The leadership of Saavsus is committed to fostering a collaborative relationship with its developer partners.
Paul Berger
Chief Executive Officer
Paul has worked with technology, education, healthcare and related knowledge-based companies in the Eugene, OR area in both executive management and business development roles. He held senior marketing positions with: Abracadata, Ltd., Palo Alto Software, SpecTech, Inc., and Language Learning Solutions, L.L.C. For a three-year period, Paul led Survey Resources, Inc., an emerging growth startup focusing on market research for medical practices. His consulting clients include: The Oregon Center for Applied Science, a behavioral health research firm; Concentric Sky, Inc., web development services focused on the higher education market; Rapid Path, Inc., web site prototyping; and Dune Sciences, L.L.C., material sciences product development.
Paul established and coordinated the Education/Research Cluster, a group sponsored by the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce to promote the growing business cluster of social science research companies and research activities at the University of Oregon and regionally. Paul was a co-founder of the Lane County Chapter of the Software Association of Oregon and the founder of the Lane Entrepreneurs Forum. He has served on the boards of the Software Association of Oregon and the Lane Metro Partnership.
In 2014, Paul co-founded Saavsus with the mission of commercializing research and evidence-based products for schools and social service organizations. He continued to engage with the contacts made when he coordinated the Education/Research Cluster, and with the recruitment of Dr. Deb Johnson-Shelton transformed Saavsus into a research, development, and commercialization company that will also pursue a business incubation role in the Eugene community.
He holds a B.A., graduating Magna Cum Laud in Philosophy from California State University, Sonoma.
Neil Vance
Chief Technology Officer
Neil has been a principal in a consulting group offering web design services, ERP, and database development. In his position as a software developer for Eugene Oregon based Grain Millers, he participated in the design and development of: an in-house ERP system, corporate website, and an e-Commerce web platform.
After completing his education and supporting his wife through her graduate studies, Neil returned to Eugene, where he co-founded Saavsus in 2014, developing the company website, CRM, and Digital Printing capabilities. He also participates in product development activities to convert assorted document and media assets from client developers into marketable programs.
When Saavsus began working on federal research grants applications, Neil undertook grant management duties and now coordinates the grant submission process with NIH agencies. He also plays a key role in specifying technology solutions and overseeing product technology development done both in-house and by vendors. Neil coordinates media production and does hands on videography and editing work. He is a key team member on all Saavsus grant projects.
Neil graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering from Oregon Institute of Technology. He attended graduate school at the University of Oregon where he received a Master of Business Administration with a focus on sustainable business practices.
Dr. Deb Johnson-Shelton, Ph.D.
Chief Science Officer
Dr. Deb Johnson-Shelton has been conducting community and school-based evaluations and research for the last 31 years. Her research has crossed multi-sector systems of care (e.g., special education services and school reform, child protective services, parent and child behavioral training, alcohol and drug recovery programs, nutrition and physical activity, and the built environment). Over the last decade, she has been working to apply research and interventions drawn from social-behavioral health to the physical health of children, families, and communities. This work has used community-engaged and multi-method research designs, as well as health surveillance approaches.
She was the Principal Investigator (PI) on the NIH-funded Communities and Schools Together Project for Child Obesity Prevention (CAST). This project involved a large academic-community-school partnership in using community-based participatory research to investigate and pilot locally designed programs for child obesity prevention. This study designed and piloted a 10-week bi-lingual, family-based child obesity intervention program for both parents and their elementary school children that integrated positive parenting, healthy nutrition knowledge and food monitoring, and adult and child physical activity training.
She recently served as Co-Principal Investigator on a collaborative study with the University of Oregon’s Biology and Built Environment Lab examining the effects of weatherization on the microbial ecology of homes and human health. She is currently PI on a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research study funded by NIH. This project is working with a nationally known child victimization prevention program, the radKIDS® Personal Empowerment and Safety Education Program, to adapt its instructor training into a technology-based delivery system that can be used for broad-scale dissemination in schools.
Dr. Johnson-Shelton received her master’s degree from the University of Oregon in Urban and Regional Planning in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Special Education in 1997 focused on interdisciplinary evaluations of educational and social-behavioral programs.
Dr. Jeanette Ricci, Ph.D.
Associate Research Scientist
Jeanette is a passionate, young-career investigator with multidisciplinary expertise youth physical activity promotion. She has experience in designing, delivering and evaluating interventions that incorporate moderate-to-vigorous physical activity to promote positive changes in children’s physical fitness and psychosocial outcomes in school- and community-based settings. She received her PhD in Kinesiology at Michigan State University in 2020 with a focus on pediatric exercise physiology and program evaluation research methods. During her early graduate school career, she served as the program evaluation coordinator for CrimFit, a physical activity and nutrition program serving under-resourced schools in Flint, MI. She then pursued several research projects investigating the feasibility and efficacy of fitness- and skill-based high intensity interval training for elementary school-aged youth for her dissertation. She now contributes to several NIH grant applications involving physical activity promotion for underrepresented groups, including minority youth and children with disabilities.
Jeanette is also the founder and owner of Aim to Play LLC, which provides consulting, grant writing, and program evaluation services to schools and community organizations with the ultimate goal of promoting children’s health.