Our founders
Innovation built on personal experience
Senscio Systems, Inc. was founded in 2010 by Piali De, PhD, Hugh A. Stoddart, PhD and Hugh F. Stoddart, with a mission to empower older adults to age comfortably and independently at home.
“My father-in-law, who had health concerns, required him to spend extended periods of time in the hospital. Due to this, he lost a significant amount of his confidence and independence. This was the catalyst for my co-founders and me to embark on this journey to help our aging population meet their complex medical needs from the comfort of their homes. This was the beginning of Senscio.” Piali De, PhD.
Senscio's Co-Founders
Co-founders of Senscio, Co-inventors of the Scio™ AI framework and Co-founders of the Clinical Innovation Council
Hugh Stoddart, PhD, 1955-2023
Co-Founder, Co-Inventor and Chief Scientist R&D
Co-inventor of Senscio’s patented Scio framework, the artificially intelligent inference engine that contextualizes data in any domain into actionable intelligence, upon which the Ibis Health program is built.
Hugh received his BS from Knox College (Elizabeth B. Smith Award for Excellence in Physics), his MS in physics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Pi Sigma), and his ScM and PhD in physics from Brown University (Sigma Xi)
He authored 12 papers on the electronic and optical properties of amorphous semiconductors and held four patents in the field of medical instrumentation. His areas of expertise included instrumentation, physical optics, optical engineering, electronics, data analysis, statistics, modeling of complex physical systems, programming, application development, control theory, optimization theory, neural networks, pattern recognition and image processing.
Piali De, PhD
Co-Founder, Co-Inventor and CEO
Co-inventor of Senscio’s patented Scio framework. A recognized thought leader in digital health innovation, De is a frequent and eloquent speaker and guest lecturer at digital health summits and health care conferences, including HFMA, HIMSS, The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, Medical Development Group, MedSpeaks and Health Innovators.
Prior to Senscio, Piali, a Brown University-trained physicist, was an engineering fellow at Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems, where she developed a system called Confluence, designed to deliver knowledge-based decision support for public safety missions, pandemic crisis, natural disaster responses, military missions and situations that require multiple organizations to analyze data simultaneously and respond in immediate unison. She is the author of many publications, three patents and one pending patent.
Hugh F. Stoddart
Hugh F. Stoddart 1927-2017. Co-founder and director of Senscio Systems, Hugh had extensive experience in the management of high-tech companies including Atomic Instrument Company (VP), Baird Corporation (VP), Atomium Corporation (Pres.), Perkin-Elmer’s Laser Department (Manager) and many more. He also served on several boards of directors and scientific advisory boards and has 40+ patents.
More about Hugh
After one year at Caltech, Hugh found himself training for the invasion of Japan. The bomb was dropped and he went to Korea to serve as an x-ray technician in a forward MASH unit. On return, he completed his studies with a major in physics and a minor in biology. After several years at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory Physics Division, he went on to MIT for graduate studies and research in nuclear physics.
He left MIT in 1954 to join Atomic Instrument Company where he developed an internationally recognized product line of nuclear instrumentation including the first positron coincidence brain scanner at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the first multichannel gamma-ray spectrometer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He oversaw the development of a low-power, high-reliability computer for the Naval Research Laboratory. In 1956, when Atomic merged with Baird Associates, Hugh introduced the first high-speed cardiac camera and a line of portable monitoring instruments.
Hugh founded Atomium Corporation where he received the Master Design award for the first nuclear medicine blood volume measurement instrument for operating room use. In 1963, after Atomium was bought by Miles Laboratories, Hugh began an ongoing consulting practice that included work for various technology-based companies and the US government.
Joining Cleon Corporation, he invented a unique and popular whole-body scanner and, in 1973, invented the novel scanned focal point (SFP) brain imager for nuclear medicine. After Union Carbide Imaging Systems bought Cleon, he and his son, Hugh A., continued the design of the SFP and developed the first 61-tube, wide field-of-view gamma camera.
Frank E. Ferguson
Frank Ferguson 1926-2021. Angel investor and company director for Senscio Systems. Frank and Hugh F. Stoddart were friends for over five decades. Their collective wisdom, imparted to all of us left behind, is beyond measure.
More about Frank
Frank Ferguson was one of five co-founders of Curriculum Associates. Frank graduated from Iowa State University in 1950 with a degree in journalism and minors in education and psychology. He received an MBA from MIT in 1959.
Frank served as President of the BOSE Corporation from 1969–1976, as President of Curriculum Associates from 1976–2008 and since then as its Chairman until his retirement. Frank was a member of the Boston chapter of Social Venture Partners, a non-profit that mentors and financially supports organizations with social missions.
Since 2010, Frank had been a board advisor to the Lionheart Foundation. He had been profoundly influenced by the work of Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, and especially by the implications for instruction and learning arising from the connection of oral language to cognition set forth in Lev Vygotsky's seminal work, Thought and Language. Frank had recently been honored with an AAP Hall of Fame Award for lifetime achievement and contributions to the education industry.