Management Team


Edgar Masri - CEO and President

Mr. Masri was appointed the CEO and President of Qualtré in 2008. From 2006-2008, Edgar rejoined 3Com, a global data networking leader, as the President and Chief Executive Officer. At 3Com, he led the acquisition of H-3C, the joint venture between 3Com and Huawei and was H-3C’s Chairman. Mr. Masri was a General Partner at Matrix Partners from 2000 to 2006, a leading technology venture capital firm, where he made investments in the wireless, broadband and semiconductor industries while serving on the boards of numerous semiconductor and telecommunication equipment startups. From 1995 to 1999, he led 3Com's workgroup business and oversaw this unit's five-fold growth to over $1 billion in revenue and a leading market share position. Prior to joining 3Com in 1985, Mr. Masri worked in various engineering and management positions at companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500. Mr. Masri holds a Diplome d’Ingenieur from Ecole Centrale de Paris, and a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He is an Arjay Miller Scholar M.B.A. graduate with distinction from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Dr. Farrokh Ayazi - Co-Founder and CTO

Dr. Ayazi is Qualtré's co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, as well as a professor at the premier MEMS academic institution, the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Farrokh received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 1994, with an M.S.E.E degree in 1997 and a 2000 Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Ayazi is an editor for the IEEE/ASME Journal of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (JMEMS). He has served on the technical program committee of IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM), International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), International Conference on Solid State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (Transducers), IEEE MEMS, and IEEE Sensors conference.  He is a 2004 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the 2004 Richard M. Bass Outstanding Teacher Award (determined by the vote of the ECE senior class), and the Georgia Tech College of Engineering Cutting Edge Research Award for his work on high performance Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) MEMS resonator and gyroscope technology.  He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications and hold 12 issued patents.

Dr. Ijaz Jafri - Vice President of Engineering

Dr. Jafri joined Qualtré in 2012 as the company’s Vice President of Engineering bringing over sixteen years of experience in the areas of MEMS and semiconductor industries.  His expertise spans inertial MEMS, optical MEMS, radio frequency MEMS, microfluidics, MEMS relays/switches and gas sensors.  Ijaz has served in key engineering leadership positions at Honeywell International (Sensing, Guidance and Navigation Center of Excellence), Corning Inc. (Electromechanical Design and Applications), and GT Solar (formally GT Equipment Technologies). Dr. Jafri has served as an investigator on US DoD, EPA, NSF, DoE, and NIST funded programs. He is Six Sigma Black Belt certified with proven expertise in the areas of integrated product development, production transition, and production support. Ijaz received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from New York Institute of Technology and his Masters of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering from State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY. He has numerous peer-reviewed journals and conference publications and currently holds seventeen US patents. 

Rich Mannherz - Vice President of Marketing

Rich Mannherz is Qualtré’s Vice President of Marketing and Product Management since 2009.  Prior to his Qualtré executive appointment, Rich served as a Product Line Manager in the Micromachined Product Division (MEMS) of Analog Devices from 2004 to 2009, where he held strategic marketing and product management roles in the inertial product group, serving the automotive and consumer market segments.  During his twenty-five year career in the semiconductor industry, Rich has also held sales, marketing and management positions at Intel and LSI Logic. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering, graduating from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Craig Core - Vice President of Operations

Craig Core joined Qualtré in 2009 as the company’s Vice President of Operations with over twenty years of MEMS and related semiconductor manufacturing experience.  Craig served as Evergreen Solar's Plant Manager from 2007 to 2009 with responsibility for bringing the solar panel facility’s wafer, cell and panel fabrication on-line from its initial ground-breaking to mass production. From 1986 to 2007, he ran the MEMS Wafer Fab Organization at Analog Devices, Inc. with responsibility for both Production and Wafer Level Process Development activities.  Craig has over fifteen years of diverse MEMS management, development, and operational experience for enterprises ranging from pre-revenue inertial MEMS sensor organizations to high-volume manufacturing at world-class MEMS suppliers. Craig received his Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and his Masters in Business Administration from Northeastern University.