John Linton

John is a seasoned R&D leader and product development expert with 25+ years inventing and scaling early stage technologies. He has degrees from Stanford (PhD, MS) and MIT (SB). John started his R&D career in the concrete industry at WR Grace developing products to control shrinkage cracking. Wanting to move back to Boston, John then moved to Polaroid where he formulated improved film developers and lead the coating development for “Instant 35mm film”. He then spent 7 years in biotech, 2 years with MJ Research developing DNA sequencing hardware, and 5 years at BioTrove leading a high throughput drug discovery platform. BioTrove was acquired by Life Technologies, but the technology was spun out into another small company which still does high throughput mass spectrometry assays. He then led the Inkjet Platform Development team at Cabot Corporation, but it wasn’t long before he was back at a young MIT startup called QD Vision, where he helped invent, develop, and scale up the world’s first quantum dot enhanced TVs with Sony. This TV won many awards and started a whole new industry of QD-enabled TVs. John then spent 5 years at 1366 Technologies in charge of the Process R&D team, where they developed a kerfless silicon process that makes solar cells that rival standard cells in efficiency, at half the cost. His most recent effort was a startup called Datacule that can store archival data in molecules.

John’s passion is learning and contributing to new technologies, and building and leading R&D teams from within. He has 42 issued patents across a wide variety of technologies.