Management Team

Jason Lohn, CEO, co-founder Jason is an entrepreneur and engineer who researches new algorithms for hardware design and optimization. He is best known for leading the team that put the first evolved antenna into space on a NASA spacecraft. In addition to X5, he maintains an appointment as an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley. Previously he founded and led Evolvable Systems research at NASA Ames Research Center, co-founded a startup, worked in search quality at Google, was a visiting scholar at Stanford, and worked as a software engineer at IBM. He has over 50 technical publications and his work has been featured in Wired magazine, MIT Tech Review, and Popular Science. He was a co-founder and co-chair of six NASA/DoD Conferences on Evolvable Hardware, and serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE TEC and GPEM. Jason received his BS from Lehigh University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park, all in Electrical Engineering.

Derek Linden, CTO, co-founder Derek has performed groundbreaking research in the automated design of wire and patch antennas using advanced optimization algorithms since 1995. He is co-inventor of the patented genetic antenna design process and has published widely on the subject, including numerous conference, journal, magazine articles, and book chapters. Prior to X5 Systems, he was the Director of Antenna Engineering at JEM Engineering in Laurel, MD. He received Discover Magazine's Top 10 Innovation Award in 2000, the Gold Medal in Human Competitive Result competition at the 2004 GECCO Conference, and a NASA Group Achievement Award in 2006. His work has also been highlighted in Science News, The New York Times, Wired magazine, EDN, Antenna Systems and Technology Magazine, Technology Review, Aviation Week, and Popular Science. Derek received his BS degree from the US Air Force Academy and his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Michel Courtoy, VP of Business Development Michel began his career in design engineering and software engineering with seven years at Intel. He managed product marketing for layout verification software at Cadence Design Systems and held executive positions at Quickturn Design Systems, Osprey Design Systems (which he also co-founded), Aptix Corporation, and Frequency Technology. As vice president of marketing for Silicon Perspective, Courtoy created the market for silicon virtual prototyping and was a key player in the company's acquisition by Cadence in 2001. He served as a vice president at Cadence until 2005 and then became President and CEO of Certess, a leading provider of functional verification tools for IC design. He led Certess through its acquisition by SpringSoft in 2009. Michel holds a BSEE from University Catholique de Louvain, Belgium; an MSEE from University of California, San Diego; and an MBA from Santa Clara University, California.