startups

Faculty & Inventors • Resources Experts in Residence – Harvard Office of Technology Development


Laura Brass

Laura Brass
Senior Investment Partner, Novartis Venture Fund

Dr. Laura Brass is a senior investment partner at NVF in Cambridge, Mass. Prior to joining NVF, Laura was a Managing Director at MPM Capital, and prior to that, she was a member of the founding management team and SVP of Business Development for TriNetX, a healthcare IT company focusing on big data analytics for clinical research. Before TriNetX, Laura was a Director of Business Development at Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development and at its Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She led commercialization strategy, start-up creation, deal structuring, and negotiations for a portfolio of over 250 biotech, synthetic-chemistry, engineering, software, device, and stem-cell technologies developed at Harvard. Laura has also held roles in business development and IP strategy at Elixir Pharmaceuticals, and was CEO of Aferon, Inc., an early-stage antiviral start-up company. Laura holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago.

David Fallace

David Fallace
Advisor, Polaris Partners

David is an advisor in the Boston office at Polaris Partner and splits his efforts with founders focused on healthcare, information technology, and biotechnology.

Before joining Polaris Partners, David served as managing director at The Investment Fund for Foundations (TIFF), overseeing diversifying strategies. Previously, he served as director of investments for special opportunities at the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, where he managed a $10-billion opportunistic portfolio including its direct biotech venture investments. Prior to Alaska, he spent time working at the quantitative investment research firm Haugen Custom Financial Systems and at GF Private Equity Group.

Bill Geary

Bill Geary
General Partner and Co-founder, Flare Capital Partners

Bill is a General Partner and cofounder of Flare Capital Partners, a team of proven healthcare technology venture capital investors delivering strategic industry resources, experience and insight to partnering entrepreneurs. Prior to helping start Flare Capital Partners in 2013, Bill was with North Bridge Venture Partners since inception in 1994.

During Bill’s more than 20-year tenure investing in young and emerging healthcare technology companies, he has served on the boards of numerous industry-leading companies, actively helping and working closely with founders and management. His current and prior firm’s healthcare investments include Aetion, Bright Health, Circulation, ClearDATA, Curisium, HealthReveal, Health Verity, higi, Iora Health, Valence Health (Evolent Health), VisitPay, Welltok, Humedica (Optum Analytics), Explorys (IBM), Rise Health (Best Doctors/Teladoc), Connance, MC10, Phase Forward (Oracle), Pharmetrics (IMS Health), NaviNet (Nant Health) and eBenX (ADP).

Jodi Gernon

Jodi Gernon
Director, Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School

The Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School champions entrepreneurship at HBS and works closely with faculty, students and alumni of HBS to foster entrepreneurship both at the school and with alumni around the world. Jodi and her team oversee the student programs including the Rock Accelerator, the Rock Summer Fellowship program to support students founding companies and joining startups, and the New Venture Competition. Jodi also oversees the Rock 100 program, designed to support alumni founders who are scaling their ventures.  

Jodi brings over 25 years of marketing and leadership experience working with successful startups such as Physician’s Online and Mediconsult.com (both sold to WebMd), Mothernature.com (IPO 1999) and Revenio (sold to Vignette) and Fortune 500 companies such as Pepsi, GE, and CR Bard. Jodi has also worked with founders at many early-stage ventures in both the U.S. and Canada. Jodi is an advisory board member of WPI’s new Fosse Innovation Center and the Nantucket Conference, and is an advisor to several startups. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from WPI. 

Francesca Gino

Francesca Gino
Professor, Harvard University

Francesca Gino is the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She is also formally affiliated with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, with the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative at Harvard, and with the Behavioral Insight Group at Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Gino teaches Decision Making and Negotiation in the MBA elective curriculum and in Executive Education programs at the School. She co-chairs an HBS Executive Education program on applying behavioral economics to organizational problems and another on Driving Profitable Growth. She has also been teaching a variety of PhD courses, on Micro Topics in Organizational Behavior, Behavioral Approaches to Decision Making and Experimental Methods.

