Ernest A. Knesel
Chairman and CEO
Meet Our Team
Mr. Knesel was a founder and officer in charge of operations for Biomedical Reference Laboratories, Inc., which started in 1969 and went public in 1979. Mr. Knesel served as Senior Vice President of this business and its successor company Roche Biomedical Laboratories, Inc. through 1995. During his tenure at Roche, revenue grew to over $1 billion. As Senior Vice President, Mr. Knesel’s responsibilities included strategic planning, laboratory direction, and management of operations, laboratory acquisitions and extensive regional/national organizational development. Mr. Knesel was responsible as the chief scientific officer for laboratory technology selection, innovation and development for all areas of the clinical laboratory. Mr. Knesel has had extensive experience in sales, marketing and has demonstrated an acute awareness of market needs and its priorities. He personally developed and directed a variety of highly successful differentiating niche businesses within Roche Biomedical Laboratories, which merged to create Laboratory Corporation of America in 1995.
In 1989 Mr. Knesel founded Roche Image Analysis Systems (RIAS) as a subsidiary of Roche Biomedical Laboratories and successfully established this company as a leader in automated cytodiagnostics. As the President of RIAS, Mr. Knesel developed a new automated thin‑layer cell preparation to improve the Pap smear and directed technology acquisitions and product development for microscopic cell based image analysis. Mr. Knesel was also founder and first president of AutoCyte, Inc. the successor to RIAS established with venture capital backing in 1996 and taken public in 1997. Mr. Knesel was responsible for planning, direction and oversight of AutoCyte’s successful PMA approval and gained significant experience working with the FDA, Office of Device Evaluation in this and related efforts.
Mr. Knesel received a BS in Biology and Medical Technology and an MS in Biochemistry from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Richard Augustus
President / Chief Operating Officer
In addition to assuming a management role at SLP in early 2014, Mr. Augustus is the President and co-founder of Aurus Advisors, Inc., a FINRA registered broker/dealer that provides collateralized finance and investment banking services to institutional clients. Prior to founding Aurus in 2002, he served as Chief Operating Officer of Automated Data Exchange (ADX), a privately held software company and was primarily responsible for turning around this near-bankrupt company in late 1998.
Prior to this, Mr. Augustus spent 15 years working primarily in the Capital Markets Division of Merrill Lynch and held various positions including Managing Director in the Global Equity Financing Division (London), Director of Global Equity Swaps, and Product Manager for Equity Derivatives. While at Merrill, he was responsible for structuring and investing in a broad array of arbitrage transactions for sophisticated investors and for the firm’s account. He also acted as the primary relationship manager for many of the firm’s largest hedge fund clients assisting them in all areas of their businesses including portfolio management, trading, financing and operations.
Mr. Augustus has a degree in accounting from Fairfield University and is a certified public accountant (inactive).
John Merritt
Sr. Executive Vice President
John Merritt has over 35 years of sales, sales management and marketing experience in the healthcare market. John has served as Vice President of Sales for Roche Biomedical Laboratories, (LabCorp.); Roche Image Analysis Systems (TriPath), General Injectables and Vaccines (now Henry Schein, Inc.), BioClinical Concepts, Inc. (now Clinical Data, Inc.). Mr. Merritt was one of the founders of BioClinical Concepts in 1997 and successfully led the company for three years as the Vice President of Sales. BioClinical Concepts specialized in physician office laboratory management.
Immediately prior to joining SLP, Mr. Merritt worked with Quest Diagnostics, Inc. as Strategic Business Development Manager and started Healthcare Innovative Products and Solutions, LLC, a healthcare software sales and service company.
Mr. Merritt is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Bill Waddington
Executive Vice President
Mr. Waddington has extensive experience in diagnostics sales and service. His career began as a medical technologist in central Florida. He joined American Monitor Corporation, a leader in clinical chemistry instrumentation where he quickly grew in a succession of key management roles which culminated in his being the Director of Sales and Operations for all of Europe
Bill’s experience encompassed all aspects of sales, marketing and systems’ and applications support.
