Brainbench Board of Directors

President's Message
About Brainbench
Management Team
News
Directions to Brainbench

Zim Putney
Managing Director and CEO
NextGen Capital

Barbara Plantholt Melera
President and Chief Executive Officer
Triad Investors Corporation

Mike Russiello
President, CEO and Co-founder
Brainbench

Zim Putney, Chairman of the Board
Zim Putney is Managing Director and CEO of NextGen Capital. He has over thirty years of experience as a venture capitalist, investor, executive and scientist in technology companies. As co-founder of the management consulting firm Putney & Eckstein, Inc., he assisted technology CEO's in areas of business and marketing strategy, quality management, and operations. For Solarex Corporation, the world's leading photovoltaic company, he headed research and development, and marketing in over 70 countries before and after acquisition by Amoco. For nearly ten years he served as an award-winning scientist, inventor, and technology manager for IBM.

Mr. Putney earned a BS degree in Physics from Syracuse University and an Sc.M. from Brown University.

Barbara Plantholt Melera
Barbara Melera is the President and Chief Executive Office of Triad Investors Corporation, a venture capital corporation initiated by Virginia Tech and the family of Johns Hopkins Institutions to commercialize technology from universities and to invest in seed or early stage technology companies. She is the founder and managing partner of Tritech Partners perhaps the most successful seed and early stage venture fund of its size in the US. Today she is a director/board advisor of two advanced technology companies in the Mid-Atlantic Region and has portfolio management responsibility for three other companies in which her firm has made investments.

Prior to joining Triad, Ms. Melera spent five years as an investment professional with Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation. She has been the founding/first institutional investor in such industry leaders as Matritech, Inc., TalkingNets, Inc., PPL Therapeutics Ltd., and Brainbench.

In 1991, the Governor of Maryland appointed her founding Chairman of the Maryland Bioprocessing Center and served as the Chairman from 1991 to 1996. She also was the Treasurer and a Director of the Greater Baltimore Committee since 1992 and served as the organization’s Secretary from 1994 to 1997. She was a Director of The Mid-Atlantic Venture Association and a member of the President's Board of Visitors for the University of Maryland at Baltimore. For the past 6 years, she has been a Director of The Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties Corporation and a member of its Executive Committee. Ms. Melera was also a trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the Maryland Science Center.

Ms. Melera has a S.B. in Mathematics and Soviet Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds an S.M. In Finance and the Management of Technological Innovation from MIT's Sloan School of Management and an M.Ed. from Northeastern University.

Mike Russiello
Mike Russiello co-founded Brainbench in 1998 and has been the driving force behind Brainbench’s leadership in the market for online skills measurement solutions. Mike led Brainbench's development of revolutionary online assessments and certifications—creating a platform that focuses on the needs for individuals and corporations to qualify and quantify the skills that drive their success.