Leadership

Jim Olson is CEO of Flywheel, a biomedical research informatics platform leveraging the power of cloud-scale computing infrastructure to address the increasing complexity of modern computational science and machine learning.

Jim is a “builder” at his core. His passion is developing teams and growing companies. Jim has over 35 years of leadership experience in technology, digital product development, business strategy, high growth companies, and healthcare at both large and startup companies, including West Publishing, now Thomson Reuters, Iconoculture, Livio Health Group and Stella/Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Jim is also an angel investor, active in the startup community supporting teams with passion and focus. Jim serves on boards, both for-profit and not-for-profit, helping drive visions forward.

Danny Joe oversees financial and accounting operations at Flywheel. Prior to Flywheel, Danny held various leadership roles at leading public and private tech companies helping facilitate planning, budgets, M&A, capital raising and optimizing growth and margins. Most recently he was Chief Financial Officer of Inspectorio, a SaaS leader in digitizing retail supply chains. Danny also led finance at Blackline, a publicly traded leader in SaaS accounting software, as well as leading strategic and M&A finance teams at Symantec, a Fortune 500 publicly traded security and storage firm. Danny was also part of leading investment banking and equity research teams at Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and TIAA. Danny graduated with a B.S. in Biology from Stanford University and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son and their labrador Jenny.

Travis Richardson is President & Chief Product Officer of Flywheel. He brings over 25 years of executive leadership experience in product development, strategy, and innovation at both large and small companies including Schneider Electric, Oracle, cloud information service provider, DTN, and Minneapolis-based White Pine Consulting Group.

Travis’ career has primarily focused on his passion for data management, data quality, and application interoperability to provide real-world solutions in industries including telecommunications, energy, and supply-chain. He is particularly excited to be leveraging his data management and analytics experience to enable a new generation of innovative solutions for healthcare with enormous potential to accelerate scientific discovery and advance precision care.

Can (pronounced “John”) Akgun, PhD, is the Senior VP of Business Development of Flywheel. He brings over 15 years of experience in medical imaging spanning academic research, product development, and commercialization. Previously, Can led business development for technology incubator, Invenshure, and its subsidiary Imbio, LLC, where he was in charge of technology licensing, industrial collaborations, and academic partnerships.

Can holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. His graduate work focusing on MRI hardware design and electromagnetic computation led to the authoring (and co-authoring) of 20 peer-reviewed publications and four patents. After his Ph.D, Can worked two years as a senior application engineer for Swiss med-tech company, Schmid and Partner Engineering (SPEAG), where he focused on application development for a commercial computational electromagnetic software platform for MRI and medical device safety applications.

Gunnar Schaefer is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Flywheel. He has over 10 years of experience working in scientific and computational environments. Prior to Flywheel, Gunnar was Chief Software Engineer at Stanford University’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, a neuroscience-focussed MRI research facility. A central part of his work there was the development of the scientific data management system that has become the foundation of Flywheel. Previously, he worked on wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring in the Swiss Alps. Gunnar holds a Master of Computer Engineering degree from the University of Kiel in northern Germany.

Gunnar thrives on applying his computer engineering know-how to facilitate and accelerate academic and clinical research. In particular, he enjoys using his extensive experience in computer programming, modern web technologies, and distributed and scalable systems design to enable large-scale data management and highly-scalable computing.

Troy Kopischke is a co-founder of Flywheel as well as a serial tech entrepreneur. He is a co-CEO, co-founder, and managing partner of Invenshure, a venture catalyst company focused on the creation and development of tech and biotech companies built around novel IP from top scientists and institutions. Previously, he was the President and Chief Financial Officer at Steady State Imaging, where he was instrumental in developing a commercialization strategy that helped guide the sale of the company to GE Healthcare in 2011. Troy holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.A. in physics from the University of Minnesota as well as a B.A. in engineering science from Bethel University. Troy is out to create a billion dollars worth of value and effect a billion lives. Through Flywheel, he aims to accelerate science, enable researchers to solve the world’s largest problems, and create high returns for investors.

Sarah Fazio is the Chief Operating Officer of Flywheel. Sarah brings more than 10 years of strategic leadership in operations, HR, and insights research from a string of companies linked through acquisition—Iconoculture, CEB, Gartner, and SHL. High-growth, interdependence, and flexibility were key themes as she consistently focused on elevating performance and profits. Sarah holds an MBA from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

Sarah is excited to support scientific discovery through technology and orchestrate Flywheel’s expansion beyond the development stage. She enjoys drawing on her experience in strategy and research-driven decision making to optimize operations and empower the best in software talent, all while navigating changes in the healthcare industry.

Brian A. Wandell is the first Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor. He joined the Stanford Psychology faculty in 1979 and is a member, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering and Ophthalmology. He is Director of Stanford’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging (CNI), and Deputy Director of Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. Wandell’s research centers on vision science, spanning topics from visual disorders, reading development in children, to digital imaging devices and algorithms for both magnetic resonance imaging and digital imaging. Building on software developed at the CNI, Wandell co-founded Flywheel Exchange, LLC to help support reproducible research methods outside of Stanford. He remains actively engaged in Flywheel’s activities, and Wandell’s team at Stanford continues to extend the range of reproducible research applications, using the tools for various neuroscience applications and large-scale computer graphics simulations for artificial intelligence in advanced driving assistance systems.