Meet the Team
Comprising experts from both inside and outside the insurance industry, the Life.io team
optimizes voluntary engagement for the digital customer experience. We apply that expertise
to drive results across the entire digital customer experience – from needs analysis and quote
through policyholder service. Meet some of our team members.
Muriel Petri
PresidentMuriel joined Life.io in 2019 bringing more than 30 years of marketing, strategy and business development experience in the financial services and insurance markets. Before joining Life.io, she was a founder of an insuretech that developed and brought to market an innovative insurance product. Muriel also ran her own boutique marketing and strategy firm for more than 20 years. Working extensively with major financial services firms, distributors and insuretechs, she helped them grow and scale their businesses. Muriel started her career with Equitable Life and then served as Vice President of Marketing at MetLife Brokerage.
Mike Logsdon
Founder & COOMike is COO of Life.io and responsible for overseeing client delivery, user support, and ongoing client success. Mike works closely with the Life.io leadership team in setting company strategy and product direction.
Mike has extensive experience scaling high-growth companies. Prior to founding Life.io, Mike worked for the Texas Pacific Group as part of TPG Biotech where he was responsible for helping it scale a key portfolio company. During his time with Elevance, he helped scale the team from 30 to 200 associates and helped the company prepare and file for IPO.
Having lost his mother to brain cancer at a young age, Mike focused the early part of his career on advocacy work for the brain cancer community. While working for the National Brain Tumor Society, Mike raised over $1 million for research through a series of endurance sports fundraising campaigns. This included a 16,000-mile bicycle ride from Alaska to Argentina and subsequently climbing the tallest peak in Europe, Mt. Elbrus (5,642m).
Mike holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kelly Altomare
Director of Growth MarketingKelly brings over 11 years of marketing experience across various industries including start-ups in the alternative asset management industry, healthcare, and risk management. Over the past couple of years, Kelly’s primary focus has been on leveraging integrated marketing strategies to drive growth, developing tactical lead generation programs, as well as, curating market-facing content for engagement via events, thought leadership, and social media.
Alicia Bergeron
Product Manager of Integrations and Customer SuccessAs Life.io’s Product Manager of Integrations and Customer Success, Alicia connects the space between the Growth, Customer Success and Product teams to deliver a great client experience. She draws on her years of managing Account Management, Client Success and Implementation teams at SaaS companies, as well as 15 years of insurance and financial experience.
Carrie Brandon
Director of Client SuccessCarrie joined Life.io in 2017. Carrie guides clients from implementation phase to pilot launch and client support to commercial expansion, ensuring goals and objectives are understood and achieved. Her desire to see individuals attain their definition of success drives her focus on clients and users. Carrie also has extensive experience in the nonprofit and charter school management industries, and is the recipient of the Campbell Soup Company’s Unsung Hero award.
Dawn Clifford
VP of Customer SuccessDawn Clifford brings more than 25 years of experience to her role as VP of Customer Success at Life.io. As a tax attorney, she has spent her career helping individuals and families understand the benefits of insurance ownership and how to best incorporate it into their overall financial plan. Dawn has worked for some of the leading insurance carriers in the country, most recently as Director of Distribution Relationships for TIAA Life Insurance Company.
Molly Black
Chief Product OfficerMolly joined Life.io in 2015 and serves as our Head of Product where she is responsible for optimizing user engagement, prioritizing and defining new products and features, and overseeing our content team, comprised of editors, staff, and freelance writers.
Molly attended Columbia University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in neuropsychology and creative writing. Molly began her career working as a neuropsychological researcher at Mt. Sinai hospital in New York City. Drawn to creative work, Molly decided to shift gears and join a small publishing house in New York City where she did editorial and book-design work, before joining her first tech start-up. Molly subsequently returned to school to study software development and joined Life.io in June of 2015. Molly considers herself equal parts creative and analytical and has found a way to marry these two passions as Head of Product for Life.io.
