company bios

Justin Bzdek, Founder and President & CEO
Justin Bzdek, a pioneer in the Colorado cleantech community, founded Symbios Technologies in January 2008 and has been involved in the founding of many biofuels and solar energy-related companies. Since 2003, Mr. Bzdek has had senior involvement in more than $50 million in federal and state government grants and contract awards from DOE, USDA, DOD, and state agencies, including for advanced cellulosic biofuels plants, algae-to-jet fuel R&D, energy crop R&D, biodiesel plants and process technologies, and waste-to-energy project feasibility studies. In 2008, Mr. Bzdek conceived of an integrated renewable ag-energy industrial park concept in collaboration with a major municipality, and in 2009 obtained funding for and directed its phase I engineering and business feasibility analysis evaluating centralized anaerobic digestion of disparate food processing and municipal wastes as well as solar power generation. He leads project development teams focused on water treatment and greenhouse gas-mitigating conversion of industrial and agricultural waste streams to clean energy, organic fertilizer, and clean water. Examples of his team’s recent work include development of proprietary engineering/technology and financial modeling software as well as geospatial database decision-making tools for distributed generation bioenergy projects, a patent-pending innovative low-energy water treatment technology, engineering design and process modeling for a patent-pending supercritical fluid oil extraction and biofuel process technology, and a proprietary engineering model for a patent-pending biogas/solar thermal hybrid electric power generation system. He has authored or co-authored numerous technical articles, essays, patent applications, and other works, and holds a patent for a biofuels purification technology. Mr. Bzdek is Chairman of the Board of The Atmosphere Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that develops, finances, and builds community solar energy renovations for affordable housing and non-profit facilities. He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and past board member of the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels (C2B2) and the Southwestern Biofuels Association (SWBA), and from 2001 to 2008 was co-founder, board member, and vice president of Blue Sun Energy, Inc. and its subsidiaries including Blue Sun Biodiesel LLC, the first major biofuels company in the Rocky Mountain region. Previously, he was Research Associate and Assistant Department Manager for the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. Mr. Bzdek holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Colorado State University.

Greg Fuhrman, Chief Financial Officer
Greg Fuhrman joined Symbios in 2009 as the Company’s Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining the Company, Mr. Fuhrman served as the Manager of Commercial Real Estate Lending for Fort Collins and Loveland for Guaranty Bank and Trust Company. Mr. Fuhrman also spent six years with Ernst & Young in Los Angeles, with significant experience in the mergers and acquisitions and real estate audit practices, with a diverse client base ranging from joint venture partnerships to publicly traded companies, including several IPOs. Mr. Fuhrman spent five years as Chief Accounting Officer at a private real estate investment company, specializing in debt and equity investments and closing on nearly $1 billion in annual transactions. As CAO, Mr. Fuhrman gained significant experience in real estate and joint venture finance, tax structuring and planning, selection and implementation of a new accounting system and management of nearly 50 different joint venture partners, as well as interacting with large pension funds, banks and other institutional investors in traditional equity fund structures. Mr. Fuhrman’s experience as an independent business consultant includes management of the IPO process for a real estate operating company in Los Angeles and raising capital for start-up companies with unique and commercially appealing technologies. Mr. Fuhrman graduated from California State University at Northridge in 1995 with a B.S. in Business Administration with an Option in Accounting Theory and Practice.

John Persichetti, Chief Engineer and Technology Consultant
Mr. Persichetti has worked in the chemical engineering, alternative energy, petroleum refining, and environmental engineering fields for 25+ years. Most of this time has been in areas of process analysis, design, modeling, and optimization, and includes several years on projects to incorporate engineering technologies and data into commercially viable software programs and transitioning fundamental technology developments into commercially viable processes. Mr. Persichetti joined the senior management team of Symbios Technologies in January 2009. In addition to his industrial experience, Mr. Persichetti teaches at the university level and has held both part-time and full-time positions. In 1997 he founded Horizon Technologies, an engineering and technology-based software development/consulting services company. Prior to 1997 Mr. Persichetti spent 11 years with Simulation Sciences in a variety of engineering, software development, and management positions, one year each with Jacobs Engineering and Stearns-Roger (part of Raytheon) on a range of industrial processes, and five years with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in applied research and modeling. He has executed design and consulting projects for companies around the world.

Mr. Persichetti’s engineering experience includes applied thermodynamic and chemical reaction model development, process modeling for biomass thermochemical conversion processes and other biomass utilization technologies, petroleum refining, petrochemical processes, natural gas systems, chemical processes, and wastewater treatment systems; data analysis and optimization to generate property prediction models; and transient phenomena analysis, dynamic modeling, and improved solution techniques for time-variant unit operations (batch processes, adsorption and packed column processes). Mr. Persichetti has served as project and technology manager for technology projects related to batch reactors and distillation processing; incorporation of environmental considerations into process designs and process operations; optimization of processes for achieving production, environmental, and cost minimization goals; utility system optimization; and chemical property data access and regression.

Mr. Persichetti is an expert in simulating a wide range of processes using several commercially available process simulation programs, including HYSYS (as owned by Aspen Technologies and now offered as UniSim by Honeywell), ASPEN Plus (by Aspen Technologies), and PRO/II (by Simulation Sciences). In a consulting capacity, he has developed user-added process modules for the HYSYS simulation environment, collaborated on development of a transient reactor model in the Sinda/Fluint modeling software, and developed countless customized process analysis tools through Excel spreadsheet models and stand-alone executable codes.

Mr. Persichetti currently holds a part-time Lecturer position with the Colorado School of Mines, teaching courses such as Bioprocess Engineering, Biochemical Engineering Design, Material & Energy Balances, Thermodynamics, Computational Methods and Numerical Methods (including graduate level courses), Petroleum Refining, Natural Gas Processing computer simulation, Chemical Reaction Kinetics, Transport Phenomena, and the Senior Design course. He has taught all courses related to process analysis, modeling and design in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines, including biochemical processes, and is one of the lead design instructors.

Mr. Persichetti holds an M.S. in Chemical Engineering and Petroleum Refining from the Colorado School of Mines and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado, with continuing education in environmental and chemical engineering, along with formal training in business and management practices. He is a member of AIChE and was previously active in AIChE corporate sponsored research, serving as chairman of DIPPR environmental data collection projects 911/912 from 1993-1996. He also has participated in the American Chemical Society and the Water Environment Federation. Mr. Persichetti also has received professional recognition from Sandia National Laboratory for his work in reviewing novel technologies in clean designs in 1997, and from the U.S. EPA as an Advisory Board Member on Environmental Considerations in Process Design from 1990-1992.

Eric Karp, Chemical Engineer
Eric received his B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has been a full-time intern at Symbios Technologies since its inception. His work has ranged from creating quality control systems to basic R&D. Recently, Eric has completed multiple techno-economic models for various phase I design projects using advanced chemical process engineering technology for processing of algae and various feedstocks to biofuels and energy. He plans to attend graduate school in the fall of 2008 to pursue his Ph.D. in chemical engineering, but will provide input on future Symbios projects while in graduate school.

 

 

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