Meet the Team

Chairman

Tim is the Chairman of Dentroid. He has extensive expertise in the life sciences, executive management and venture capital investment. Tim was previously CEO of ANU Connect Ventures, a $30M pre-seed VC fund, the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at The University of Sydney and Professor & Head of Microbiology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is an active angel investor working with investment groups throughout Australia and US to assist early-stage companies to raise capital and develop their innovative technologies. Tim is also Chairman & CEO of GPN Vaccines Ltd, as well as a Director of Gamma Vaccines Pty Ltd, Brain Changer Pty Ltd, Flex-G Pty Ltd, PPB Technology Pty Ltd, a Trustee Director of Griffin Accelerator Holdings Pty Ltd and an Honorary Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide.

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Co-Founder, Co-Inventor and CEO

Dr. Omar Zuaiter, BDS (Hons), MFDS (Ireland), MPP (Hons) (Australia) is the cofounder and CEO of Dentroid. Educated as a dentist, he accumulated extensive experience in dentistry, policy and advisory both in Australia and overseas. He is a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland and holds a Master of Public Policy from the Australian National University. Prior to cofounding Dentroid, Omar advised matrix organisations on negotiations, communication and digitisation.

Co-Founder, Co-inventor and CTO

Alaa (BCopEng/BIS, MCyberSec) is the cofounder and chief technology officer of Dentroid. He is a Cyber Security, Information Systems and Network engineer with an interest in micro-electro-mechatronics and robotics. Alaa holds a Masters degree in cyber security from the University of New South Wales Canberra – ADFA. He has worked extensively as a project manager, contractor and IT advisor in Australia and overseas before cofounding Dentroid.

Director

Mike started his career in retail, managing Nock & Kirby stores before completing his MBA. He was the GM of the paging business, Link Telecommunications, before leading a management buy-out of Health Communication Network (HCN) from the Australian government in 1995. As MD, he saw it grow from no staff to an ASX listing during the dotcom era. HCN acquired eight companies in twelve months of being public and was eventually itself acquired by Primary Healthcare for $111 million. Mike was an early investor in WiseTech in 2005 which he helped as a Director become a multi-billion global leader in providing logistics software. Mike was the inaugural investor in Dentroid and remains one of its most ardent supporters.

Chief Dental Officer

Emeritus Professor Walsh is one of the most prominent dental clinicians, scientists and innovators in the southern hemisphere. He has published more than 340 papers, authored over 22 book chapters or books and registered over 20 patents. From 2000 to 2020 Prof Walsh led the Advanced Technologies group at the University of Queensland School of Dentistry. He is a founding member (2010) and the current president of the Australian Association for Laser Dentistry, as well as a founding member (1992) of the US-based Academy of Laser Dentistry. He has had significant past industry collaboration with dental laser manufacturers, including Denfotex (UK), Biolase, Ultradent and Luxar/Laser Light Scalpel (USA), HighTech Laser (Belgium), and KaVo (Germany).

Advisor

Andrew is an experienced scientist and engineer working across optics and digital domains. He is passionate about the transformative capability of optics, signal processing and AI to change the world for the better. Andrew’s career has focused on sensing the world, including delivering satellite laser systems at NASA, 3D and bio-medical sensors at Apple, and launching a revolutionary reconfigurable test & measurement solutions as a Co-founder of Liquid Instruments.

Advisor

Professor Heiko Spallek serves as Head of School and Dean at The University of Sydney School of Dentistry. Prior to joining the University of Sydney, Professor Spallek served as Associate Dean at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1993, he graduated as DMD from the Humboldt University, Berlin where he continued his career and was appointed in the Department of Periodontology and also received his Dr. med. dent. (dental material sciences). While being appointed at Temple University School of Dentistry in Philadelphia, he earned an MSBA (Computer and Information Science) in 2000. Professor Spallek’s research has as its focus the development of computerized clinical decision support tools—he published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers and a textbook for Dental Informatics. He has served as chief investigator of NIH-funded research projects that support the adherence to evidence-based dentistry principles.

Advisor

Dr. Convissar is a pioneer in the field of laser dentistry. One of the first dentists to use a laser to treat patients, he has over 3 decades of experience with almost a dozen different wavelengths. He has authored more textbooks and papers on laser dentistry than any general dentist in the world. He is the only dentist in the world to have achieved Diplomate status from the American Board of Laser Surgery, Fellowship in the American Society of Laser Medicine and Surgery, Mastership in the Academy of Laser Dentistry, and Fellowship in the Academy of Laser Dentistry. His seminal textbook, Principles and Practice of Laser Dentistry, now in its 3rd edition, is available in 5 languages and has been the # 1 selling laser dentistry textbook for over a decade.

