Barbara A. Paldus

Barbara Alice Paldus (born May 1971) is an American-Canadian-Czech entrepreneur and scientist. In 2001, she received Adolph Lomb Medal.

Since 1998, she has been involved in the theoretical and commercial development of technological platforms for measurement and automation in various industries, including climate monitoring and biotechnology. She holds or co-holds 50+ patents (including 50 in US). In the United States, Barbara Paldus has built several biotech companies from scratch, whose instruments and technologies were utilized in large-scale vaccine production during the Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics. She also focuses on marketing, business development, and technological incubation, expanding local and international markets in areas such as biological processing, personalized medicine, cell therapy, biotechnology-based OTC products, and analytical technological tools.

Early life and education Barbara Paldus was born in 1971 in Canada. Her mother, Eva Zdena Bajer and her father, Josef Paldus, were both Czechoslovak émigrés from 1968. worked as a research scientist at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After leaving Czechoslovakia, he became a university professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Paldus studied technical fields, starting in mathematics and electrical engineering. She spent parts of her life in Europe, living in Strasbourg, as well as in Nijmegen, and Berlin. She first visited Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, at the age of 20.

Paldus earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1993.

Career In 1998, Paldus founded Picarro,

From 2005 to 2018, Paldus was an operational partner at Skymoon Ventures. From 2005 to 2017, she co-founded and served as CEO of Finesse Solutions.

In March 2018, Paldus founded the venture capital fund Sekhmet Ventures, focusing on "health and wellness backed by science."

In 2023, Paldus established the "Professor Josef Paldus Engineering Scholarship" in memory of her father. It is awarded annually to a full-time undergraduate student entering their first year of Biomedical Engineering.