Our Team
Dan Pardi, MS
Dan is the CEO and co-founder of Dan’s Plan, an online wellness and technology company promoting optimal health in our modern world. Prior to founding this company, Dan established a track record of excellence in various health-related occupations, including innovative work in bioinformatics and Scientific and Medical Affairs in the biopharmaceutical industries. Dan has also performed scientific research on diet, exercise, and cancer, and continues to conduct research today in both sleep neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University and the University of Leiden. As a lauded presenter and educator, Dan has been invited to speak to physician and academic audiences around the world, including Switzerland, Germany, Moscow, Belgium, Netherlands, Turkey, Budapest, and throughout the United States. He is an invited member of the Society for Ingestive Behavior and was formerly the Chairman of the Board of Directors for IISRA, which is a global association helping to stimulate independent research grants for academic investigators. Early in his career, he also served as the Assistant Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at the University of San Francisco, where his primary responsibility was the design of year-round training protocols to optimize in-season peak performance for 13 different athletic teams. Loves: Family, dogs, MMA, cycling, dancing, electronic music, soul, jazz, great food, a good night sleep, and Burning Man.
Erik Svenson
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Erik is the COO and co-founder of Dan’s Plan. Prior to founding this company, Erik worked for over ten years in finance. He spent two years as an Investment Banker and then worked for two insurance companies, managing investments totaling over $3 billion in the food and beverage industry. Early in his career, Erik worked in both business and strategic development for a bioinformatics start-up. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Economics. He also completed the CFA program. Erik shares the record for the longest touchdown pass in American Football history (99 yards in high school – probably tied with hundreds of others).
Loves: Family, spinning records, Mt. biking, the Oakland A's, San Francisco, his Fitbit, and his Crock Pot.
Erik is the COO and co-founder of Dan’s Plan. Prior to founding this company, Erik worked for over ten years in finance. He spent two years as an Investment Banker and then worked for two insurance companies, managing investments totaling over $3 billion in the food and beverage industry. Early in his career, Erik worked in both business and strategic development for a bioinformatics start-up. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Economics. He also completed the CFA program. Erik shares the record for the longest touchdown pass in American Football history (99 yards in high school – probably tied with hundreds of others). Loves: Family, spinning records, Mt. biking, the Oakland A's, San Francisco, his Fitbit, and his Crock Pot.
Larry Carter, PhD - Advisor
Larry is a Scientific Advisor and a co-founder of Dan’s Plan. A Michigan native, Larry earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology and Psychology from Kalamazoo College where he studied medicinal plants deep in the Amazonian rain forest and played middle and strong-side linebacker on the football team. After college, Larry completed a PhD in Pharmacology from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, which resulted in over a dozen scientific, peer-reviewed publications and earned him the Armand J. Guarino Award for Academic Excellence in Doctoral Studies (the highest student recognition awarded by the school). Subsequently, he completed a Clinical Research Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where he remains an Adjunct Assistant Professor. During that time he published another dozen papers, contributed to two books, served on the Medical School’s IRB, and served as an on-camera clinical pharmacology expert for the local ABC and Fox affiliate television stations in Little Rock. Larry has a wealth of development and regulatory experience having served as a Special Government Employee for FDA, having presented before the European Medicines Agency, and having served as a consultant to several pharmaceutical companies. He has given national and international invited presentations, including seminars at the NIH, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University, and he has served as an expert reviewer for over two dozen scientific and medical journals. Larry also has a track record of working for small and innovative companies. He founded his first business at the age of 13 when he started painting fences in the Detroit area.Loves: Family, football, BBQ, strength training, sleeping, fine dining, science, and breakfast.
Stephan Guyenet - Advisor
Stephan is a postdoctoral obesity researcher at the University of Washington. He has a long-standing interest in health and nutrition, including how human evolutionary history can inform today’s diet and lifestyle choices. His current research focuses on the role of the brain in obesity and metabolism. Stephan has presented his research at a number of professional and lay science conferences, including the American Diabetes Association, the American Society of Human Genetics, the Ancestral Health Symposium, and TEDx Harvard Law. He is a published author in a number of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and the sole author of the diet-health weblog Whole Health Source. He received a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Washington.
Paul Jaminet, PhD - Advisor
Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley, Paul was an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, became a software entrepreneur during the Internet boom, and now provides strategic advice to entrepreneurial companies while pursuing research in economics (see pauljaminet.com for more information). Paul’s experience overcoming a chronic illness through a refined Paleo diet, nutrition, and antibiotics led him and his wife, Shou-Ching, a vascular biologist and cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, to write Perfect Health Diet: Four Steps to Renewed Health, Youthful Vitality, and Long Life. Paul and Shou-Ching host a popular diet and health weblog at perfecthealthdiet.com.Vladi is a Technology Advisor and an award-winning clean tech pinoeer. He earned a BA degree with High Honors in Computer Science and Environmental Studies from Oberlin College, where he published a seminal paper on using real-time feedback and competitive behavior to drive significant behavior change among building occupants, showing that one can reduce electricity consumption in commercial buildings by as much as 55% simply by changing the behavior people. In 2005 he co-founded Lucid, a clean-tech software company, where he serves as the CTO and board member and has since helped grow Lucid to 25 employees and reach break-even. Today Lucid serves over 220 large commercial customers, including 8 out of the 8 ivy league universities, 100+ of the nation's top colleges and universities and companies like Google with multi-national deployments of the Building Dashboard technology. A recipient of prestigious national and internatinal awards, including from the U.S. EPA, the CA State Assembly and the California Clean Tech Open, he has multiple publications in the domain of feedback-driven behavior change and approved patents in the area. Vladi works closely with the research team at Dan's Plan to help define, develop and deliver a scalable, intuitive and effective cloud-based product. Vladi's expertise in integration with realtime feedback devices, cloud-based services and the associated challenges with processing large amounts of data guides architecture and product decisions at Dan's Plan.