Marshall Burns, PhD

Marshall Burns is a noted author, speaker, and consultant on advanced technology concepts.

     Marshall Burns is the founder and president of the Ennex companies, having conceived the “Ennex” name in 1975. He is a seasoned technology manager, a tenacious problem solver with a unique combination of analytic and communication skills. He has twenty years of experience in the development of emerging industries from personal computers to nanotechnology. In that time, he has spearheaded the development of a new hardware product (digital “fabber”), formulated business and financial plans with new business models, and done hands-on software development (including Web and database design, electromechanical control, numerical analysis, and retail productivity). He has three patents and degrees in physics from MIT (BS) and the University of Texas (PhD).

     For more background on Marshall, visit his personal Web site at www.MBurns.com.

Kenneth J. Hayworth

Ken Hayworth is a brilliant scientist and engineer.

     Ken Hayworth played an instrumental role in both teams that built Ennex’s Offset^™ fabricator prototypes. He designed the electronics of both systems and wrote the data manipulation software. He is a coinventor on two of the Offset Fabbing patents. He serves with Marshall Burns on the board of directors of Ennex Corporation.

     Ken’s passion is the mind-machine interface. He is currently pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where is research focus is “the cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience of human object recognition as supported by neural circuits in the ventral and dorsal visual streams.” He operates ExtremeNeuroanatomy.com, which seeks to establish an international collaboration on the development of a circuit atlas of the human brain at the level of the synapses. More information on Ken’s background can be found in his ExtremeNeuroanatomy bio.

William L. Robbins, MBA

Bill Robbins has fifteen years of experience in business development and technology start-ups.

     Bill Robbins was a founding investor in Ennex Corporation’s venture to develop a low-cost digital fabricator. In addition to a monetary investment, he helped with business development and contributed his marketing experience to a number of consulting projects performed by Ennex.

     Bill is the founder and principal of Convergent Ventures, LLC, a consulting and investment firm focused on high-tech start-ups. He is an experienced manager and entrepreneur with fifteen years of business development, product development, product management and research experience in the biotechnology, software, and consumer products industries. Much of his work with start-up companies has been at the interfaces among computer science, the biomedical sciences, engineering, and physics.

     Bill is President of the Columbia Business School Club of Southern California and cofounder of the “Westwood BioBrew,” a popular monthly networking event for the Southern California biotech community. More detailed background can be found in his Convergent Ventures bio

James Howison

James Howison is researching the politics of disruptive technology.

     James Howison collaborated with Marshall Burns on developing the concept of Napster fabbing, which applies “peer-to-peer” technology of the Internet to distribution of physical product data for distributed, localized manufacturing.

     James is pursuing a PhD in Information Studies at Syracuse University (New York). His research currently focuses on the politics of technology, open source development teams, and incentive compatibility in networks. He is the author of a study on government and corporate efforts to tame and reshape the Internet: Making the (Cyber)world Safe for Capitalism.

     James keeps a rather irreverant Web log called Freelance Propaganda.