When not at work, Molly takes care of way too many dogs, studies and plans her next great meal, and, rainy weather permitting, spends her time outdoors, gardening, dog-parking, hiking, and exploring.
RJay Haluko
SVP of Creative & DesignRJay joined the team in 2018 as multidisciplinary Creative/UX Director. His mission at life.io is to design a thoughtful user centric product experience that enhances the user’s life. He has spent the last 20 years exploring the intersection of design and technology within healthcare and consumer industries. RJay’s unique creative skill set fuses programming, behavioral design, product design, UX, motion graphics, 3D, illustration, and brand strategy. Using this fusion of skills he has built sales-converting solutions to Fortune 100 business challenges, designed an award-winning mobile weather app, highly rated iOS game, and empathy-building VR experiences.
Amelia Harnish
Director of ContentAmelia is the director of content at Life.io. Her role is to oversee the editorial operations and content development, so that users are always learning and growing. For the past decade, Amelia has worked as a journalist and editor with a focus on health, science and women’s issues for outlets like Refinery29 and Health.
Dorothy Holmes
Director of MarketingDorothy brings more than 20 years of insurance and financial services marketing experience to her role as Director of Marketing at Life.io. Before joining the Life.io team in 2019, she worked for a marketing firm that specializes in insurance and financial service clients. Dorothy began her marketing career with a small advertising agency in Philadelphia before working for The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company and Lincoln Financial Group.
Stefanie Rathjen-Kelly
VP of Product MarketingStefanie joined the Life.io team in 2019 with a single goal—connecting. Stefanie has spent her career creating digital marketing strategies to connect people with financial and healthcare services that improve their lives. Stefanie’s secret to connecting—a deep interest in understanding the fears and dreams that motivate the real person behind the “end user.”
Thomas Schaffner
Software Engineer, Team Lead - Web ApplicationsJoining the team in 2019, Thomas’ job is to coordinate, build, and maintain high quality features for Life.io’s web applications products. Thomas works with excellent designers and developers to ensure users get the most out of Life.io’s web applications. He is passionate about clear and enjoyable user experiences, and he looks forward to opportunities to continue improving and growing Life.io’s applications.
Ross Teichner
VP of EngineeringJeff Young
SVP of EngineeringJeff joined Life.io in July of 2019. His primary focus is on delivering software services as seamlessly and efficiently as possible. From his first days of automating build processes in 1993 using MS-DOS .bat files and 3.5″ floppy disk duplicating machines through the arrival of the Internet and the Cloud his focus continues to be on enabling engineering organizations to get quality software in front of customers as reliably and quickly as possible.
Charles Zino
Director of EngineeringCharles joined in early 2021, bringing 15+ years of experience in the business intelligence space, and a passion for delivering actionable insights to the business. He has extensive experience in many facets of business intelligence which includes requirements gathering, data warehouse design and development, data visualization, ETL/ELT, and data validation. He also has experience in building successful, results-oriented teams from the ground up across several verticals, and in this role will help guide Life.io‘s analytics practice from both a strategic and tactical perspective.
When not at work, he spends time with his wife, his 2 daughters (and their activities), watches way too much baseball, enjoys learning about new tech, and struggles to identify what his dog is barking at.
Board of Advisors
Life.io’s Board of Advisors consists of industry veterans with
extensive experience across the insurance and technology industries
Simon Baitler
AdvisorA veteran of more than forty years in the insurance business, nineteen of them with Transamerica Life Companies, Mr. Baitler became Chief Operations Officer for Transamerica Life Insurance and Annuity Company in 1978. He then served in several senior management and board positions, lastly as Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer for the Transamerica Life Companies.
