Meet the team
Dr Benjamin Wiesent – Joint CEO
Dr Benjamin Wiesent is the co-founder of Spectrolytic and currently serves as the joint Chief Executive Officer of the company.
Benjamin used his PhD thesis work to set up Spectrolytic to bridge a gap in the marketplace for cost-effective laboratory, inline and portable Mid Infra-Red spectrometers. Originally set up with oil condition monitoring in mind, the application and product portfolio now extends into many industries.
Benjamin aids in all aspects of the business with his considerable knowledge of optical, mechanical, firmware, software and chemometric systems.
He also contributes heavily to the family owned business, Comline GmbH, a successful German company who develop and manufacture cabling systems and on-board electronics for large industrial vehicles.
Benjamin holds a degree and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich.
Dr Carsten Giebeler – Joint CEO and Managing Director
Dr Carsten Giebeler serves as the joint Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the company. In addition to the CEO and business development activities, Carsten uses his experience in sensors and optics to aid our product design.
Previously Carsten spun out Pyreos Ltd from Siemens AG in Germany, where he was working as a venture Manager for the Siemens Technology Accelerator. Carsten served from 2009 to 2015 as the Chief Technology Officer of Pyreos, which grew to 40 people, and he had sole responsibility for all technology developments, IP and technology partnerships. In addition, he was leading the sales activities in Germany and Korea.
Prior to that Carsten held a number of R&D positions at the Hewlett Packard research laboratory in Palo Alto, USA and the Philips Research Laboratory (NatLabs) in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Carsten holds a PhD in physics from the University of Sheffield and an MBA form the University of Edinburgh.
Neil Conway – Applications Manager
Previously Neil has held Process Engineering positions in semiconductors with Motorola and Atmel and operated as Wafer Fabrication Manager with IR Sensor company Pyreos where he developed and commercialised the worlds first thin film PZT based IR sensor manufacturing line. He then worked as a consultant in the MEMs industry before joining Spectrolytic.
Neil is a chartered Engineer (CEng) and Scientist (CSci) and corporate member of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (MIChemE) and holds a BEng (Hons) in Chemical & Process Engineering from Strathclyde University.
Previously Spyros worked as an applications engineer at Pyreos Ltd, where he developed sensor-based algorithms for gesture sensing. Prior to this he worked as an ASIC Software Engineer at Schrader Electronics and spent several years at Heriot Watt University as a researcher into free-space optical neural networks. Spyros holds a BSc in computer science and an MSc in embedded systems engineering.
Dr Costas Plakas – Software Manager
Costas is responsible for the management of Spectrolytic’s software platforms. This ranges from cloud-based dashboard management to various internal software platforms such as sales, product definition, chemometrics and system measurement consoles.
Previously, Costas worked for 10 years In the Medical Imaging sector for Toshiba, both as senior scientist specialising in algorithms and AI for medical applications, and as a project/product manager. His post-doctorate experience at Heriot-Watt University includes working as a computer vision development manager in Robotics for 5 years.
Costas holds several project management qualifications (PRINCE II, AgilePM) and is working towards an MBA at the University of Strathclyde. Costas holds a BSc in Physics, an MSc in Knowledge Based Systems and a PhD in Computer Science.
Dr Gergely Hantos – Senior Systems Engineer
Gergely is responsible for our product calibration and quality control processes. He is also responsible for data analysis software development. Previously, he worked for at Broadcom and Pyreos as an Applications Engineer overseeing the development of the validation systems. Gergely spent 5 years at Cirrus Logic in Machine Learning based MEMS microphone research and development as part of his PhD. Gergely holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, a joint MSc in Smart Systems Integration from Heriot Watt University, University of South-Eastern Norway and Budapest University of Technology and Economics and a PhD in Embedded Intelligence from Heriot Watt University