Jan Akervall, MD, Ph.D., founder and President of Akervall Technologies Inc. has been ranked top 1% ENT surgeons in the USA since 2014 by Castle Connolly. He has pioneered trans oral laser and robotic surgery for head and neck cancer in Sweden and Michigan for the last 15 years. He developed Intuguard™ to protect the teeth of his patients during these procedures, where heavy equipment is used to access the throat. He has performed 1,500 endoscopic procedures using the Intuguard technology and has yet to see the first dental injury. He soon discovered that the same material made an excellent mouthguard for use in sports when his daughter began playing field hockey. He began making mouthguards for the team and decided the demand was great enough introduce this new polymer into the sports market, now called the SISU^® Mouth Guard.

Johannes Schwank, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Akervall Technologies, Inc., holds the James and Judith Street Endowed Chair Professorship in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. He has served for several years as director of EMAL, the University’s materials characterization facility. He oversees a large research program exploring structure-performance relationships in catalysts, sensors, nanomaterials, and polymers. The results of his research have been published in over 200 peer-reviewed articles.

Timothy Huang, Senior Research Scientist, manages the daily activities of our research department. He is a Materials Science Engineer from the University of Michigan specializing in polymers and composites. Notably, he has worked at Harvard’s Mesoscopic Physics Lab and is the winner of a prestigious Red Dot Design Award.