Team

Don Wolfe

CEO

Don has 35 years of experience in managing new engineered product development for oil and gas production, primarily in developing and commercializing flexible pressure pipe technology for production operations with all major oil companies. Mr. Wolfe also has 20 years of experience in new product development, establishing international revenue and supply infrastructure for a bicycle component brand.

Mike Roper

Chief Technology Officer

Mike Roper has over 35 years experience in wireless product development and engineering management. He has previously held senior systems design and R&D management positions at Marconi, SR Telecom and Spotwave Wireless. Mike has obtained product approvals from major organizations [AT&T, Verizon] and regulatory authorities [FCC, IC, CSA, UL, ISO 9001] and has experience in hands-on R&D management in the fields of wireless antenna, analog, digital and hardware, embedded and client software, and mechanical packaging and design. Mike also has experience managing geographically distributed development teams within Canada, China, India, and Europe. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics (Honours) from Southampton University in the UK.

Maxim Ralchenko

Senior Researcher
Maxim Ralchenko has worked for Vital Alert since 2014, first as a Ph.D. student, then as a Senior Researcher. He completed his Ph.D. in 2017 (Earth Sciences/Geophysics, Carleton University). His thesis focused on modelling and optimizing through-the-Earth (TTE) radio transmissions. Mr. Ralchenko’s current work at Vital Alert focuses on the modelling of TTE radio transmissions for positioning and navigation technology. He is the co-author and presenter of several technical papers relating to VLF magnetic positioning in multi-story parking garages, and positioning of pedestrians and cyclists in urban intersections using VLF magnetic fields. He is the co-author of numerous Vital Alert patents relating to VLF communication and positioning.

Peter Kwasniok

Principal Software Architect

Peter Kwasniok is a senior software engineer specializing in embedded and mobile programming with extensive experience in the design of sophisticated low-level software running on embedded and mobile platforms. Peter gained his Ph.D. in Circuits and Systems studying electromagnetic propagation over power lines and has extensive knowledge of communications systems design. His M.Sc. degree is in Telecommunications. When at the University of Ottawa he delivered tools to simulate the coupling of external electromagnetic fields into electronic equipment using numerous numerical methods and developed groundbreaking power line impedance measurements used for the first time in world research and published the results in referred journals.

Peter has been at Vital Alert for over five years where he has been responsible for the DSP software design for the Canary digital TTE wireless radio and other TTE systems. Peter has also performed research leading to several NIOSH grant awards, utilizing the extensive experience gained in computer simulation and modeling developed during his numerous tenures both at universities and in high technology industries. He has over 25 years of software development experience, including over 10 with Mosaid Technologies Inc. There, he architected robust and extensible high speed DSP software, serving many generations of company’s memory testers, and invented numerous original software algorithms for calibration, noise removal, and minimization of multiple reflection effects.

Brian Du

Senior Mechanical Design

Brian Du has over 20 years of industrial and mechanical design experience in machine design, plastic design, electronic packaging design, finite element analysis, structural strength calculations, tolerance stack-up and analysis, ANSI and ISO standard engineering drawings from concept design and prototyping through to detailed design and production. Du also has excellent expertise on using 2D and 3D mechanical design tools on AutoCAD, Solid-works, ProEngineer, ANSYS. He has a Master’s Degree in Engineering, and is a certified professional engineer of Ontario.

Vladimir Puzakov

Senior Hardware Engineer

Vladimir Puzakov is a senior hardware engineer with over 15 years of experience in the Ukraine, Israel, and Canada. He has experience in analog and digital electronic hardware and software development for power, control, telecommunications and industrial automation. At Vital Alert Vladimir has been responsible for the board level hardware design of all products, including the digital processing boards used to implement the TTE radios and Li-ion battery boards powering mobile equipment. He also provides low level programming support for other embedded devices. Vladimir has a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering.

Andrew Wahl

Manager of Operations

Andrew Wahl is an operations and supply management professional with international experience. Andrew holds a D.E.C. in manufacturing engineering technology from Dawson College and specializes in leading operations support for product introduction teams developing and commercializing leading-edge technology products.

Prior to joining Vital Alert, Andrew held progressive positions in project and supply management with Rolls Royce Nuclear Canada, Digital Equipment Corporation and JDSU, where he contributed to product development teams responsible for introducing robotic equipment used in the repair of CANDU reactors, hermetic microelectronic packaging, and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) chips deployed in fiber-optic communication gear.

Andrew has been with Vital Alert for over 2 years where, as operations leader, he is responsible for the management of contract and subcontract manufacturers, international logistics, documentation, inventory, and export controls.

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