Maia Harris

Maia H. Harris
Partner, Pepper Hamilton LLP

Maia H. Harris is a partner at the law firm of Pepper Hamilton LLP, where she focuses her practice on intellectual property issues including licensing and counseling, as well as enforcement when necessary. Ms. Harris’ work spans a full spectrum of technologies and industries, from semiconductors to surgical methods and devices and digital health. Her clients are just as diverse, including emerging, private, and public companies, as well as universities and research institutions. Ms. Harris is also one of several members of her firm who, together, focus on providing a full suite of IP services specific to the needs of universities, research institutions, and related start-ups, including IP strategy, prosecution, and licensing.

Rosana Kapeller

Rosana Kapeller
Entrepreneur in Residence, GV

Rosana Kapeller is an Entrepreneur in Residence at GV, focused on the intersection of therapeutics and machine learning. She brings over 25 years of scientific leadership and entrepreneurial experience to her role.

Prior to joining GV, Rosana was the founding Chief Scientific Officer of Nimbus Therapeutics, where she led the company’s initiative to apply advanced computational technologies to the design and development of novel therapeutics. During her tenure at Nimbus, she assembled a strong scientific team that validated the company’s platform and advanced multiple promising programs. Before Nimbus, Rosana served as VP of Research at Aileron Therapeutics. Early in her career, she worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and consulted for Third Rock Ventures and Atlas Venture.

Rosana is a member of the board of directors of Cedilla Therapeutics and of the HBS Blavatnik Fellowship Key Advisory Board.  She earned her M.D. from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Tufts University.

Sophie Kornowski

Sophie Kornowski
Senior Partner, Gurnet Point Capital

Dr. Sophie Kornowski joined Gurnet Point Capital in 2018 from Roche, a leading healthcare company based in Switzerland, where she was Executive Vice-President, global Head of Partnering. In this role, Dr. Kornowski developed and maintained over 200 external partnerships with research institutions, biotech, pharma, and healthcare information technology companies worldwide. During her tenure, Roche Partnering completed over 50 deals per year. Sophie was a member of Roche Extended Global Executive Committee and a member of the boards of Chugai. Previously, for five years Dr. Kornowski was General Manager of Roche France, a major affiliate of the Roche group.

Earlier in her career Dr. Kornowski spent 11 years in various leadership roles at Merck in the United States, France, and Israel and in the early years of her career worked at Abbott and Sanofi, in France and the United States. Dr. Kornowski has a Doctorate in Pharmacy from Rene Descarte University in Paris and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth.

John Lee

John Lee
Principal, Osage University Partners

John focuses on enterprise software and hardware. At Osage, John has been actively involved in investments such as Algorithmia, Clarifai, Corelight, Embodied, Kymeta Corp, Lastline, Perceptive Automata, and Streetlight Data. Prior to Osage, John spent time at Lux Capital and was a manager in the investment arm of Mahindra & Mahindra, one of Asia’s largest conglomerates, where he worked on diversified investments and in-house startups in technology. John holds a BS from Cornell University.

Ellie McGuire

Ellie McGuire
Partner, LS Polaris Innovation Fund

Ellie McGuire is a Partner of the LS Polaris Innovation Fund. She has held leadership and consulting positions in business development, operations, and strategy in multiple life science companies including Arsia Therapeutics, XTuit Pharmaceuticals, and Lyndra.

McGuire currently serves on the Board of Directors to Mellitus, and is a Board observer to Gauss Surgical and Suono Bio. In addition, she is a member of the Fred Hutch Evergreen Fund Advisory Committee.

Prior to co-founding the LS Polaris Innovation Fund, McGuire was the Head of Business Development at Lyndra, where she was also a member of the founding team. She was recently awarded the Up and Coming Woman of the Future Award by WEST. McGuire studied neuropsychology at Colby College prior to attending Tuck School of Management Business Bridge Program.

