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Successful Entrepreneur
Elma Levy
Co-Founder, Dovel Technologies
Founder, Coach to Strength, LLC
Ms. Elma Levy is the Co-founder and Chair of the Board of Dovel Technologies; under her tenure and guidance the company evolved from a 2-person at home start-up to its current size of $200M and 1300 FTEs.
Ms. Levy established the corporate foundation and culture that enabled the company to develop from a start-up to a mature organization. Ms. Levy had the vision to implement a strategy of growth through acquisition at the right time in the corporate life cycle and executed the steps to realize that vision. In her current position as Chair of the Board, Ms. Levy oversees and guides the organizational governance and strategic direction.
Ms. Levy is a highly sought-after speaker and panelist, business mentor and leadership coach. She serves as mentor to University students as well as to entrepreneurs. In addition to her Board position at Dovel, Ms. Levy serves on multiple Advisory Boards, and she is the Vice -Chair of the Board of the largest non-profit hospice organization in Montgomery County
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Sanja Basaric
Founder
SVB Consulting, LLC
Over a decade of proven experience in developing comprehensive strategies, managing complex projects, and developing relationships with clients and partners across the healthcare and life sciences markets. Experienced business development professional who is passionate about strategic growth, forging new relationships, driving public-private partnerships, and ensuring that clients are connected to the right people at the right time.
Multi-faceted career has included experience in academic research, federal government, big-firm consulting, and small business consulting. Client experience portfolio includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), along with numerous small and large private sector healthcare companies.
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Healthcare, Startup & Government Expert
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39
Successful Startup Entrepreneur & Healthcare Expert
Sathya Elumalai
Founder | CEO
Multisensor Diagnostics
Sathya is an executive healthcare professional with over 14 years of experience leading product development, program management, performance improvement, channel distribution, contract negotiation, network management, and new business development.
Sathya is a certified professional in healthcare quality and safety, and a formally trained health services researcher with diverse leadership experience in the areas of patient safety and quality outcomes.
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John Piletich
Foreign Service Officer
U.S. Department of State
National Security Professional. Experienced digital economy, data privacy, cyber, blockchain, AI, and emerging technology policy expert with a demonstrated history of working in the international affairs industry. Government and business affairs specialist with a talent for aligning government policy and advocacy with advanced business standards and operational goals in foreign markets. Team leader with proven UN experience directing complex projects while managing, motivating, and mentoring UN team members in North Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia and the United States. Extensive experience coordinating international teams, including multiple teams worldwide in the successful election of Doreen Bogdan-Martin to head the Bureau of Telecommunication Development at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
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U.S. Diplomat
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41
Entrepreneur, National Security & Media Expert
Elena Taube Bailey, MBA, MA, PhD Candidate
Sr. National Security Specialist; CEO & Co-founder of Glocal; and Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University
Elena Taube Bailey has over 16 years of private and government sector experience. She currently serves as the Sr. Intelligence Specialist at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), is the CEO and Co-founder of Glocal, and an Adjunct Faculty member at Georgetown University, Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence program, as well as, a Thesis Reader at the National Intelligence University (NIU), and the Executive Director at Wild Things Media.
Elena previously served as a senior analyst and subject matter expert covering a variety of high level national security issues at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of State (DoS), the Department of Defense (DoD), and other US federal government agencies, as well as, the Consulate General of Israel and the Consulate General of Ukraine.
