Kathy Barnes, President and Chief Executive Officer:: A founder of Scholars, Kathy's customer focused orientation has fed a passion to find solutions for school clients. Her passion for solutions led the way for the inspiration to find an effective grant search tool. Kathy devoted years in researching and testing various processes in order to identify the most effective and efficient method to respond to the information required by grant program administrators to accomplish their annual reporting requirements and successfully conduct longitudinal studies.

Kathy's 17 years of experience working with the Higher Education community to streamline their processes, including student loans and grants, have provided a solid foundation from which to talk with grant administrators about the unique Scholars search tool and product. She worked with a National Council of Educational Loan Programs’ committee on the development of data exchange standards between schools, lenders, students and the guarantee agencies. Her combination of technical insight and successful work with numerous schools makes her the ideal choice to be the primary interface with the grant community. As Kathy points out “it is important to hear the client, they know what they want: It is our challenge to find the way to deliver.

Kathy also works closely with Scholars technical staff to ensure the product is simple for our clients to use as well as safe and secure. She has worked closely with Scholars legal counsel in order to assure clients that the Scholars search process is in accordance with existing laws.

Les Ocsenas, Chief Financial Officer: His 20 years of experience in business management and customer service provides him the ability to carefully listen to clients and create services that meet their individual needs. As co founder Les has been a key part of translating the design concept of the Scholars process to the automated search tool that is used by higher education clients. As Les points out, an underlying understanding that helped drive the creation of the company is that Scholars will always be interested in ways to better serve our clients.

Working closely with technical staff, Les is involved with product development that fully automates services. From both a financial and operational perspective, Les works to integrate three essential concepts into each version of Scholars search tools, that each version be Secure, Efficient and Accurate.

Pam Jones, General Counsel: Pam has over twenty years of experience in working with small businesses and nonprofit organizations. Through her work with nonprofits she is intimately familiar with federal, state and private foundation grant reporting and evaluation requirements. Pam is responsible for intellectual property issues, business transactions, and compliance at SIS. Pam holds a J.D., from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, an M.B.A. from California State University, Sacramento, and a B.A. with a major in Economics from California State University, Chico.