Terry McGuire

Terry McGuire
Partner, Polaris Partners

Terry McGuire is a founding partner of Polaris Partners and has 30+ years of successful early-stage investing experience in healthcare and technology companies. As a venture capitalist, Terry has co-founded three companies. He has invested in nearly 50 companies which have addressed the needs of more than 60 million patients. Mr. McGuire holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS in engineering from the Thayer School, Dartmouth College, and a BS in physics and economics from Hobart.

Chrissy Meyer

Chrissy Meyer
Partner, Root Ventures

Chrissy has spent the past decade taking hardware products from early concept through high-volume production. After getting her MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, she led several projects at Apple and Square. She was also a founding team member at Pearl Automation, a vehicle technology startup. She has developed products that have shipped tens of millions of units, and she has spent over a year on the ground in Asia working closely with manufacturers and suppliers. Chrissy recently joined Root Ventures, a seed-stage hard tech venture capital firm, as a partner. At Root, she invests in deeply technical teams that are solving problems in robotics, hardware, industrial automation, AI, and machine learning. Outside of work, Chrissy is a sleep-deprived mother to a six-month old daughter.

Mark Nardone

Mark Nardone
Executive Vice President, PAN Communications

Mark Nardone is the Executive Vice President of PAN Communications with 25+ years of experience in marketing and PR. He oversees the firm’s strategic direction across brand marketing and business development efforts. Mark’s ability to engage audiences and remain dynamic was the driving force behind PAN’s move to integrated marketing communications.

Mark is passionate about growth marketing. He provides brands with seamless transitions into their next stage of growth by creating compelling ideas and developing integrated approaches to move those ideas through the market. Mark is an active contributor to several publications, including MarketingProfs, CMO.com, and PRWeek, offering his expertise in areas such as customer experience, marketing strategy, measurement and content marketing.

Stan Reiss

Stan Reiss
General Partner, Matrix Partners

As a general partner at Matrix, Stan focuses on early-stage investments across technology sectors and works with companies including Hyper9 (acquired by Solarwinds), QPID Health (acquired by eviCore), Acacia Communications (ACIA), Xtalic, RightHand Robotics, and LogRocket. He started his career as a chip designer for National SemiConductor and as a Consultant at McKinsey before joining Matrix as an investor. Stan has a degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell, a Masters’ in Electrical Engineering and Operations Research from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard.

David Resnick

David Resnick
Partner, Nixon Peabody LLP

David Resnick is a partner in the Intellectual Property practice at Nixon Peabody. He works with both startup and established life sciences companies, as well as major U.S. research institutions, to develop comprehensive patent strategies to protect their IP. His practice focuses on strategic portfolio management, patent prosecution, transactional matters and associated client counseling, managing portfolios of some of the leading U.S. research institutions and domestic and international corporations. David has extensive experience with microbiome-related technologies, pharmacogenomics, disease biomarkers, proteomics, tissue engineering, gene therapy, regenerative medicine, drug delivery systems, stem cells, angiogenesis modulation, cancer vaccines, oncology, immune modulation, medical devices, and diagnostics.

Michael Schrader

Michael Schrader
CEO and Co-founder, Vaxess Technologies

Michael Schrader is the founding CEO of Vaxess, a Gates Foundation– and VC-backed company bringing healthcare out of the clinic and into patients’ lives, whether at home or around the world. Vaxess has a pipeline of immunotherapies and vaccines on the MIMIX platform, which combines self-administration and high-temperature stability with enhanced efficacy. Prior to Vaxess, Michael spent time at Google, Toyota, and Honda where he helped bring a range of products to market and earned fifteen patents. Michael received his B.S. in Engineering from Purdue and his M.B.A. from Harvard.

