If you were given a choice as to the ideal moment to start a new assignment, you probably would not choose “in the middle of a pandemic”.   Yet, here we are, and I happily started this great new opportunity as CEO of himed on April 1.  The world will undoubtedly recover from this tragedy but, I am quite sure we will all operate differently going forward. 

Himed is open and operating right now, and our company has established new ways to stay safe while providing products, services, and support to customers.  We are happy to share with you what we are doing if it might be helpful in your operations.   Likewise, we would love to hear your new best practices as you return to operation.

At himed, I am joining Ed Garofalo’s wonderful and highly experienced management team, many of whom I have known for years.  Ed has been with himed since the beginning(1991!) and will continue on as President. Much like I did in my previous CEO assignment at Savsu Technologies, I will be supplementing his team’s efforts.   In particular, I will be focusing on marketing and new markets, sales, creating advanced management systems, and refiniing IT systems while the entire himed team continues to service existing customers and develop new products and services.

Every successful company has a unique DNA.   Himed’s uniqueness is a remarkable combination of world-class materials problem-solving skills married with a high level of customer service.  Himed not only creates new bio-active materials and surfaces but, often creates the unique, automated production machinery to make it work at scale.  Going forward we will be building on that uniqueness.

I come to himed after three years as CEO at Savsu Technologies.   Savsu Technologies was successfully built by Barson (our parent company) over nine years and sold to our long time partner BioLife Solutions (NASDAQ: BLFS) in August of 2019.   At Savsu, our team developed a revolutionary new system called evo®.  The evo® system was created to protect the remarkable, new, cell and gene therapies during transport to and from the patient.   evo® is a very sophisticated, integrated system of innovative hardware and software working together to protect these most precious payloads.    During my time at Savsu, I was deeply exposed to the new, fast-developing, cell and gene therapy markets.   I am hoping to bring some of what I learned during my time in that dynamic market to himed.  A few of those lessons that we learned were: be agile, think holistically (consider the operation of the entire supply chain, not just our component), communicate often but efficiently, keep the patient in mind at all times.

I am very excited about joining the himed team. I look forward to meeting customers and suppliers in the months ahead.

Dana