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Bob Milner
Very Successful Entrepreneur
Experiential Professor of Entrepreneurship at Sam Houston State University
Bob is a serial Entrepreneur, Speaker and Professor whose focus is on Impact. He is a decorated veteran who served 7 years in the USAF, and has earned a BS in Business, an MBA and he is working towards his PhD in Organizational Development and Executive Leadership. A finalist for the 2017 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Along with being the CEO of TerBo Consulting Inc and MRH Auto Enterprises LLC; he is an Assist. Professor of Entrepreneurship at Sam Houston State University, an Advisor to many nonprofits on strategy, employee engagement and leadership development. Bob currently serves on the Board of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, The Woodlands Chamber of Commerce, the Executive Leadership Advisory Council for Memorial Hermann - The Woodlands, Executive Advisory Council for The Interfaith of The Woodlands, VEL, The Woodlands Waterway Arts Council, The Insperity Golf Charity, and the Montgomery County Crime Stoppers. He is a graduate of the Accenture Executive Leadership Development program and the Thayer Executive Leadership Development Program at West Point Military Academy. He is the recipient of the 2017 VEL Institute Legacy Award for his service and commitment to Veterans and he is the 2018 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Lifetime Achievement Honor recipient for his support and contributions to help fight child diseases.
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Very Successful Entrepreneur & Entrepreneurship Educator
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43
Government Technology Policy Expert
Bill Rockwood Jr.
Financial & Technology Policy Advisor - Congressmen Darren Soto (FL-09) at U.S. House of Representatives
Financial & technology policy advisor - Congressmen Darren Soto (FL-09) at U.S. House of Representatives with a focus on blockchain and AI. Bill has a JD and LLM (financial & securities regulation) from Georgetown University Law Center and an MBA from Rollins College.
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Phil Kim
Entrepreneurship Professor & Venture Advisor
Babson College
Academic Research:
Current research interests focus on breakthrough science in academic entrepreneurship. Exploring the risky world of patenting and commercialization. Using specific examples from both successful and unsuccessful inventions, Identifying traps on the road to commercialization and offer insights for how entrepreneurs can avoid them. Researching issues related to early-stage ventures, founding teams, and performance of growing ventures, both in the US and around the world.
Entrepreneurship Educator:
In my 10+ years of university teaching, I have empowered hundreds of students in courses such as Venture Creation and Technology Entrepreneurship. These courses garnered praise for their active and involved nature and introduced students to key principles of entrepreneurship.
Venture Advisor:
Helping entrepreneurs and researchers achieve success in their ventures is important to me. I have worked with companies and individual entrepreneurs, including companies coming from both industry and academia to pursue their venture opportunities.
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Entrepreneurship Education Expert
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45
Business Strategy Consultant
Hector Del Castillo
Chief Product Officer
Byond
Hector has over 20 years of experience collaborating with executives and entrepreneurs to grow their
businesses. He’s passionate about working with executives to achieve business growth by guiding
organic and inorganic growth initiatives.
At Byond, he conducts market research and business intelligence to share actionable information with
small and mid-market business executives and founders who want to grow their companies and
significantly improve the value they deliver to customers, while reducing operational costs to increase
their company’s profitability, productivity and scalability.
As a consultant and coach, he ensures organizations achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by
guiding executives, building capacity and capability, improving processes and deploying best in class
tools.
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Lawrence Jones
Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Biotechnology Health Management and Care LLC.
Lawrence Jones, Ph.D., is the founder of Biotechnology Health Management and Care LLC, a consulting firm geared to the early stage biotech start-up companies. He is a graduate of Webster University with a B.A. in biology, a graduate of the Masters in Biotechnology program from Johns Hopkins University and a graduate of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC) Masters in Public Policy. He obtained Certificates in Entrepreneurship from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Innovate Program and in Business Development from the nationally acclaimed I-corps lean customer discovery program. Dr. Jones received his Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership from Regent University in the School of Business and Leadership with a concentration in Entrepreneurial Leadership. He has a vast breadth of professional employment experiences by way of laboratory technical positions from the bench to managerial level positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to industry in the Rockville, Maryland biotech arena with the BioReliance Corporation and in consulting for emerging start-up bioengineering technologies.
