Cataphora - Management Team

Management Team

Elizabeth Charnock, CEO

Elizabeth founded Cataphora and has led it from concept to successful profitability, funded entirely by revenues from clients and without any outside investment. To do this, she has drawn on her prior experience as a CEO and on her extensive knowledge of information retrieval technology and business. She was CEO and founder of Troba, an industry leading Customer Relationship Management software company which she sold in 2001. Elizabeth has significant experience in engineering management, management consulting, and restart management at such companies as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Elizabeth holds a BS in Theoretical Mathematics from the University of Michigan Honors Program.

Jonathan Nystrom, Executive Vice President

Jonathan Nystrom, Vice President of Sales

Jonathan's background includes fifteen years in sales and marketing of software for the legal industry. He joined Cataphora from IKON Office Solutions, where he worked closely with top law firms and corporate law departments throughout the United States. Jonathan held a number of positions with IKON, including Vice President of Sales, Digital Litigation Solutions, and worked in numerous functions encompassing sales, sales management, operations, and general management. Jonathan's prior background includes substantial experience of direct and channel sales and sales management in government and commercial markets. Jonathan holds a BA in Political Science from Knox College in Galesburg, IL.

Rick Janowski, Director of Marketing

Rick has over twenty years of computer industry experience and has been with Cataphora since its foundation. Prior to Cataphora, he was Director of Product Marketing for Mercado, a search software startup. Previously, Rick held a series of positions with Hewlett-Packard. He started in HP's corporate research laboratories in Bristol, England, and then in Palo Alto, California, researching knowledge representation technologies and inventing a number of tools for use in HP businesses. In 1994, he assumed the role of Technology Program Manager for HP's public corporate website. Subsequently, he served in a variety of strategic business development and marketing roles. Rick earned a First Class Honours Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, England.

Mark Epstein, Director of Technical Services

Mark is responsible for the design and deployment of the data center and network systems that are critical to meeting the needs of Cataphora's clients for fast, accurate, secure, large-scale and extremely reliable processing of data. Mark leads a team that has many years of experience of running these systems, which process and store very significant volumes of customer data, and support uninterrupted real-time access for large numbers of external users simultaneously. Prior to Cataphora, Mark co-founded Ponte Communications, a network security software company, where he was Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer for over five years. Mark's experience also encompasses network security consultancy and engineering of computer storage systems with companies including McAfee and Silicon Graphics.

Lee Pantuso, Director of Finance

Lee Pantuso is the Finance Director for Cataphora, Inc., where she brings over 18 years of extensive experience in financial management, consulting and monitoring, as well as new business development. She joined Cataphora from her position as Chief Financial Officer at NeoCarta Ventures, where she acquired expertise tracking fund transactions, monitoring fund performance, and managing accounts payable, payroll and financial reporting. Lee's prior background includes working as Chief Financial Officer for PicksPal, Inc., working at Arthur Anderson & Co specializing in financial consulting for small businesses and start ups, and working in various finance positions during eight years at Qwest, where she focused on developing new lines of business in the US and emerging economic growth countries in Europe. Lee has a BS in Accounting from University of Virginia and an MBA from the University of Denver.

Sonya Sigler, Esq., Vice President and General Counsel

Sonya Sigler, Esq., Vice President of Business Development and General Counsel

Sonya has over ten years of experience in business relationship management through her role as in-house counsel and as a business development and legal consultant to start-ups such as Treasure Media, RealCommunities and IDO Systems, as well as established companies such as Sony and Intuit. Sonya worked as an attorney at Sega supporting the Business Development, Product Development, Marketing, and Finance groups, as well as Sega Studios in Los Angeles. More recently, Sonya worked at Intuit, where she evaluated and negotiated agreements and licenses for Intuit's industry-leading financial software products. Sonya holds a JD from Santa Clara University and a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and is a member of the California State Bar.

Dick Oehrle, Chief Linguist

Dick has held teaching or research positions at the Universities of Stanford, Groningen (Netherlands), Pennsylvania, California (Los Angeles), and Tübingen (Germany). He was Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Dick is a past president of the Mathematics of Language special interest group of the Association of Computational Linguistics and has served on the editorial boards of several distinguished linguistics journals, including Language and Research on Language and Computation. He has been widely published on a variety of linguistic topics, including connections of grammatical architecture with algebra, logic, and computation. Prior to joining Cataphora, he was Senior Linguist at YY Technologies. Dick holds a BA in English from Harvard University, an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Eric Johnson, Vice President of Legal Operations

Eric Johnson, Vice President of e-Discovery Solutions

Eric is a legal industry veteran whose experience includes developing innovative, professionally run, and efficient discovery services organizations. He brings with him more than twenty years of expertise. Eric's role at Cataphora encompasses management of electronic discovery solutions, investigative analytics, and operations. Prior to joining Cataphora, Eric held positions at some of the nation's most respected law firms including Shearman & Sterling, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Pillsbury Winthrop and, most recently, Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder. Eric has had significant involvement with legal matters and civil litigations in such diverse areas as Life Sciences, Technology, Second Requests, Patents & Trademarks, Antitrust, and Securities. Eric holds a BA in Classical Studies from the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Steve Roberts, Chief Technology Officer

An acknowledged industry leader in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Steve has specialized in combining NLP techniques with other technologies. Previously he led groups working on speech recognition at ViaFone and on agent technology at Dejima. He held similar roles at other Silicon Valley companies, including Neuron Data, the leading vendor of expert system technology. Steve studied computational linguistics at the University of Michigan.