Wido Menhardt

Wido Menhardt is an experienced technology executive with a passion for taking technology ideas from scratch to market,  and to then scale them to volume deployment.

Mr. Menhardt is Vice-President, Engineering at Philips Healthcare Informatics, responsible for a global informatics infrastructure organization of close to 300 engineers in Silicon Valley, the Netherlands and Bangalore.

As CTO of his last start-up, he managed to drive a cancer detection software product from proof-of-concept to successful FDA submission in only 18 months. After acquisition by Kodak, he stayed on as General Manager for another 2.5 years to launch the product in the US. At Eastman Kodak, he drove business development activities to broaden the product portfolio inorganically, and he initiated organic business growth in China.

After leaving Kodak, Dr. Menhardt focussed on products in the field of data mining, mostly using Ruby On Rails. He built a document classification and clustering engine for a personalized information discovery start-up, and designed several Web 2.0/Ruby on Rails websites for applications such as geo mash-ups, social networks, and wiki indexing. He is one of the organizers of the 2006 Bay Area RubyOnRailsCamp.

Previously, he served as CTO and Vice-President Engineering for Cedara Software, first in Toronto and later as the General Manager of Cedara’s Silicon Valley offices. He was responsible for Cedara’s (then “ISG”) flagship 3D visualization product at the time of the IPO, and as VP Engineering played a critical role in building a successful engineering consulting practice with a global customer list including GE, Siemens, Philips, Toshiba and Hitachi. As CTO, he provided technology leadership to close to 500 software engineers, and initiated several innovative incubator products including a domain-specific application framework and embeddable high-performance imaging software components.

Dr. Menhardt started his career at Philips medical systems in Hamburg (Germany) and Eindhoven (Netherlands) where he authored more than 50 papers in journals and at conferences on topics ranging from MRI physics to Fuzzy Logic. In his capacity as research leader he also started the highly acclaimed multi-national COVIRA project with 1M Euro of EU funding and participation by IBM and Siemens.

Wido Menhardt holds a PhD in Computer Science from Hamburg University, and an MSc in Physics from the Technical University of Vienna. He lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and two children.