Mr. John Goldstone, President and CEO

John has over 25 years of success translating scientific and technical innovation into commercially viable product and licensing revenue streams. He’s consistently worked with patent holders, business representatives, legal counsel and executives from both selling and buying organizations to secure deals that offered both attractive revenue and favorable tax benefits. He has over five years of experience prospecting for, negotiating term sheets and agreements, and closing 14 licensing transactions and 6 divestitures that’s brought more than $15M of previously unrecognized or overlooked revenue.
As Director of Technology Licensing at Weyerhaeuser, John drove the company’s strategic bias to license or divest technology in order to decrease the cost of in-house research and development. He’s worked with teams of scientists, engineers, and legal and business leadership to evaluate, determine, and present which technologies to license/divest. In addition, as a representative for Weyerhaeuser on a Joint Development Agreement, John led a team to re-open negotiations on fertilizer technology twice with an industry leader. His efforts achieved the company’s most successful license with royalty fees from the U.S. and 8 other countries.
In all of his roles, John has been a resourceful and perseverant professional as well as a resilient licensing and deal-winning key contributor committed to optimizing the return on investment for innovation and technology by making the deal successful for both parties.

Prof. AJ Boydston, Co-founder

AJ began studying chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon under the guidance of Professor Michael M. Haley. His research focused on the synthesis and study of dehydrobenzoannulenes. After completing BS and MS degrees, he began doctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin in the laboratories of Professor Brian L. Pagenkopf. In 2005, AJ joined the group of Professor Christopher W. Bielawski, also at UT-Austin, and was co-advised by Professor C. Grant Willson. He completed his thesis research focused on the synthesis and applications of annulated bis(imidazolium) chromophores. After graduating in 2007, AJ moved to Pasadena, California to take an NIH postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology. There, he worked under the mentorship of Professor Robert H. Grubbs to develop new catalysts and methods for the synthesis and characterization of functionalized cyclic polymers. He returned to the Pacific Northwest as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington in the summer of 2010. Recently, he has been the recipient of an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, Cottrell Scholar Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

Dr. Danielle Chun, CTO

Danielle began her chemistry career as an undergraduate at California Polytechnic (Cal Poly) State University – San Luis Obispo studying biochemistry. At Cal Poly, Danielle completed two summers of research under Dr. Shanju Zhang synthesizing graphene oxide for solar cell technologies and using UV-vis to analyze conformational changes in P3HT polymers. In addition, Danielle led a research group for 1 year under the advisement of Dr. Corinne Lehr studying the detection of cyanuric acid in swimming pool waters using GC-MS analysis. For this work, Danielle won the Departmental Analytical Chemistry Award in 2017. After completing her BS degree, Danielle obtained an industry role at Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. as a Chemist-I. She then decided to pursue her Ph.D. in 2018 at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville under the advisement of Dr. Michael Kilbey. Danielle’s doctoral dissertation focused on the physical and chemical responses of amidine-functionalized polymers in the capture and release of CO2. During her graduate student tenure, Danielle mentored several undergraduate students and collaborated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory for access to the Spallation Neutron Source and a TGA instrument equipped with simulated flue gas streams. Outside of the laboratory, Danielle served as an officer for the Association of Chemistry Graduate Students (ACGS) and co-founded the Multicultural Graduate Student Organization (MGSO)  (Graduate Organization of the Year in 2022, 2023, and 2024). For these efforts, Danielle was granted a One-time Fellowship Award in 2023 and a Volunteer of Distinction Award in 2024.