VIASPACE Advisory Board

Dr. Dwight Duston

Dr. Duston is currently Chief Technology Officer at the Egg Factory of Roanoke, Virginia, which incubates high-technology companies. Prior to that, Dr. Duston spent 20 years in research and high-technology management for the US Department of Defense. He was Director, Science and Technology and later Assistant Director for Technology at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. He has chaired and served on numerous review and advisory panels and working groups for NASA and the Department of Defense.

Dr. Duston has served on Advisory Boards for several companies and was co-editor of the journal, “TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT”. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan. Dr. Duston has a strong track record of technology transfer of military R&D, that has resulted in more than 350 commercial products brought to the market, traceable back to the military R&D his office at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization funded.

Rachid Yazami, Ph.D.

A native of Fez, Morocco, Dr. Yazami joined the graduate school of electrochemistry (ENSEEG) of the Grenoble National Institute of Technology (INPG), where he obtained a MS Degree (Engineer) in 1978. He then engaged in a research project in Carbonaceous Materials for Lithium storage in batteries at a what is now known as LEPMI Lab where he earned a Ph.D. in 1985. In the same year he joined CNRS as a research scholar and was promoted to ‘Director of Research' in 1988.

In 2000, Yazami came to Caltech under a cooperative exchange program with CNRS and co-founded a joint CNRS-Caltech international laboratory on ‘Materials for Electrochemical Energetic' (LIA-ME2) with Prof. Brent Fultz with the Department of Material Science.

In 2006 Yazami was appointed ‘Visiting Associate' in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering' in collaboration with Prof. Robert Grubbs. Yazami and Grubbs are the co-founders of CFx Battery, Inc. a Caltech - CNRS start-up company on primary and rechargeable batteries. View Bio