Mr. Baitler was responsible for the Group Life and Health Division and turned it around from operating at a loss to a profitable business that was sold to Provident Life and Accident. Mr. Baitler was responsible for a number of Transamerica Life Companies’ special ventures including: a mass marketing company, a broker dealership, a structured settlements operation and an insurance operation in New York. In addition, he was responsible for the Company’s Mergers and Acquisitions function and its corporate asset/liability management program. During his management of the M & A function, Transamerica successfully divested itself of its group life and health insurance operations and its Australian subsidiary.
When he left Transamerica he was a member of the Executive Committee of the boards of all the Life Insurance Companies. In 1989 Mr. Baitler started his consulting business, initially as a strategic advisor to senior executives in the Insurance Industry, assisting them in articulating a vision and a prioritized strategy to achieve that vision. He assists his clients in implementing the appropriate external elements of those strategies. This has led to work in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures and in establishing new relationships with alternative distribution organizations.
Mr. Baitler has served as an Operating Director of Arsenal Capital Partners as well as a board advisor to portfolio companies. Born in New York, Mr. Baitler received his Bachelors degree in Mathematics from Union College in New York. He has been a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries.
Glenn Cunningham
AdvisorGlenn Cunningham has more than 30 years of leadership and management experience in both the insurance and reinsurance industry.
Glenn began his career with the Travelers Insurance Companies in Hartford Connecticut, rising to Senior Vice President and Chief Underwriting Officer of Travelers Life and Annuity Company.
He served GE Capital as and Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of two life, health and annuity insurance companies and was part of the acquisition and integration teams in a number of insurance related acquisitions, mergers and integrations across multiple insurance product lines.
Mr. Cunningham then joined Transamerica Corporation assuming first leadership responsibility for their reinsurance division international group life and accident business, and then as Executive Vice President responsible for their core U.S. Life reinsurance business for over 15 years.
He continued as a member of the Executive Management Board of Transamerica Reinsurance, under Aegon N.V after acquired Transamerica Corporation and then after the SCOR S.E acquisition of Transamerica Reinsurance.
Mr. Cunningham has extensive ties and relationships in both the insurance and reinsurance industry and has been an active participant in a number of industry committees, associations and trade groups over many years. He is recognized for his expertise in business strategy development, planning and execution, Innovative data driven start-up successes along with the assessment of mergers, acquisitions opportunities and integration planning and execution.
Mr. Cunningham is a graduate of Saint Bonaventure University.
Jim Galli
AdvisorA veteran with over 30 years of domestic and international insurance industry experience Jim Galli has focused heavily in product development, underwriting, channel marketing and distribution expansion.
Most recently Jim was with Legal & General America having served as Executive Vice President, Business Strategy & Innovation where he was responsible for managing sales and marketing and for helping expand the product and distribution strategies.
Prior to this role, Jim has served in various executive positions to include:
• MetLife, as Senior Vice President Innovation and Partnerships where he established the US Sponsored Direct business which centered on meeting the protection needs of the US middle market. In this role, Jim was responsible for overseeing B2B distribution, managing external partnerships, executing customer cross-sell strategies and launching an internal innovation lab designed to incubate new products, technologies, channels and partnerships.
• AIG (both within the US and abroad) where he focused on new business development, strategic marketing, product management and distribution expansion.
• MassMutual serving in several executive roles in the home office and in the field within the life, annuity and disability business lines.
Jim has been an active participant in the insurance industry having been a featured speaker at LIMRA, PIMA, South by Southwest and other relevant organizations. Jim has served on two life insurance company boards in the past: US Life and Legal & General America, and has been active in several non-profits in a variety of roles throughout his career.
Mr. Galli is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross.
Mark Hug
AdvisorMark Hug is a recognized business leader who has shaped the life insurance industry over the last four decades. He is best known for his candid and bold thought leadership across a broad spectrum of specialties within the financial services industry. Throughout his distinguished career he held senior leadership positions in global fortune companies including Transamerica, Aetna, AXA, and Prudential.