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Consulting Expert of Early Stage Biotech Start-Up Companies
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47
Government Procurement Expert
Harrison Smith
Senior Procurement Executive (Acting) U.S. Department of the Treasury
Procurement executive with extensive experience in managing substantial, multifaceted portfolios. Detailed, transparent, process-oriented approach to helping organizations make consistent, evolutionary improvements. Proficient in complex business negotiations for major IT investments, and creative pricing arrangements which enable federal agencies to deploy them within budget.
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Katherine Pinkard
President
Real Estate Pinkard Properties
As the President of Pinkard Properties, Ms. Pinkard oversees the daily operations of the woman-owned commercial real estate firm.
Over the past several years, she has grown the firm from a start-up to a robust book of business made up of clients of varying sizes. From local real estate owners and developers, to publicly-traded REITs, as well as large public companies and public institutions and municipalities, Ms. Pinkard has leveraged the firm’s talented and experienced staff to create lasting partnerships with major players in the Maryland real estate
market and beyond. She has developed a niche providing property management, asset management, development, and consulting services to a host of clients large and small, primarily in the Baltimore metropolitan area. She has worked with both local developers and public REITs to consult on complex and varied development projects ranging from the adaptive reuse of urban sites to ground-up greenfield development.
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Blockchain Real Estate Expert
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49
Venture Capitalist
Christopher College
General Partner
TCP Venture Capital
Mr. College is an experienced venture capital professional with deep expertise in structuring, negotiating, and executing transactions. Mr. College has successfully closed over 70 transactions during his career worth over $2.0 billion. He is currently responsible for the strategic and operational leadership of TCP Venture Capital. Prior to joining TCP Venture Capital, from 2006 to 2012, Mr. College was Head of the Private Finance Group at Stifel Nicolaus. From 2001 until 2006, Mr. College was with the Private Finance Department of Legg Mason Wood Walker. Mr. College joined Legg Mason Wood Walker in 1999 and from 1999 until 2001 was a member of the investment banking team focusing on mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings (IPOs) in the technology industries. Prior to joining Legg Mason, from 1992 to 1997, Mr. College was an investment banker with Robert W. Baird & Co. Mr. College holds BA in economics from Northwestern University and an MBA degree from Emory University.
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Salma El Marjiya Villarreal
MD, MPH/MBA Candidate at Johns Hopkins University
President of America's Venture Capitol LLC
Salma has experience with medical systems in Israel, Europe, and the United States. Salma is an avid researcher and has a number of publications. She is getting her masters in public health at the #1 MPH program in the world, Johns Hopkins University, along with her MBA. While steeped in traditional medical methods, Salma is also interested in alternative medicine and new technology and approaches that could help solve world health issues and our toughest health challenges.
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Medical and Health Expert
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51
Elite Management Consultant - Startup & VC Expert
Antoine Grant
Associate Partner
East Coast Market Lead - Fuel
McKinsey & Company
Antoine is an Associate Partner and the East Coast Market Lead for the Fuel by McKinsey practice, which serves pre-IPO companies and their investors. Antoine works with fast growing companies and venture capitalists to drive growth through pricing, go-to-market, new product development, org structure, and optimization strategies.
Antoine began his career as a management consultant at Bain & Company. Throughout the United States and Australia, he worked on a variety of cases in growth strategy, performance improvement, and post-merger integration, serving clients in technology, telecom, food, services, chemicals, and private equity. After Bain, Antoine held entrepreneurial roles in strategy, product, and business development, helping to define, develop, and deploy digital businesses.
Antoine holds a bachelors in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Claremont McKenna College, and an MBA from Wharton Business School.
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Todd Kata
Chief Operating Officer
Varna Capital
COO for Global Equity L/S fund; responsibility included operations, business development & investor relations, risk management, trading
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52
Investment Expert
53
Hedge Fund Expert
Robert Picard
Chief Strategist
Asset Management
GlassBridge Enterprises, Inc.