Dan Knesel
Sr. Vice President / CFO
Dan has had an extensive career with experience in all aspects of accounting, cost control and staff development in one of the largest global international supply and distribution businesses. He is applying the same standards to guiding SLP’s growth.
Russell Hogsett
Senior Vice President of Sales
Russell Hogsett has over 20 years of diagnostic sales experience with over 10 years of experience in diagnostic equipment focused in Molecular Diagnostics. Russell began his selling career with MetPath Laboratories which became Quest Diagnostics and focused on physician and hospital diagnostic testing services.
Russell then moved into Molecular with Roche Molecular Systems and focused on selling molecular equipment to hospitals. After Roche Molecular, Russell moved to Luminex Corp and served as a SE Regional Manager and a National Corporate Accounts Director with a continued focus in Molecular.
Mr. Hogsett is a graduate of East Caroline University with a Business Degree.
Bradley Knesel
Vice President of Operations and COO CellSolutions
Bradley Knesel joins the Select Laboratories group from Solstas Laboratory Partners where he served as Associate Vice President of Technical Laboratory Operations. While with Solstas, Brad directed the operational integrations of acquired laboratories yielding $500M in annual corporate revenue. He also led process improvement activities, realizing $6.5M in annual cost savings.
Prior to his tenure at Solstas, Brad was a working founder at Select Diagnostics, Inc. and eventually was promoted to Vice President of Operations. At Select, he oversaw the operations of Select’s three laboratories (2 in NC and 1 VA), yielding $12M in annual revenue, and developed a program to standardize workflow and QA activities.
Brad holds a Masters in Clinical Laboratory Science with a concentration in Cytology and Molecular Biology for the Medical University of South Carolina. He is an ASCP certified cytotechnologist and molecular biologist.
Thanh Nguyen
Vice President of Software Engineering
Thanh Nguyen’s over 30 years career spans many disciplines, starting with the development of image processing hardware, senior software engineering in graphics and image processing, embedded system development, engineering management, technical marketing, server side software development for wireless service provider, web based applications among many other achievements.
He has worked in bleeding edge projects in big corporations such Sun Microsystems, Openwave and for a number of small startups consisting of few contributors in the US and Europe. The combination of strong technical expertise and management experience makes him a unique contributor for the team.
Thanh has an electrical engineering degree from the University of Munich and an MBA degree from the Santa Clara University.
Von C. McAfee Sr.
Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
Von currently serves as the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development and has over 25 years of healthcare sales experience. After separation from the United States Army serving as an Airborne Ranger with the Army’s elite Special Operations Forces, Von worked for Texas Instrument Defense Systems Missile Division in Dallas, TX, Abbott Laboratories Diagnostics Division as both a Production/Test and Transfusion Diagnostics Supervisor and later as an Area Account Executive, for the DynaMedix Corporation (later Synergy Medical Informatics).
Von has held the position of Instrument Sales Specialist for Diagnostic Products Corporation selling Immulite® immunochemistry analyzers to hospitals, physicians, and reference laboratories. Upon the acquisition of Diagnostic Products Corporation, Von became the Regional Sales Manager for the Charlotte, NC Region of Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics.
Von is a graduate of South Carolina State University where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Professional Mathematics.
Billy Fox
Vice President of Laboratories
Billy began his career with Biomedical Reference Labs in 1977 after receiving his degree in Medical Laboratory Technology from Elon College. Biomedical Reference Labs grew to become the foundation of Roche Biomedical Laboratories, and later Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp).
At Roche Biomedical Laboratories, Billy held the position of Assistant VP, Director of Technology Development. He help lead various Innovation Teams in the development of novel technologies resulting in FDA 510(k) and FDA Class III PMA product lines. One of these product lines was spun off into an IPO company that became TriPath Imaging Inc., subsequently acquired by Becton Dickinson in 2006 to become BD Women’s Health & Cancer.
Billy joined Select Lab Partners in June 2015 after taking early retirement from Becton Dickinson where he served as a Business Analyst for the BD Diagnostics Engineering Division. He holds nine assigned US Patents, four additional US Patent Applications, and numerous worldwide patents related to Medical Device designs. He has directed a diverse array of projects spanning Reagent, Software, and Instrumentation R&D, Facilities Design, Manufacturing Systems Design, and Operations.
