John M. Capek, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Medical Devices, Abbott

John Capek, Ph.D., is executive vice president, medical devices. Capek was appointed to this position in July 2007 and is responsible for Abbott's Vascular, Diabetes Care, Abbott Spine and Animal Health businesses. Previously, he served as senior vice president, Abbott Vascular, heading up Abbott's global vascular business.

Capek served in various management roles at Guidant, including president, Guidant Vascular Intervention and vice president and general manager of Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions. He also served as vice president and general manager of Guidant Germany and vice president, marketing, Guidant Cardiac Rhythm Management Group. He also previously served as vice president, Cardiac Therapies, Abbott Vascular upon the April 2006 acquisition of Guidant. Before joining Guidant, Capek was manager of New Product Technology at Eli Lilly & Company.

Capek serves on the board of the American Heart Association.

Capek has a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering, a master's degree in biomedical engineering, a master's degree in electrical engineering, a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and a master's degree in business administration from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

April 15 5:30 - 6:30 pm

Location Vidalakis Dining Room, Schwab Residential Center

David Auth, Ph.D.

Dr. Auth received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Georgetown University in 1969. He joined the faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington in 1969 and continued as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering until 1982. While at the University of Washington in the 1970’s, Dr. Auth and his students carried out the seminal work on impedance limited, controlled injury, multipolar electrosurgery, transparent media contact laser surgery, and ophthalmic holography.

In 1982 he became Director of New Product Ventures for the Squibb Medical Systems Group. In 1985 he founded Biophysics International, a division of E.R. Squibb and Sons, Inc. and continued with Squibb Corporation until 1989. He founded Heart Technology, Inc. (HRTT:NASDAQ) in 1989 and served as its Chief Executive Officer until its merger with Boston Scientific Corporation in 1995. By 1995 Heart Technology’s revenue had grown to more than $80 million dollars with 500 employees. The stock for stock merger with Boston Scientific was valued at more than 600 million dollars.

Dr. Auth is the inventor or co-inventor of Olympus HPU™ (Olympus Corp. of Japan), a standard of care device for endoscopic control of gastrointestinal bleeding, BICAP™, a multipolar electrosurgical device for transcatheter hemostasis (American Cystoscope Makers, Inc.), BICEPS™, a cooled boundary layer bipolar forceps for neurosurgical bleeding (Edward Weck and Co., Inc.), ROTABLATOR™, a catheter based microdissection device using high speed rotational ablation to remove via differential cutting, calcified, lipoid, and fibrous atherosclerotic plaque from coronary arteries (Heart Technology, Inc. and Boston Scientific Corp.), and NOVASURE™, a multipolar electrosurgical device for global endometrial ablation (Novacept Inc. and CYTYC, Inc.)

Date: May 29
5:30 - 6:30 pm

Location: Bishop Auditorium