Mr. Picard has co-founded and built four multi-billion dollar hedge fund platforms at The Carlyle Group/Rock Creek, Optima Fund Management, RBC Capital Markets and InfraHedge/State Street. Most recently, Mr. Picard has been a leader at Lyxor Asset Management, Navigant Consulting’s FIRST Team and The Rumson Ridge Group, LLC (his own firm), as Managing Partner. Earlier, he was Chief Investment Officer and Partner at Optima Fund Management overseeing USD $6.5 Billion of hedge fund investments. Prior to joining Optima, Mr. Picard was a Managing Director at The Carlyle Group. At Carlyle, Mr. Picard built and managed the process and portfolio of a hedge fund platform for investing in alternative investments. Prior to joining Carlyle, Mr. Picard was Managing Director at RBC Capital Risk Advisors. The Group actively managed more than US $10 billion of Royal Bank's proprietary assets through arbitrage trading, hedge fund investments and structured private equity investments. In the early 1990s, he oversaw Global Equity Derivatives for Kidder, Peabody in Europe and worked for Bank Nomura (Suisse) S.A. trading and selling multi-currency Asian convertible and warrant products. Mr. Picard graduated from College de Genève and attended the University of Geneva School of Law
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Jeff Cherry
Founder & Executive Director
Concious Venture Lab
Over the last 29 years Jeff has been a designer, CEO, educator, consultant and investor. He enjoys the creative process, both from an artistic and organizational perspective. Currently he's bringing these divergent experiences together in order to help companies develop more conscious, purpose driven business models; and to help investors build societal as well as financial value. He tries to bring right and left brain thinking to problem solving, business creation and investing ideas; hopefully asking better questions and using his expertise to make the lives of those around him more fulfilling and successful.
As the founder of the Porter Group, CEO of SHIFT Ventures and Founder and Executive Director of Conscious Venture Lab, Jeff is an evangelist for the transformation of capitalism. Working with private investors and early-stage businesses his goal is to create businesses that are operating at the intersection of profit and purpose. As an expert in the emerging field of Conscious Capitalism Jeff has been invited to speak or present at a number of universities around the country on the topic of impact investing and new models of business. These include: The University of Maryland, The Darden School at the University of Virginia, Yale University, Columbia University, The Booth School at the University of Chicago, Howard Community College and The University of Baltimore.
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Early Stage Business Accelerator
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55
Technology, Blockchain & Digital Consulting Expert
Aleksandar Zelenovic
Strategy & Consulting Practice Lead
Publicis Sapient
As a Strategy & Consulting Lead, Aleksandar focuses on creating long-lasting solutions at the intersection of technology, innovation and business. He is highly entrepreneurial business leader with 20+ years of experience in supporting U.S. and overseas clients from Fortune 500 companies to government. His approach to leadership generates results by focusing on end-customer value, rapid prototyping and organizational learning. Aleksandar is an expert in management consulting, business and digital strategy, Blockchain, DevOps/Agile, transformation, modernization, advanced analytics and organizational design. He is also a founder of Sapient’s global consulting development program “Strategy University” (SYU).
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Eric S. McGill
Strategy & Consulting Practice Lead
Publicis Sapient
Eric McGill presently serves as a Sr. Technology Commercialization Specialist for Aetos Systems where he leads the NASA Goddard’s Spaceflight Center’s (GSFC) Strategic Partnerships office (SPO) in matters pertaining to direct marketing of technologies for licensing. He possesses a strong scientific background in research and development as well as entrepreneurial experience gained from discovering, developing, and successfully licensing his own patented technology. Mr. McGill was a Senior Scientist in R&D and product development for a global medical technology company where he discovered two patented compositions/methods and served as a member of the company’s patent review team. Mr. McGill has over 10 years of scientific experience, 4 issued patents and more than 15 years of technology licensing and commercialization experience for NASA, DoD, universities and small businesses. He has also matriculated through a National Science Foundations I-Corps cohort.
