Management
Terry Jester
Chief Executive Officer
Ms. Jester, a 30-year veteran of the solar industry, joined Calisolar in 2010 following her active involvement in the company as Entrepreneur in Residence at Hudson Clean Energy. She has extensive experience in the manufacturing and engineering of photovoltaics and led efforts to ramp up manufacturing operations to full production for a variety of photovoltaic technologies including silicon cell-based photovoltaics. Ms. Jester has managed large solar operations and held engineering positions at SoloPower, SunPower, SolarWorld, Siemens, Arco and Shell. She holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from California State University Northridge.
Dr. Kamel Ounadjela
Founder and Chief Development Officer
Dr. Ounadjela co-founded Calisolar in 2006, recognizing the market need for fundamental improvements in the cost-effectiveness of producing high-performance solar cells. He was instrumental in forming the initial company, creating the business plan, raising funding from strategic investors, and building a team that has demonstrated product performance in high-volume production. Dr. Ounadjela has more than 25 years of experience in utilizing device physics, magnetics and nanotechnologies in the operation and development of solar material, semiconductor, disk drive and processing equipment products. Prior to Calisolar, he was leading memory products development and transfer to manufacturing at Cypress Semiconductor, San Jose, California. Before that, he was driving product development at IBM and Veeco Instruments. He holds several patents, has authored more than 200 major technical publications and edited three books. Dr. Ounadjela holds an engineering degree and a Ph.D. in Material Science from the University of Paris.
John R. Beaver
Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Beaver joined Calisolar in 2009. In his role as CFO, he aids Calisolar’s rapid growth by leveraging years of financial leadership experience in building the finance functions during periods of significant growth of publicly traded companies. Prior to joining Calisolar, he served as Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer at Sterling Chemicals, a publicly traded company in the highly competitive commodity chemical manufacturing industry. Mr. Beaver has held senior financial positions at a number of other public companies including Pioneer, Borden Chemicals and Plastics and Monsanto. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Certified Public Accountant.
Michael Russo
Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development
Mr. Russo has more than 30 years of experience in the semiconductor and solar industries. He joined Calisolar in 2011 and is using his relationships and in-depth knowledge of the industry to drive the company toward global leadership in the sales and marketing its silicon. Mr. Russo came to Calisolar from MEMC Electronic Materials, as Senior Director of sales where he spent 7 years and was responsible for forming several strategic contracts with major semiconductor and solar manufacturers. Prior to MEMC, Mr. Russo worked in various Engineering, Marketing, Sales and Business Development roles with Advanced Micro Devices and Texas Instruments. He has degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut.
Dr. Fritz Kirscht
Founder, Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Kirscht co-founded Calisolar in 2006, bringing the strategic vision of vertical integration as the key to success and more than 30 years of experience in the silicon industry. His photovoltaic and silicon processing experience includes technology and leadership positions at Mitsubishi Silicon America, the Institute for Semiconductor Physics at the former East Germany’s Academy of Sciences, the Institute for Crystal Growth and Q-Cells. Dr. Kirscht has pioneered defect engineering in silicon, worked consistently on related applications, transferred basic research into industrial applications, and has been granted more than 50 patents. He has also authored more than 150 technical and scientific papers, given invited talks, and co-chaired sessions at major international conferences.
Dr. Kirscht holds a Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.