In 2017, Mark started his own consulting firm, Hug Consulting and works closely with several firms as a senior advisor. His expertise in actuarial science, product development, life distribution, multicultural marketing, advanced sales, and digital marketing allows him to add value to insurtech, life carriers, and a variety of distributors.
Mark gained much of this experience and skillset while an EVP at Prudential. There he held positions heading up distribution, marketing, and product for its life division. As distribution head, Mark grew Prudential’s brokerage operation into one of the largest in the industry through unique strategies designed to foster relationships and support. As Prudential’s CMO, Mark was recognized in 2014 when Forbes named him one of the 50 most influential global Chief Marketing Officers of 2014 based on digital sharing and generating reaction. Finally, as product head, Mark pioneered instant issue full underwriting via data analytics and created the first ever fully digital life insurance product.
Mark earned a B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame and is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries. He is also an active participant in industry events, including the American College, AALU, LIMRA, NAILBA and the ACLI.
Barry Jacobson
AdvisorA veteran of more than thirty years in the insurance business, Mr. Jacobson is an experienced International Life Senior Executive. He has a reputation for innovative thinking, problem solving and leadership skills. He has extensive Board experience as an Outside Director as well as Executive Director.
Mr. Jacobson was President of International Life for the ACE Group. He started the business from scratch and after 5 years it became a Global Life and Reinsurance business generating $1 Billion in Revenue and $200 Million in after-tax operating profit. He managed 1,000 employees and 10,000 agents across 26 countries. As part of this Mr. Jacobson started a 50/50 Life Insurance JV with Huatai in China with operational management responsibility and as a Board member.
As Executive Vice President for Citigroup, Mr. Jacobson built and managed start-up Life Insurance Companies in China, Hong Kong and Poland. He also started a 50/50 JV with partner Mitsui Sumitomo Life in Japan.
As Senior Vice President for Travelers Insurance, Mr. Jacobson was responsible for their US Life insurance business. He tripled their revenue over a three year period. In 1991 as a Senior Vice President for Security-Connecticut Life, Mr. Jacobson invented the market’s first life insurance product with secondary guarantees.
Mr. Jacobson served two years on the Board of Aviva US until the company was sold. He chaired their Risk and Audit Committees.
Born in New York, Mr. Jacobson received his Bachelors degree in Mathematics from the State University of New York in Albany. He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries. Mr. Jacobson is currently on three non-profit Boards in the education field including The Actuarial Foundation.
Cheryl Neal
AdvisorCheryl Neal is a senior executive with 30+ years in the financial services and life insurance industries. She is a future-focused, solutions-driven leader with a proven track record of successful business transformations, and known as an agile leader who balances strategic thinking with practical execution to ensure scalability, sustainability and profitable growth.
Most recently, Ms. Neal was President of Kemper Life, where she was responsible for strategically evaluating the business and architecting the plan to reinitiate growth, improve profitability, refresh the product portfolio and modernize the home services business model. She led ongoing development and delivery of the Digital Agency in support of 2,300 captive agents and 4 million customers, positioning the organization for scalable, long term material growth.
As President, Foresters Financial, North American Life and Annuity Division, Ms. Neal repositioned the $10B organization from a final expense market leader to one equally balanced across ordinary life and annuities, through an independent agent network. Over a period of two years, new business sales increased from $80M to $124M and profit improved by 20% to $120M.
Ms. Neal served as President of the stand-alone $13B individual life division at Liberty Mutual. Over the course of 7 years, she led the organization to deliver profitable growth, increasing sales from $460M to $1.2B, growing profit 260% to $132M and Improving ROE 2.5 points to 9.2%. The organization also became the market leading distributor of life insurance through banks and increased life insurance sales per Liberty Mutual P&C agents to highest levels ever.
Ms. Neal’s board service includes Director, MIB; Trustee, Lawrence General Hospital: and Director, Merrimack Valley YMCA.
Scientific Advisory Board
technological findings. The Scientific Advisory Board meets regularly to review new Life.io features and discuss
how to incorporate new learnings from the scientific community, ensuring an industry-leading platform.
