meet The Cibus Health Team
Chief Executive Officer: Phaly Pichota
Phaly has been focused on nutrition for the majority of her life, after experiencing severe malnutrition in her early childhood during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. She knows what it feels like to starve and has firsthand experienced on the power and impact of food with her own health and recovery. She credits the medics at Khao-I-Dang refugee for saving her life and inspired her become a US Army Medic herself in her early career. With a 26+ years of combined military service, Phaly continues to serve as a Medical Service Corp Officer within the USAFR as a military healthcare executive. Today, Phaly is a passionate nutritionist, fascinated with technology innovation as a public health intervention and it’s capabilities to help people adopt healthy eating and steer behavior towards better health outcomes. When she is not obsessing on ways to innovate and improve health, you can find her in the kitchen – experimenting with ingredients and flavors – always trying to make her favorite dishes just a little bit “healthier”. She is constantly laughing, goofing around and enjoying some kind of outdoor activity with her husband and two little boys. Her interests are far and wide, ranging from topics like women in leadership, health and wellness and of course anything that has to do with food! Phaly has been known to travel miles and miles, scouring various grocery stores and farmer markets, searching for the best tomatoes around! Toys and books litter across her family room, along with cookbooks, nutrition research articles and mom-made paper airplanes. She is always open for a good chat about anything and everything and loves connecting, sharing and being inspired by everyone around her!
Phaly received a Master in Public Health (MPH) degree from the UC Berkeley, an Integrative Nutrition certificate from UC San Diego, a MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a BS in Accounting and MSIS from UMASS Boston.
Chief Financial Officer: Michael Siwinski
Michael has suffered from various allergies most of his life, but several years ago was also diagnosed with Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), an allergic condition of the esophagus, predominantly triggered by food. This meant that he is needed to avoid certain foods -- a lot of certain foods for that matter! This made eating really isolating and food was no longer a pleasure for him. He couldn’t even share a cheeseburger with his family. The struggles with managing EoE, while also trying to follow his doctor’s recommendation was really difficult and this led him to eventually cofound Cibus Health with Phaly, simply based on the idea that adhering to his strict food avoidance diet shouldn’t remove the pleasure of eating food altogether. Managing nutrition for conditions like EoE or some other condition shouldn’t be hard and patients leaving their doctor’s office deserve more support than a list of foods to avoid.
Michael loves spending time with his wife and two boys doing all sort of outdoor activities -- biking, swimming, fishing or skiing. An expert camper, Michael can rough it in wild mountains of New England with his boys all alone, even when they were toddlers – now that’s a real super Dad! In what little time he has left for himself, Michael is an avid sailor, particularly with long sailing trips and sailing competitions. His dream is to one day sail the world with his family.
Michael spend his professional career in the Insurance industry in various analytics roles drawing on his lifelong passion for math and numbers (yes he is a math geek!). Currently he is the AVP of Pricing Analytics for Lincoln Financial. An entrepreneur at heart, Michael also runs is own consulting practice where he advises small corporations on business strategy and analytics. Michael has a BA in Economics and Mathematics and MA in Economics from Boston University and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.
Chief Digital Marketing Officer: Randy Sarmiento
Randy Sarmiento is Navy veteran who served as a "Blue-side" [Navy] and "Green-side" [Marine Corps] Corpsman [Medic]. As "Blue-side" Corpsman he served on Trauma teams, Surgery, and Clinical Education. As a "Green-side" Corpsman he earned his Caduceus Shield and Fleet Marine Force Pin serving as a Field Medical Technician (Combat Medic) and got nick named "Doc Sar". After serving, Randy later founded Eagle 1 CPR wanting to bring to Families, Companies, and Individuals a better way to prepare for emergency situations; just like he did in the military. His students then started to call him "The First Aid Professor". With his core belief that human life is priceless, and that helping one another is the greatest good for all mankind, after selling off his company, he continues to strive to empower and encourage people to accomplish their dreams, at Cibus Health he helps orchestrate engaging and impactful programs for patients outside the hospital settings.