In this role, I'm responsible for developing and implementing a vision and infrastructure to accelerate a cross-campus culture of entrepreneurship that spans research institutes, colleges, and departments.My focus includes anticipating mechanisms to secure and grow entrepreneurship programs and resources to assist ecosystem members with new venture formation, fundraising, management, and growth beyond the incubation stage.I also lead the staff of the EnterpriseWorks incubator at the University of Illinois Research Park, which provides technology commercialization support for researchers and entrepreneurs, supports new venture creation, and catalyzes promising startup companies.

Teaching a seminar course on Engineering Entrepreneurship where I introduce students to entrepreneurship through frameworks and principles reinforced by the practical experiences of guest speakers who are typically entrepreneurs or investors or others who support the formation and growth of new ventures.

Corporate owner of product portfolio. Provide leadership on all aspects of technology development, product development, technical service, manufacturing, EH&S, and product stewardship.Talent Management: Responsible for recruitment, hiring, training, management, and mentoring of technology and product development team consisting of chemists, chemical engineers, and materials scientists.Product Development Pipeline and Product Management: Lead the development and refinement of the company’s strategic technology and development road map.Project Management: Technical project lead for 40 + active technology evaluation and joint development projects with various customers including major coatings, adhesives, sealants producers and their OEM end-users.Intellectual Property Management: Manage intellectual property portfolio and develop protection strategies including protection vehicles (patents or trade secrets) and jurisdictions for foreign filings. Collaborate with Patent Counsel during drafting and prosecution phases. Led the development of new technologies resulting in 16 issued and pending patents in U.S. and foreign jurisdictions. Negotiated new evaluation licenses with commercial licensing options with various government agencies, national labs, and academic institutions with a total portfolio of 11 issued and pending patents.Application Development and Technical Service: Lead the development of new coating, adhesive, and sealant formulations to develop relevant application properties data and formulation guidelines for customers. Coordinated technical support efforts on customer projects.Product Scale-Up, Manufacturing, and Quality Control: Coordinate transition of new products from lab scale to production via management of internal R&D teams and toll manufacturing scale-up and production teams. Set product specifications and quality control procedures. Optimized supply chain to lower key raw material costs by 50%.

Product development and technology transfer efforts met milestones that resulted in a successful Series A fundraising round.Performed exhaustive review of toll microencapsulation and large scale drying operations to complete the assembly of initial supply chain.Led development and scale up of 3 novel self-healing chemistry platforms from lab-scale new technologies through pilot production coordinating efforts between R&D team and toll manufacturing partner.Designed and executed technical project that represented the company’s first revenue generating joint development agreement.Led technical service efforts and served as technical counterpart to business development and sales efforts.

As an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR), I mentored and supported faculty and student entrepreneurs in areas ranging from founding team formation and equity allocation, vision and strategy formulation, fundraising strategy, business development, product development and scalability, and contract manufacturing, to name a few examples.

Adapted Ring Opening Metathesis Polymerization (ROMP) self-healing chemistry for application in epoxy vinyl esters for the development of self-healing fiber-reinforced composites.Evaluated performance of alternative ruthenium catalysts for ROMP-based self-healing systems with a view towards identifying more chemically robust catalysts and designing tunability of reaction kinetics into self-healing systems.Characterized new catalytically active ruthenium-amine complexes generated during preparation of ROMP-based self-healing systems and proposed a decomposition pathway for ruthenium catalysts in the presence of primary amines.Designed and characterized new approach for improving self-healing performance in epoxy materials via non-covalent interactions.Developed new self-healing system based on free-radical polymerization of acrylate monomers for application in biomedical materials such as orthopedic cements and dental resins.Led multidisciplinary collaborations that included post-doctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate research assistants.

Supported course instruction, led review sessions and provided additional tutoring to assist students with homework and exam preparation for both departments.

Led culturally and professionally diverse teams of consultants on various projects for clients that included fortune 500 companies, startups, hospitals and academic institutions.Projects included organizational structure development, go-to-market strategy formulation, market research, benchmarking and e-commerce marketing plan development.Updated clients with monthly status reports and presented final deliverables to clients.

Functionalized a new line of paramagnetic particles for immunodiagnostic applications.Performed alkaline Schiff base chemistry on existing aldehyde functionality.Characterized resulting particles for performance as a potentially more economical replacement for existing paramagnetic particles.Developed familiarity with both covalent and passive adsorption-based coupling techniques and functional capacity assessment for assay performance.