Dr. George E. Gerpheide serves as a Senior Advisor at G.R. Associate, Inc. Dr. Gerpheide serves as a President at c2mw4 LLC, where he acts as an inventor, entrepreneur, and mentor. He was a Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer at Cirque Corporation for 15 years. Dr. Gerpheide has 18 United States patents plus additional foreign and pending He holds a B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ph.D. from the University of Utah.
Dr. George E. Gerpheide formed Cirque Corporation in 1991 and its predecessor, Proxima, Inc. in 1988, to further develop and commercialize GlidePoint® technology, which he had previously developed. As founding president, Dr. Gerpheide was the guiding force behind taking Cirque from a small start-up basement business to a respected, multimillion-dollar corporation known throughout the world. He has been responsible for:
Initially developing GlidePoint® technology on which he holds five patents
Assembling and leading a technical team
Attracting team members with key financial, sales, and marketing skills
Securing over $2 million in private funding
Negotiating technology license agreements
Formulating corporate strategic and growth planning
Prior to founding Proxima and Cirque, Dr. Gerpheide founded and operated Quality Microcomputer Instrumentation (QMI), an engineering design firm, and Aquila Instruments, Inc. a geophysical equipment company. He was a Visiting Scientist at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was part of a team which developed a dexterous robotics hand. Dr. Gerpheide served as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah, where he specialized in motion control, sensing systems. Dr. Gerpheide initiated and coordinated a research experiment to investigate growth of protein crystals in micro-gravity in conjunction with Utah State University for the Space Shuttle Challenger, Mission 41-B.
Dr. Gerpheide holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah (1981), where he was a Graduate Research Fellow and IBM Fellow. He also holds a B.S.E.E. degree from MIT (1975), where he was a National Merit Scholar. He is a member of the Institute of Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
During the startup years, the company was operating in the founder's basement on a shoe string budget, and at times did not have the funds to make the meager payroll. While the inventor saw great potential, the markets need was not yet established. Potential customers were not interested, and most computers did not have a graphical user interface - a Windows operating system.