Chairman & Chief Scientific Officer

Raymond Peterson founded Celadon Laboratories in 1999 after working for six years as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. He shares responsibility for product concept, business strategy, science, and software development.

An author of many peer-reviewed publications, since founding Celadon, Raymond has been the principal investigator on seven state, federal, and private non-profit grants and research contracts. Raymond has won research awards from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.

Raymond earned a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of Business in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Pennsylvania State University in 1998.

President & Chief Executive Officer

Larry Kessner focuses on Celadon’s strategic, sales, marketing, and legal issues, and works closely with customers to ensure excellent results. Mr. Kessner joined Celadon in 2000 as CEO with the goal of working with Raymond Peterson to build the Company into a leading developer of products and services for genomic research.

A lawyer and former journalist, Larry has founded and managed early-stage companies since 1990. He was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun in the early 1980s and returned to that newspaper as the first publisher of Baltimoresun.com. He also worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C., specializing in business transactions and zoning law.

Larry received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins in 1979 and a law degree in 1986 from Georgetown Law Center, where he was an editor of The Journal of Law and Policy in International Business.

Chief Technology Officer

Dean Fiala has headed the Celadon development group since June 2004, improving the functionality and speed of its primer and probe design software, applying the highest standards of software architecture and programming to our product. He was named a Microsoft MVP in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

During his 17 years of software development, Dean has tackled a number of complex problems. He has designed large applications for projects from case management to cattle feeding. He has focused on object-oriented design and development for the past 15 years, and has been leading the development of web applications for the past seven.

Dean is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.