Steven Tregay

Steven Tregay
Founder, President, and CEO, FORMA Therapeutics

Steven Tregay is the Founder, President and CEO of FORMA Therapeutics, based in Watertown, MA and Branford, CT. Prior to founding FORMA, Dr. Tregay was a Managing Director for the $200M Novartis Option Fund. He led the fund’s investments in and served on the Board of Directors of FORMA Therapeutics, Adenosine Therapeutics (acquired by Clinical Data: FRX) and Cequent Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Marina Biotech: MRNA). Prior to joining the venture group, he was the Executive Director and Head of Strategic Alliances-Oncology, Ophthalmology and Technologies at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. He managed a team who were responsible for identification, negotiation and management of collaborations for the oncology and ophthalmology disease areas and all the technology areas. Prior to Novartis, he had roles in business development at Array BioPharma and research.

Dr. Tregay is a co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Compass Therapeutics, an immuno-oncology-focused start-up biotechnology company in Cambridge, MA.  He also serves as a Board Member at LabCentral based out of Cambridge, MA. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in organic chemistry from Harvard University and a B.S. from Davidson College.

David Walt

David Walt
Professor, Harvard University

Dr. Walt is an internationally recognized expert in nanoscience and diagnostics and has invented numerous transformative technologies that have led to major commercial successes including Illumina and Quanterix. He is Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. His laboratory pioneered the development of microwell arrays, which revolutionized the field of genetic analysis. Dr. Walt’s laboratory also introduced the idea of digital protein detection by developing a high-throughput technology for performing single-molecule analysis. He is the Scientific Founder of Illumina and served on the Board of Illumina for 18 years. He is also the Scientific Founder and a Director of Quanterix Corporation, as well as a founder and Director of Ultivue, Inc.

Russ Wilcox

Russ Wilcox
General Partner, Pillar VC

Russ Wilcox is a general partner at Pillar VC, where he invests in Boston-based seed stage companies related to software, IoT, digital health, quantum computing, home construction, robotics, agriculture and biology. Previously, he cofounded E Ink Corporation to commercialize electronic paper invented at the MIT Media Lab. E Ink conducted materials research and product development, closed design wins, scaled a factory and global supply chain, and shipped tens of millions of displays for the Amazon Kindle and other devices. After the sale of E Ink for $480 million in 2009, Russ co-founded Transatomic Power, advancing an invention for safer, cleaner, cheaper nuclear energy; and Piper Therapeutics, conducting preclinical studies for an immuno-oncology drug. He sits on the advisory board of Harvard’s Physical Sciences & Engineering Accelerator and was a Board Director for Harvest Automation, a developer of agricultural robots. Russ graduated with honors in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College and was a Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School. He holds thirty-five issued U.S. patents. He is an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur of the Year and a Mass High Tech All-Star.

Larry Wittenberg

Larry Wittenberg
Senior Partner, Goodwin

Larry Wittenberg is a senior partner in Goodwin’s Technology Companies & Life Sciences group and Co-Chair of the firm’s Healthcare Technology and Services practice. Mr. Wittenberg co-founded the firm’s Life Sciences practice and previously served as Co-Chair of that practice and as national Co-Chair of Goodwin’s Technology Companies & Life Sciences group. He has more than 30 years’ experience representing life science and healthcare technology companies, ranging in size from start-ups to public companies, in corporate and intellectual property transactions and general corporate matters. This work has included numerous venture capital financings, public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, joint ventures, licenses and technology transfer agreements. Mr. Wittenberg also represents venture capital groups on their investments in life sciences companies and investment banks in connection with public and private financings. He has structured and negotiated corporate partnering transactions with numerous global pharmaceutical companies.

Krishna Yeshwant

Krishna Yeshwant
General Partner, GV

Dr. Krishna Yeshwant is a physician, programmer, and entrepreneur who has been working with GV since its inception. He first joined Google as part of the New Business Development team.

Prior to Google, Krishna helped start an electronic data interchange company that was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and a network security company that was acquired by Symantec.

Krishna has a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University. He also earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and completed his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., where he continues to practice.



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