Key Staff Bios

Ted Groves is one of the two founders and Principals at Myriad. Prior to co-founding Myriad, Ted held the position of Director of Design at The Computer Museum in Boston. During his five years there he redesigned the entire museum, including educational software, printed materials, interactive exhibits, and exhibit spaces. In 1994 Ted had finished the Museum and joined Jane Cuthbertson as a founder of Myriad Inc. Ted began his career at MGIA Architects, Inc in Boston, There, he worked on retail interiors, residences, and recreational facilities. He was also diagnostic and design consultant to the cities of Boston and Cambridge, assessing (and providing design solutions for) over two hundred public buildings for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Ted’s work has won many awards and has been widely published, and recently “Your Disease Risk”, a project on which he worked in partnership with the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Cancer Prevention was featured in US News and World report, and in the Wall Street Journal, saying it “stands out as one of the best health-oriented sites on the web”. Among the publications in which Ted’s work has been featured are Print Magazine, The Boston Globe, and PIE Books (Japan). Ted is a long time collaborator with the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Cancer Prevention and is a regular lecturer at the Boston University School of Public Health and at MIT.

John Lara is an accomplished Internet entrepreneur with strong technology and marketing background. He has been running Internet based companies for over 12 years. He founded and grew a successful Internet consulting and development company to 18 employees with over 50 ongoing clients. Some of the clients included OSRAM SYLVANIA, The Harvard Business School, BBN (now Genuity), Genzyme Biotechnology, the Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants and Cannondale Bicycles. John later sold that company to a German multinational consulting company. He later started an Internet specialty hardware business that sells direct to consumers and industry via the Web with his catalog of over 400 products through Amazon, Yahoo and eBay.

Jane Cuthbertson worked as an art director at Forsythe Design in Boston before co-founding Myriad. At Forsythe, she designed packaging, documentation, and collateral for universities, high-tech companies and cultural institutions. In 1994, she left Forsythe to become one of the two founders of Myriad Inc.

Jane began her career designing reading textbooks for children at Lipman & Simons in Chicago. Following this, she was a senior designer at the Field Museum in Chicago designing graphic information systems, most notably for a large-scale, permanent exhibit on ancient and contemporary Egypt.

Jane's work has won many awards and has been featured in many publications, including several editions of PIE Books (Japan), Print Magazine, and The Type Director's Club Annual.

Emma Thorp is an interactive and graphic designer at Myriad. She holds a certificate in Graphic and Web Design from the Center for Digital Imaging Arts (CDIA) at Boston University, and an MA in Economics and Accounting from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (UK).

Before coming to work at Myriad, Emma worked as a retail interior designer at a London agency (One Red Wall). Emma worked predominantly on branded retail interiors including Starbucks and Pret A Manger, designing new stores and refurbishing old sites.

Karen A. Piotrowski is Lead Developer at Myriad and brings extensive technical knowledge and innovation to the team, contributing uniquely deep and varied capabilities in database, interface and e-commerce programming.

With Myriad, she has been an integral part of many highly successful projects from start to finish, exercising her expertise in multi-level organizational data structuring, application psychology, knowledge of over 15 programming languages and how to integrate them with the web, as well as everyday applications, and her highly developed ability to identify project nuances that allow the creation of software and interactive products that are robust, yet nimble.

Karen has been working in the Internet industry since its infancy, in a variety of capacities beginning with a position at one of the region’s first Internet Service Providers, and including Technical Project Manager at Lara Consulting in Salem, MA; and Project Manager/Dedicated Developer at Edgewing/Plaut in Waltham, MA; and Principal and Founder of Chili Pepper Consulting in Salem, MA. In these various positions she has a long and proven track record with clients such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Genzyme, OSRAM Sylvania, Cannondale Bicycles, BBN/Genuity Corporation and Harvard Business School.