Michelle Svatos

Founder, CEO

Michelle Svatos received her Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Over the 20 years of her career in Radiation Oncology, she has worked in a National Lab (LLNL), a University Hospital (UCSF), 2 multinational Fortune 500 companies (Siemens, Varian), and has been deeply involved in numerous start-ups.  She had leadership roles at Topas MC, Inc, and served as CEO of Celestial Medical and TibaRay.  She was previously Product Manager of the TrueBeam linear accelerator in its formative stages which became Varian's most successful product ever for cancer treatment worldwide.  She holds 18 patents and has co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed papers. She is an Adjunct Professor both of Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in Radiation Oncology at Dalhousie University in Canada.  Michelle also has been a consultant to a variety of Medical Device companies and served on several Boards, specializing in advising start-ups in the Radiation Oncology, Diagnostic Radiology and Biopharma spaces. 

In 2019 Michelle met Alex Williams of Holistic Hyperbarics in Oakland, CA.  Michelle was fascinated with HyperBaric Oxygen as a therapeutic intervention, experiencing the profound benefits firsthand. She was also surprised that it wasn’t more widely recognized, not unlike the earlier days of radiotherapy. Over the course of her career, Radiation Therapy steadily matured into a highly personalized medicine: it became individually optimized for each patient, pre-planned, automatically delivered, verified, and correlated to patient outcomes.  She saw an exciting potential to bring hyperbarics through a similar arc.  When Alex called her during the quarantine period of 2020 to discuss a personal hood device for hyperbaric oxygen, their visions sparked powerfully, and heart of AtmosThera was born!