Leadership Team
Charmi Chande
CEO
Dr. Charmi Chande is the Founder and CEO of PFASolve, leading the development and commercialization of innovative technologies for PFAS detection, capture, and destruction. With a Ph.D. in Microbiology and expertise in microfluidics, electrochemical sensing, and diagnostics, Charmi brings together scientific innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology commercialization.
Charmi has also mentored early-stage entrepreneurs through the NSF I-Corps program and continues to support the advancement of technologies addressing environmental and sustainability challenges.
Michael Ehrlich
Business Co-founder
Dr. Ehrlich is a Co-Founder and Investor.
After earning his Ph.D. in Economics, he began his career on Wall Street at Salomon Brothers and later served as a Senior Managing Director at Bear Stearns, leading Emerging Markets Fixed Income.
He then became an entrepreneur, transforming FineTone into FineStar Imaging before selling the company and joining NJIT. His work at NJIT focuses on student mentorship, economic development, and research in financial markets, entrepreneurship, and early-stage investment.
Arjun Venkatesan
Scientific Co-founder
Dr. Arjun Venkatesan, our Scientific Co-Founder, provides deep PFAS and environmental-contaminant expertise. His work spans PFAS chemistry, environmental analysis, treatment, capture, detection and destruction. He brings the scientific depth required to evaluate technologies rigorously while keeping development connected to real environmental applications.
For me, Arjun is an important bridge between fundamental PFAS science and technologies that can ultimately be deployed at utilities, industrial facilities and remediation sites.
Manish Patel
Interim CMO | Advisor
Manish Patel, our Interim CMO, brings the commercialization and market-communication discipline that technical companies often lack. He helps us translate sophisticated PFAS science into a value proposition that a utility director, remediation company, strategic partner or investor can immediately understand.
He works on positioning, branding, customer messaging, market development and go-to-market strategy so that our commercial story is as strong as our technology.
Advisory Board
Stewart Abrams
Consultant - Langon Group
Stewart Abrams, P.E., brings more than four decades of environmental engineering and consulting experience. His value goes well beyond technical advice. He understands how environmental technologies actually move through the commercial ecosystem—how engineering firms evaluate them, how remediation projects are structured, how utilities make decisions and what has to happen for an innovative technology to become something engineers and customers are comfortable specifying and deploying. His extensive environmental-industry network also gives us insight and connectivity into exactly the markets we are trying to penetrate.
Govi Rao
CEO Phase Change Solutions
Govi Rao brings the perspective of an experienced clean-tech executive who understands how to take technology from innovation to commercial scale. His career spans technology, specialty materials, energy, water and sustainability, with leadership experience across multiple businesses. He helps me think beyond the next experiment or pilot toward manufacturing, supply chain, strategic partnerships, organizational scale and national commercialization. That perspective is particularly valuable now because PFASolve is transitioning from technology development into a company that must be capable of supporting multiple customers and markets.
Adam Broder
Founder BRODER GROUP
Adam Broder gives us institutional-caliber financial and strategic expertise that is unusual for a company at our stage. He spent decades in global financial services, including senior leadership experience at Goldman Sachs, and brings a sophisticated understanding of capital markets, investment strategy, corporate development and building organizations for scale. Adam helps me think several steps ahead—how we position the company for institutional investors, structure strategic relationships, build enterprise value and ultimately create optionality for larger partnerships and transactions.