Advisor

Steven has over 20 years of experience in global multi-billion medical device companies. His roles saw him lead and integrate large teams of engineers, designers and quality professionals towards the development, industrialisation and scale manufacturing of new implantable, miniaturised and complex medical products. Steven holds a Bachelor of Materials Engineering with Honours (UNSW 2004) and two Masters degrees with Distinction in Statistics (Newcastle 2008) and Commerce (Deakin 2022). He is currently the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Cochlear Ltd, a global leader in manufacturing implantable cochlear hearing devices that has provided over 600,000 devices since its inception in 1983.

Regulatory Consultant

Dr Lee Walsh CPEng FIEAust is an engineer, physiology and consultant with a background in medical research, biomedical technology and medical device regulation. He is internationally recognised in his fields of practice and has contributed to policy and standards for medical devices at the National and International level, including representing the Australian Government on technical committees.

Dr Walsh is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Platypus MedTech Consulting, a firm specialising in regulatory affairs and quality management for start-ups, small business and novel medical devices. In the Dentroid Team, he is the lead for Regulatory Affairs.

Quality Manager

Tahseen Kamal, Ph.D. (Engineering), FHEA is a professional with 16+ years of experience broadly in electronic and computer engineering. Currently Dr. Kamal is working in the medical device industry as a consultant contributing to quality management and regulatory domain. Prior to that Dr. Kamal worked briefly in the public sector working for the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). Dr. Kamal’s technical expertise lies in applied optics, computational microscopy, digital system development and optimization. She worked in the academia for 14+ years and her teaching skills in the higher education industry has been recognised as Fellow of Higher Education Academy.

Collaborator

Professor Dzung Dao is a Head of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at Griffith University. His research expertise is in semiconductor physics and sensing effects, and he has been listed as one of the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists in Applied Physics (Stanford rankings 2021-2022). He has over 20 years of experience in developing physical sensors, actuators, and microscale systems. He has been a lead Chief Investigator (CI) or co-CI of many prestigious and competitive government research grants, including two ARC Discovery Projects, two ARC Linkage Projects, five ARC LIEF, three IMCRC, and other collaborative research projects from industry and universities. By Dec 2022, his total research income is more than $10.5M. He has published over 230 high-impact journal papers, 190+ conference papers, 6 books/book chapters, and filed 18 patents. he has supervised to completion of 23 PhD students. He has also collaborated widely with many companies to develop prototypes and commercial products.

Collaborator

Dr Peter Woodfield is a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Griffith University. He has over 20 years of experience in the fields of experimental and computational heat transfer, including: jet-impingement boiling heat transfer, inverse heat conduction, natural convection, thermomagnetic convection, thermophysical property measurement, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). He lectures in thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer and engineering dynamics. He has published more than 60 refereed journal articles since completing his Ph.D. at Sydney University in 2001, has worked for 10 years on thermal research projects in Japan and secured over $1M in research funding.

Collaborator

Dr Van Dau is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering and Built Environment, Griffith University. He had worked for a start-up in England and leading companies in Japan for 8.5 years before joining Griffith University in 10/2018. He has published 150+ papers and 23 inventions (7 US patents) in microelectromechanical systems, nano atomisation and nano printing. His inventions have led to 5+ commercial products. In the last four years, he has secured over A$3.1M in research funding from national and institutional funding agencies and initiated collaborative projects with Australian companies in advanced manufacturing sectors. He is a senior member of IEEE and currently leads a team of 7 PhD students.

Collaborator

Professor Andrei Rode is internationally recognised as one of the world’s research leaders in ultra-short laser interaction with matter and laser processing. With over 30 years of expertise in this field, his research spans from laser-induced thermal forces to laser ablation, to the acceleration of ions at relativistic intensity, and to the formation of super-dense material states. His research activities solve problems in a broad range of laser applications ranging from medicine to photonics. He pioneered the use of femtosecond lasers for teeth ablation in 2002. As a member of the Laser Physics Centre (LPC) at the Australian National University (ANU), he is advising Dentroid on research and development (R&D) activities including laser-related concepts, processes, technologies, and products.

Collaborator

Professor Steve Madden is the head of the Laser Physics Centre (LPC) at the Australian National University (ANU) and the group leader of the Integrated Photonics group. Steve has worked in multinational technology companies and Silicon Valley start-ups and is an internationally recognised expert in fibre/integrated optic devices and the winner of the Eureka prize for National Security in 2020. He has proven expertise in the design, build and automation of high-power laser processing systems and laser process development for industrial manufacturing of optical devices. He is a key member of the collaboration with Dentroid into remote laser-based dentistry working on both the ablation process and the system design/investigations.

Collaborator

Dr Ludovic Rapp is a Senior Research Fellow at Laser Physics Centre (LPC) at the Australian National University (ANU) and the group leader of the High-Power Laser group. Ludovic has over 15 years of expertise in short and ultrashort laser interaction with matter, a strong background in ultrafast laser micromachining, new strategies for ultrafast laser applications and expertise in beam shaping. He is leading the development of the femtosecond laser processes for dentistry applications at ANU.