Our Team
Dedicated to Sleep Technology and Its Application
Senior Leadership Team
Patrick Crampton – President and Chief Operating Officer
Joining Cerebra in April 2019, Patrick brings a passion for commercializing innovation and building customer-focused organizations. Patrick previously served as Chief Operating Officer for Farmers Edge, a global leader in the Ag Tech sector and Vice President of Business & Product Development at Agrisoma Biosciences, a pioneer in the development sustainable biojet fuels. Patrick brings significant global business & product management experience having served in numerous senior roles at Syngenta AG including Global Business Manager and Head of Marketing for the Canadian business unit. Patrick holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Guelph and a Masters in Business Administration from the Queen’s School of Business. Patrick also serves as a board member for the Biosciences Association of Manitoba.
Lorna McLeod – Chief Financial Officer
Lorna joined the Cerebra team in June 2018. Prior to this she was Senior Vice President, Finance at Postmedia Network Inc., a Canadian newsmedia company representing more than 140 brands across multiple print, online, and mobile platforms. She held senior finance positions in Postmedia’s predecessor companies, Canwest Limited Partnership and Canwest Media. Prior to joining Canwest, she was Vice President, Finance at TruServ Canada. Lorna holds a CPA, CA designation as well as a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) degree from the University of Manitoba.
Guy Duke – Vice President, Technology
Guy joined Cerebra in February 2022 bringing extensive software development experience. Guy co-founded GranDuke Geomatics in 2012, a software services company that was later acquired by Farmers Edge in 2015. At Farmers Edge Guy served as the Vice President of Analytics and built several modeling and data science teams that created digital tools for growers to maximize their farm’s profitability. Guy has a passion for enabling high-velocity software development in a fast-growing start-up environment and a deep understanding of how to apply decision science to build value for businesses. Guy holds a Bachelor of Environmental Science and a Master’s in Geography from the University of Lethbridge.
Dr. Veronica Guadagni – Director, Sleep Science
Dr. Guadagni joined Cerebra in December 2022. Dr. Guadagni completed a Bachelor in Psychobiology and a Masters in Neuroscience at the University of L’Aquila, Italy. She then moved to Canada where she completed a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neurosciences at the University of Calgary and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Cumming School of Medicine and Hotchkiss Brain Institute with funds from the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Dr. Guadagni’s research interests focus on investigating the effects of sleep , sleep-deprivation, and sleep disturbances on cognitive functioning and brain structure and function in both healthy and clinical populations. As Director, Sleep Science at Cerebra, Dr. Guadagni is leading the Sleep Science team to validate and develop new neuro-technologies and sleep indexes with the ultimate goal to improves assessment and diagnosis of sleep disorders.
Ruth St. Yves – Director, Customer Success
Ruth joined Cerebra in January 2022 as Director of Customer Success. Ruth brings over 20 years of experience leading customer-focused teams in various industries including telecommunications and financial services, holding titles such as National Director of Customer Care with Shaw Communications and Vice President of Insolvency Services with Bromwich & Smith. Ruth is passionate about employee engagement and has an unwavering commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience.
Supporting Research and Development for Ultimate Sleep Health
Dr. David White, MD
Dr. David White, MD, is currently Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs at Apnimed Pharma, is Professor of Medicine, Part time, at Harvard Medical school, and was the former Chief Medical Officer at Philips Sleep & Respiratory Care. Some of his major accomplishments include being President of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Chairing the Task Force to write the research plan addressing sleep and its disorders for the National Institutes of Health, and being the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal SLEEP. He was also on the test writing committees for the American Board of Internal Medicine for both Pulmonary Disease and Sleep Medicine.
Areas of focus: Pathophysiology of sleep breathing disorders; sleep apnea phenotyping to guide therapy; simplified methods to diagnose and monitor sleep apnea
Clete A. Kushida, MD, PhD
Clete A. Kushida, MD, PhD is an academic physician-scientist whose major accomplishments and roles include serving as past President of the World Sleep Society, the World Sleep Federation, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), and founding President of the California Sleep Society. Dr. Kushida has authored or edited over 200 publications, including six books, and serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Sleep Science and Practice.
Areas of focus: Sleep apnea, sleep technology, narcolepsy/hypersomnias, and countermeasures for sleep loss
Dr. Najib Ayas MD MPH
Dr. Ayas is a Professor of Medicine and Associate Head of Research in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and staff at the Leon Judah Blackmore Centre for Sleep Disorders at UBC Hospital.
He completed Medical School training at the University of Alberta, his Internal Medicine Residency at the Mayo Clinic, and a Respiratory/Critical Care/Sleep and Research Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He also completed a Masters in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
He has been actively involved in clinical practice and reseach of sleep since 1996 with over 250 scientific publications.
Previously, he has been a Chair of the Canadian Thoracic Society Sleep Disordered Breathing Guideliens Committee, an Exectuive Member of the Canadian Sleep Society, and a Chair of the American Thoracic Society Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology Planning Committee.
Dr. Richard Berry, MD
Dr. Richard Berry, MD, is Professor of Medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Medical Director of the UF Health Sleep Center and Director of the UF Sleep Medicine Fellowship. His major accomplishments and roles include serving as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Past President of the AASM Foundation, and serving on the AASM Board of Directors. Dr. Berry was chair of the AASM Scoring Manual Committee for 10 years and lead author on a publication of the AASM Sleep Apnea Definitions task force. He has written two popular sleep textbooks: The Fundamentals of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Medicine Pearls.
Areas of focus: Home sleep apnea testing, treatments for obstructive sleep apnea, EEG arousals, technology advances in polysomnography
Thomas Penzel, PhD
Professor Thomas Penzel currently serves as Scientific Chair of the Interdisciplinary Center of Sleep Medicine and is also the Director of Research of the Interdisciplinary Sleep Medicine Center at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Germany). His major accomplishments include serving as President of the German Sleep Society and Adcom member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, an IEEE group dedicated to the study of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Penzel is editor-in-chief of the journal Sleep and Breathing and has published more than 300 journal papers.
Areas of focus: sleep medicine, biomedical signals, wearables, the cardiovascular and the neural system related to the sleep-wake regulation, and pathophysiology of sleep disordered breathing.
Célyne Bastien PhD
Dr. Célyne Bastien PhD, is a Full Professor in the School of Psychology at Laval University and Researcher at the Cervo Brain Research Centre. Dr. Bastien currently serves as the President for the Canadian Sleep Society where she has been an active advocate for over 15 years. She studies the psychological and physiological aspects of insomnia to understand its effects on people and to find ways of treating them. Dr. Bastien has conducted studies showing that the brains of insomniacs remain in a state of hypervigilance during sleep, and that these people respond differently to stimuli (sound or visual) during sleep, but also while awake. She is the director of the Human Neurosciences and Sleep Laboratory and has received CIHR grants to measure cortical activation in people with insomnia.
Areas of focus: Psychophysiological aspects of sleep; microstructure and quantitative analyses of sleep EEG; Insomnia and insomnia therapy; cortical activation and hyperarousal; event-related potentials in sleep and during wake; sleep perception; and sleep in the elderly.
