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Annual Dinner 2006
- Nassib Chamoun
Introduction
Good
evening every one
Thank
you for joining us tonight.
Special
thanks go to Maureen Chamoun who accepted our invitation and was able to
join us tonight even though she has a flight tomorrow morning at 6:00 in
the morning.
It
is a great pleasure and honor for me to be presenting to you tonight my
dear friend Nassib Chamoun.
For
the ones who don’t know Nassib, Nassib is the founder and CEO of
ASPECT Medical a medical
device company that specializes in monitoring the Brain waves to measure
the consciousness of patients under anesthesia and to insure that the
patient is at the right level of sedation during operation. As you may
know, little sedation can lead to the patient becoming alert during the
operation, even though he is immobilized, the alternative is deep
sedation which could lead to major side effects after the operation and
could lead to a very long recovery.
Aspect
is based in Newton has turned its first profit as a company in 2005
after 18 years of existence. Today Aspect Medical is one of the most
talked about success companies on wall street with a Market CAP over
$780 Million, and revenue of over 71 million. Just to give you an idea,
in March 2003 the company stock was trading around $3 Dollars a share
and it is now trading around the $36 a share.
I
met “The Chief” in 1981/1982 through a common friend, George Assaf.
Nassib and George used to be room mates and were going to Northeastern
together. The war in Lebanon was raging at that time. We felt so
helpless being here with our families in Lebanon getting bombarded daily
and trapped in basements and bathrooms. We got together often to discuss
the situation and to pool our resources to do every thing we can to help
raise awareness about the Lebanese people and to do every thing we can
to help.
Nassib
Graduated from Northeastern in 1984 with a degree in Electrical
Engineering with a specialization in signal processing, He then went on
to Boston University where he earned a master's degree in computer
engineering. He then conducted PhD research on cardiac electrophysiology
at the Harvard School of Public Health's Lown Cardiovascular Research
Laboratory, under the direction of cardiologist Bernard Lown. It was
there that Nassib realized the challenge and the opportunity to explore
the Brain monitoring technology that he eventually developed and
patentented to became the core foundation for his company.
When
Nassib told Dr Lown, his mentor and adviser at Harvard, that he was
planning to drop out of school to start the company, Lown told him that
was anything but logical, beseeching him to remain in academia. Another
mentor did just the opposite. Charles A. Zraket, ,
the former head of Mitre Corporation, in Bedford, Massachusetts,
a Lebanese America and a good friend of Jack and Evelyn Hajjar, who’s
house Nassib used to frequent, told Nassib that an academic setting will
not likely offer him the time or the money to accomplish his goals. The
Advice of Charles Zraket resonated with Nassib and the risks and rewards
of business appealed to him. The pace and bureaucracy of academia
didn't.
The
rest is history.
Nassib
continues to hold Mr. Charles Zraket, who passed away in 1997, in great
esteem, and attributes a large portion of his success to Mr. Zraket
guidance and advice. You will hear more about this subject later in the
evening. Yet Nassib remains grateful to the Lown Cardiovascular Research
Foundation for fully funding his graduate studies, and credits Dr. Lown
in helping him develop the social mission that helped him form Aspect's
identity.
With
this I ask you to give a warm welcome to our honored guest Mr. Nassib
Chamoun.
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