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Technology Commercialization, Marketing and Licensing Expert/Consultant
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57
Automotive Sales and Marketing Expert
James Boening
Dealer Operator
Ourisman Automotive Group & H Street Management
Mr. Boening has owned companies in many different Industries; Automotive, Finance & Lending, Health & Fitness, Construction, Food/Restaurant, Music/Recording and Media. Self-made Entrepreneur from an early age of 24. He has written and published a book and has another one in the making by the name of SuperGross TM. His strengths are finding niche’s and adapting quickly to change. Has been employed by a Fortune 500 Company to grow and produce more Net Gross. He was in charge of one of the most successful Operations within the Company for years. One of his companies, Synergy Acceptance that he Founded and owned 40% of, sold for 20mm in the fourth year of operation. He is a graduate of NADA Dealer Academy. He is the Founder of the AlphaTeam and the creator of building Brands within Brands within Multiple Manufactures. He has recently joined forces with Chris Ourisman on a new venture of building, running and acquiring Franchise Dealerships and currently the Host of The Gentlemen Series.
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Alexis Johnson
Creator and Innovator - Blockchain Events
Alexis Johnson graduated Loomis Chaffee, an independent boarding school in Windsor, CT and part of Ten Schools Admissions Organization , with Cum Laude distinction.
A recipient of the Little Rock 9 Scholarship, Alexis holds a bachelors in Civil Engineering from the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. Alexis has over 5 years experience in real estate development and construction management ranging from high end residential, commercial and healthcare with total portfolio over 2 billion in value.
Alexis launched her media company back in 2015 targeting niche industries and communities. Alexis began passively investing in cryptocurrencies in 2017 and during spring of 2018 launched the Light Node Media subsidiary, an events and media company which targets the Blockchain community.
February of 2019 Alexis launched the Johns Hopkins Blockchain Fintech and Alumni network connecting students, professors and alumni within the Blockchain and Fintech ecosystem.
Marketing veteran, investor and engineer, Alexis’ strengths include marketing, business development, sales and branding.
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Blockchain Media Specialist
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59
Angel Fund Manager & Entrepreneur
Sumner Webster
Co-Fund Manager & Investor
San Diego Angel Conference
Sumner was born and raised outside Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University where he played football and earned a B.A in Economics. Before earning his MBA from Johns Hopkins University Sumner worked in consulting, venture capital and startups. Today Sumner is an active Angel Investor, CEO of Iron Forge Development and Co-Fund manager for the San Diego Angels.
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Femi Devin Ayanbadejo Sr.
Founding Partner
HealthReel Inc.
Femi is an NFL Champion and Founder of HealthReel, Inc., which uses technology from NASA. HealthReel is disrupting the mobile health space. Femi is an experienced successful entrepreneur and has an MBA from Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, a BA from San Diego State University, and has taken the NFL entrepreneurship program at Stanford University.
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NFL Champion & Tech Entrepreneur
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Government Venture Expert
Ethel Rubin
Head of NIH Venture Capital Team
Versatile and creative life sciences venture strategy & innovations executive with a track record of sourcing, assessing and investing in biomedical technologies with sound go-to-market strategies. Huge (1200+) network of VC/CVC, angels, entrepreneurs, service providers in the innovation ecosystem. Held senior level roles in both Fortune 100 & early stage companies, senior advisor for biopharma, med tech, digital health and diagnostics ventures. Business strategy expertise with history of global product launches in multiple therapeutic areas. Media-savvy influencer.
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David Spirk
Chief Data Officer
United States Special Operations Command
David is a technology and national security expert. Now serving as the first Chief Data Officer for the United States Special Operations Command. David is helping to apply cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, robotics, etc. to the U.S. Special Forces environment and capabilities.
David has a massive amount of armed forces and national security experience including serving as Deputy Director of Intelligence for the United States Central Command and as the Associate Director of Technology Investment for a special division for the United States Secretary of the Air Force. This is in addition to David's extensive military experience and additional senior executive military/intelligence leadership roles.
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Technology & National Security Expert
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