Thomas Gahm, PhD
Founder and President/Select Laboratory Software, LLC
Dr. Gahm holds a Master of Physics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Human Biology, a combination of Electrical Engineering and Medicine with a concentration in research, from the University of Hannover, Germany.
From 1983 – 1993 he worked as imaging expert, scientific adviser and project coordinator at Kontron Electronics, Image Analysis Division, München. In 1993 he moved to the United States joining Roche Image Analysis as VP of Image R&D. Subsequently he served in similar positions at AutoCyte, TriPath, and Becton Dickinson leading engineering teams of various sizes in the development of medical devices including automated systems for thin layer preparation of cytological samples, fast scanners for automated recognition of cancer cells in cytological slides, virtual slide scanners and histology systems for the quantification of tumor markers in histological sections, and telepathology devices.
In 2012 Dr. Dr. Gahm left Becton Dickinson and started his own company Select Laboratory Software. As a close partner of Select Laboratory Partners, his company develops and sells a laboratory information system with an innovative cloud-based data backbone making the system location and hardware independent. Initially optimized for toxicology, the system is currently expanded to be applied to full service laboratories.
Patrick Rainey, PhD, DABT
Chief Science Officer
Dr. R. Patrick Rainey attained his B.S. in Chemistry with a Mathematics minor from the University of Central Arkansas and went on to pursue his Ph.D. studies in Chemistry at Texas A&M University, College Station TX. His dissertation focused on utilizing naturally occurring organometallic catalytic centers of enzymes (carbonic anhydrase) to prepare novel co-polymeric materials. Upon completion of his Ph.D., Dr. Rainey was awarded the National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST Gaithersburg, MD) in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. His industrial research experience includes identifying harmful constituents of cigarette smoke and monitoring their effects on biological pathways within immortalized HeLa lung cells in vitro as the Director of R&D with Vector Research Durham, NC.
Dr. Rainey followed his industrial research experience as a chemistry instructor with the North Carolina School of Science & Math in Durham, NC. He enjoyed teaching Advanced AP Chemistry and Organic Chemistry courses and labs as well as mentoring students in the pursuit of science careers. During this time, Dr. Rainey pursued and attained Diplomate status with the American Board of Toxicology as a certified toxicologist. Initially consulting with Select Laboratory Partners (SLP) to determine the feasibility of providing physicians with the option to perform in-house definitive drug analysis utilizing LCMS-MS, Dr Rainey was offered the position of Director of Analytical Toxicology with SLP in 2012. In 2014 Dr. Rainey was promoted to Chief Scientific Officer where his responsibilities, with the help of his team, include managing physician owned and reference laboratories, working on the scientific aspects of pursuing FDA approval for new clinical analyzers and reagent product offerings and directing R&D efforts for alternative clinical testing regimes utilizing LCMS-MS technology for SLP.
Jochen Fischer, PhD
Vice President of Engineering and Instrument Performance
Dr. Fischer is responsible for engineering at CellSolutions, including the management of external technology suppliers and manufacturers. In addition, he oversees quality control and statistical evaluation of the BestCyte product.
Prior to joining CellSolutions, Dr. Fischer was the CTO and co-founder of Batanga, an online media company where he led the development of large scale digital asset management and streaming services. Earlier his career he worked at Roche Image Analysis Systems on various engineering and software aspects of a digital cytology scanner.
Dr. Fischer received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Stuttgart in Germany where he was working on research projects mainly in the field of medical imaging.
Joel Dry
Vice President of Product Management and Cytology Applications
Joel has been a member of CellSolutions since it’s founding. He has been involved in the design and development of the company’s BestPrep liquid-based cytology preparation products and BestCyte digital cytology imaging system.
His career began in 1993 as a cytotechnologist in Charleston, South Carolina. He worked for seven years in the R&D division of TriPath Imaging. Joel was the Cytology Supervisor of Select Diagnostics from 2002 to 2011.