsale, he held key finance positions at two other companies after leaving KPMG, where he had worked in the financial services and banking audit group. Mr. Wolkind qualified as a Chartered Accountant in the United Kingdom. Mr. Wolkind is not an officer or director of any other reporting company.