Leadership Team
Joe Kiani, MS. Chairman
Founder and Executive Chairman of Willow Laboratories, Founder of Masimo and Patient Safety, CEO of Like Minded Media
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Joe Kiani is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Willow Laboratories, a health and wellness innovator focused on developing noninvasive patient monitoring and reinventing diabetes care. Willow, founded in 1998, is the inventor of rainbow technology and Nutu and is preparing to commercialize several new innovations. Before launching Willow, Joe Kiani founded Masimo in 1989, a global medical technology company known for breakthrough patient monitoring technologies. Under his leadership as Chairman and CEO, Masimo grew from a startup in his garage into a publicly traded enterprise with over $2 billion in revenue. Its technologies, including Signal Extraction Technology (SET), are used on more than 200 million patients annually and have helped reduce infant blindness, save lives and lower healthcare costs.
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Mr. Kiani serves on the boards of various healthcare institutions, including Rady Children’s Hospital, and was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in 2021, where he contributed significantly as the co-lead of the Patient Safety working group to the national PCAST report on patient safety, "A Transformational Effort on Patient Safety", published in September of 2023. His contributions to healthcare have earned him multiple awards, including the Society of Critical Care Innovation Award, the Robert Wears Patient Safety Award, TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024 for the W1 Medical Watch and Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in Life Sciences.
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Kiani is also Chairman and CEO of Like Minded Labs and Chairman of A Starting Point and Like Minded Entertainment. He founded the Kiani Preserve in the Santa Ynez Valley, focused on regenerative farming, with its first wine vintage released in 2025. He holds bachelor's and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from San Diego State University and honorary doctorates from SDSU and Chapman University. Kiani remains tirelessly dedicated to improving the lives of patients, their safety, and the healthcare system they interact with.
Stephen C. Jensen, Director
Partner, Knobbe Martens
Stephen C. Jensen is a partner at Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear LLP, one of the largest intellectual property law firms in the country. He has been practicing law for over 25 years, with most of that representing innovative medical technology companies. Mr. Jensen received his J.D., Order of the Coif, at the University of California - Los Angeles in 1990, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering , magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University in 1987. Prior to becoming a lawyer, he worked for Hughes Aircraft where he was involved in development of airborne radar systems.
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He served on the Board of Directors of Sedline, Inc, a company that developed non-invasive brain function monitoring products. He also served as the Senior Vice President of OEM Business and Business Development at Masimo Corporation, and currently serves on the board of directors of Cercacor Corporation, a company that is developing non-invasive monitoring technology. He brings true passion for patient safety, particularly through innovation. He believes that if we apply Voltaire’s principal of “no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking,” and stop worrying about who gets credit, we can solve any patient safety problems presented.
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Mr. Jensen, with his wife and five children have been serving the vision impaired community for over a decade, through their passion for raising seeing-eye dogs. These dogs are provided to the vision impaired at no charge. He also provided volunteer service overseas for about a year and a half before finishing his undergraduate degree.
Sarah Kiani, BS, Director
Governance Board Member, Patient Safety Movement Foundation
Sarah has been a devoted mother, wife and philanthropist since the age of 21. She has served as a member of the Board of Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare a year after its founding. The foundation has focused on improvement of patient care with many projects, including the founding of Patient Safety, Science and Technology Summit (patientsafetysummit.org). She and her husband, Joe Kiani, have also been involved in various international projects, including building schools in Uganda with their support of Clinton Global Initiatives.
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In addition, Sarah has been involved in many local programs, including the Booster club at George White Elementary School, where she spearheaded various programs including raising money to buy all Apple computers for the computer lab. She and her husband have also helped the school by improving its image and communications with the entire school community. In addition, Sarah chaired the March of Dimes fundraising event in 2003, and together with her husband is leading this year’s MOD Walk, as they did for Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in 2009 for their annual walk.
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Sarah has also involved her daughters, Kayla and Nessa, in volunteerism as they tutored students at a title 1 elementary school in Santa Ana. Kayla and Nessa have made gift bags for kids at CHOC hospital during holidays and have taken care of families for the holidays sponsor meals.
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Sarah has been a student of nutrition and its impact on children and has become an expert in proper diet and supplements to encourage a healthy mind and body.
Fredric J. Harris, Director
Professor at UCSD, Digital Signal Processing for Communication Systems
Multirate Signal Processing
Dr. Harris is an adjunct professor at University of California San Diego. He was a professor of Electrical engineering and was CUBIC signal processing chair at San Diego State University. He is an internationally renowned expert on DSP and Communication Systems. He is also the co-inventor of the Blackman-Harris window. He also has extensively published many technical papers, the most famous being the seminal 1978 paper "On the use of Windows for Harmonic Analysis with the Discrete Fourier Transform." He is also the author of the textbook Multi-rate Signal Processing for Communication Systems and is co-author with Bernard Sklar of the 3-rd edition textbook on Digital Communications. He holds 38 patents on DSP and digital radio receiver technology.
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Harris received his B.S. from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, his M.S. from San Diego State University, his PhD from Aalborg University, and did PhD course work at the University of California, San Diego. He is an IEEE Fellow and was co-editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Digital Signal Processing.
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In early 2010 the "Fred Harris Endowed Chair in Digital Signal Processing" fund was established by Eric Johnson and Qualcommexecutive Peggy Johnson. The fund is described to encourage and enable future students to pursue careers in the communications specialty of electrical engineering and to honor Fred Harris' legacy. In 2020, the Johnson's funded the fred harris Chair of DSP with a donation of $3.1 million.
