The Prescient Wireless Leadership Team
Paul Blashewski, President & CEO, Founder
Paul is currently the President and CEO of Prescient Wireless which he established in June of 2006 by spinning off Filtronic Comtek, Inc.’s highly successful Chicago Design Center into a privately held stand alone company. Since forming Prescient Wireless, Paul has expanded the teams advanced technology and product development focus to include innovative solutions for the Military, Commercial Avionics, Industrial & Scientific and Medical markets, in addition to the team’s long track record of success in the Wireless Communications market.
From 1998-2006, Paul held the position of Chief Technical Officer of Filtronic Comtek, Inc. and Managing Director/Founder of the Chicago Design Center. In early 1999, Paul was appointed chair of the Filtronic plc. Global Wireless Business Board, where he successfully led a senior team of business unit General Managers in assessing the company’s strengths and weaknesses within the evolving wireless market and making recommendations to the main board regarding how best to resource and grow the company. Upon completion of this key strategic assignment, Paul spent six months managing Filtronic’s Salisbury Maryland operation with a primary focus on restoring a key OEM’s confidence in the company’s ability to deliver on new design and supply commitments. Following that engagement, he returned to Chicago where he recruited a highly experienced core team of RF and active systems development engineers in order to enable Filtronic to fulfill a key recommendation of the Wireless Business Board, which was to grow the business by supplying higher level active base station subsystems and to establish Filtronic as a full service RF solutions provider. Paul’s team was directly responsible for the successful shipment of Filtronic’s first commercial combined amplifier/transceiver product and its first digitally predistorted power amplifier products.
Prior to joining Filtronic, Paul was the Director of Base Station Development for Motorola, Inc.’s Advanced Products Division in Arlington Heights, IL where he led a large team of engineers responsible for advanced research and base station product design. The team successfully developed and shipped a multitude of products, spanning the AMPS, TACS, NAMPS, PDC and CDMA standards and was awarded the CEO Quality award for achieving best in class development cycle time reductions and zero program slippage. During his 18 year tenure at Motorola, Paul held several key management positions in both Development Engineering and Manufacturing Operations.
Paul holds a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana and has completed several specialized leadership development and executive training programs.
Ed Shultz, Director of Engineering, Founder
Ed Shultz is the Director of Engineering for Prescient Wireless, Inc. where he directs the product development efforts of the engineering team. A founding member of Prescient Wireless, Ed manages the engineering team as well as provides the system design role for all new products. His system design role has involved key technical contributions from high level system design to low level circuit design for products that range from high performance receivers and transmitters to low cost consumer products.
Prior to joining Prescient Wireless, Ed was an Engineering Manager for Filtronic Comtek, Inc. directing the R&D efforts of the Chicago Design Center (CDC). Ed managed the engineering team as well as provided the system design role for new products and provided the primary Filtronic technical contact for cellular base station OEMs. He developed Matlab simulations of feed-forward and digital pre-distortion systems for innovative high efficiency power amplifiers which resulted in a new power amplifier business for Filtronic with two major OEMs. From 2004 to 2005, he joined the Filtronic design team in Shipley, England and resided in the United Kingdom while responsible for the introduction of these new products into high volume production. Prior to joining Filtronic, Ed was a Senior Resource Manger for Motorola's Advanced Products Division in Arlington Heights, Illinois and led a team of 35 engineers in the development of cellular base station products including the world’s smallest CDMA microcell product for a Japanese customer. Ed was the primary technical contact for the end customer and was involved in negotiation with a wide variety of worldwide suppliers. At Motorola, Ed authored the TIA/EIA standard “IS-89 Recommended Minimum Standards for 800 MHz Dual-Mode Narrowband Analog Land Stations”, a worldwide standard defining specifications for cellular base stations supporting 10kHz wide analog channels.
Ed has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Case Western Reserve University and earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is the inventor for US patent #5,603,087, Interference Detection Technique, which covers a method to detect co-channel interference in analog cellular communication systems. He is also coinventor for several patents applied for by clients as a result of contracted development work. Throughout his career, Ed has amassed 28 years experience developing products for nearly every cellular/mobile communication standard including AMPS, TACS, NAMPS, GSM, EDGE, CDMA, W-CDMA, WiMAX and LTE.
John Melinyshyn, Principal Engineer, Founder
A founding member of Prescient Wireless, John performs a wide range of design activities and is a key technical leader in the company. His responsibilities span all phases of the product life cycle including architecture, system/circuit design, new product introduction and support. He has designed state of the art transmitters, receivers, PAs, synthesizers and power supplies for the telecom, medical, military, avionics and RFID markets. In addition to his role as a designer, John provides guidance to other engineers within the company and interfaces with clients on a regular basis.
Prior to the start of Prescient Wireless, John was a Senior Principal Engineer at Filtronic Comtek for 6 years. He was recruited in 2000 to help the company expand into the transceiver and PA product areas and performed advanced research and development in RF subsystems for major cellular OEMs around the world. Research focused on high efficiency, linearized PAs and ultra low noise amplifiers. This research was leveraged in the development of a PA/XCVR that served as the primary W-CDMA Macrocell radio module for a major cellular OEM. Other product development included an IP67 W-CDMA PA for outdoor use. These products allowed the company to broaden their product portfolio in the cellular market.
John spent the first 12 years of his career with Motorola, progressing through numerous technical roles attaining the position of Senior Staff Engineer in the Advanced Products Division. He developed a variety of RF circuits and played a key role in the successful development and deployment of many analog, TDMA and CDMA cellular infrastructure products. At the end of his tenure with Motorola, John was the lead technologist for Motorola's Micro/Picocell products for the Japan market and worked closely with customers and Product Management.
A native Chicagoan, born in 1965, John received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1987 and a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Technological University, Fort Collins, Colorado in 1999. He is coinventor of patent WO 2013188415 A3, Capacitor-Based UPS.