Lindsay Jubelt, MD
Population healthDr. Jubelt is the Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Operations for Mount Sinai Solutions. Her role involves both her clinical work as a primary care physician and a steadfast pursuit of creating sustainable health solutions for large populations.
After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree at University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Jubelt completed medical school at Stony Brook School of Medicine with residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She returned to University of Pennsylvania to obtain a Master of Science degree in Health Policy. This educational foundation allowed Dr. Jubelt to pursue her first passion of treating patients while also creating innovative ways for people to experience healthcare.
Clinically, Dr. Jubelt finds tremendous value in creating meaningful partnerships with her patients, developing a plan of care together based on each individual’s unique habits, needs, and goals. She uses the most modern evidence to guide her treatment and educate her patients on appropriate lifestyle choices for long-term success.
Mitesh Patel, MD MBA
Behavioral EconomicsMitesh S. Patel, MD, MBA is Director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system. He is the Ralph Muller Presidential Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Care Management at the Perelman School of Medicine and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Patel is on faculty at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation and the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, and a Staff Physician at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His research focuses on combining insights from behavioral economics with scalable technology platforms to improve health and health care. He has led more than 25 clinical trials in partnership with health systems, insurers, employers, and community organizations that tested ways to design nudges, incentives, and gamification to change clinician and patient behavior. This work includes digital health interventions using wearable devices and smartphones, and health system interventions using the electronic health record.
Dr. Patel is Director of the VA Advanced Fellowship Program in Health Services Research and Development in Philadelphia and Co-Director of the Wharton MBA Course on E-Health. He has received several national research awards including the 2018 Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year from SGIM, the 2018 Alice Hersh Emerging Leader Award from AcademyHealth, the 2019 Young Physician-Scientist Award from ASCI, and 2020 Quality and Practice Innovation Award from SGIM. Dr. Patel’s work has been published in leading medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Health Affairs. His work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the New York Times, NBC Today Show, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Forbes, Time, NPR and CNN.
Martin Seligman, Ph.D.
Behavioral PsychologyMartin Seligman, Ph.D.
Behavioral PsychologyDr. Martin E.P. Seligman is the Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center and Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Penn Department of Psychology. He is also Director of the Penn Master of Applied Positive Psychology program (MAPP). He was President of the American Psychological Association in 1998, during which one of his presidential initiatives was the promotion of Positive Psychology as a field of scientific study. He is a leading authority in the fields of Positive Psychology, resilience, learned helplessness, depression, optimism and pessimism. He is also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression, and build strengths and well-being. He has written more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books.
Arun Wiita, MD Ph.D.
Clinical HealthMy research laboratory spans a number of areas within genomics, proteomics, and hematologic malignancies. One major area of research involves the use of targeted, quantitative proteomics to answer important biological questions in myeloma and B-cell leukemia. We are particularly interested in questions related to translational regulation after cancer therapy as well as how clinically-relevant genomic alterations result in phenotypic changes at the level of the proteome. Furthermore, my group includes the UCSF Stephen and Nancy Grand Multiple Myeloma Translational Initiative Laboratory. In this role, we collaborate with industry and academic partners to advance preclinical evaluation of novel myeloma therapeutics using a suite of in vitro and in vivo approaches.
In my clinical work, I am Assistant Director of the UCSF Clinical Cytogenetics laboratory. In this role, I interpret molecular genetic testing for the prenatal and postnatal diagnosis of microdeletion and microduplication syndromes. In this area we have translational interests in emerging technologies for determination of DNA copy number variation, integration of single-nucleotide variants and CNV interpretation, and cell-free DNA for prenatal testing. In my research laboratory we are also using quantitative proteomics to evaluate the role of protein homeostasis in determining the phenotypic effects of CNVs, as well using CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering to generate new functional models of syndromic CNVs.