Julie Lenzer Kirk
President and CEO
Path Forward International
http://www.julielenzerkirk.com/
Julie Lenzer Kirk is an author, speaker, consultant, and mom. She built her IT company to multi-millions in revenues while raising her children and after successfully cashing out, harnesses her experiences to assist others in realizing their dream of entrepreneurship and taking their already-established entrepreneurial companies to the next level. Her book, "The ParentPreneur Edge: What Parenting Teaches About Building a Successful Business" (John Wiley & Sons) is available online and in bookstores across the globe.
Ms. Kirk is the “Entrepreneur Expert” for Working Mother Magazine's website and a columnist for Enterprising Women Magazine. She has been quoted online and in print by Inc. Magazine, New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Washington Post as well as frequently featured in the Washington and Baltimore Business Journals. She has also appeared on NBC, Fox News, CBN's “Living the Life” seen nationally on ABC Family, and various local and regional television shows.
As President of Path Forward International, she provides keynotes, workshops, and consulting to give entrepreneurial companies and individuals a "Boot in the Butt ™ " to launch new ideas, grow existing ventures, find their work/life balance, and fine-tune their leadership skills. She is a sought-after speaker on topics of entrepreneurship, business management and leadership, and balancing work and family.
She works with the NSF-funded ACTiVATE program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Through this program, she helps experienced women start businesses by licensing technologies from universities and government labs. She is also active internationally, working with women from Iraq and South Africa to help them start and grow their businesses.
Ms. Kirk graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.S. in Computer Science and participates in and leads numerous community organizations and events. She currently resides in the Baltimore / Washington D.C. metro area with her husband and two children.
Kären Olson
Founder & CEO
BalMed Group, LLC
Kären Olson is the founder and CEO of BalMed Group, LLC, a company providing and supporting strategic, operational, and marketing input at board and executive levels to private equity, venture capital, and early stage companies in the biotechnology and chemical industries.
Olson began her career as a research chemist at Nalco and then moved into sales and marketing with both Teledyne and ICI in the healthcare and chemical markets.
Kären next joined Adhesives Research for a 14-year tenure that progressed from sales to various management roles culminating as President and CEO. Under her leadership, the company surpassed the $100 million milestone while creating two new divisions:
- ARx developed a patented dissolvable drug delivery platform launching over 14 OTC products.
- ARmark invented a patented covert marker for the anti-counterfeiting market including various healthcare applications.
The depth and variety of her experience serving on corporate boards provide a unique perspective to corporate governance and strategy. Kären currently sits on several corporate boards including: BioMarker Strategies, a Johns Hopkins' start-up biotech; Main Tape, a private equity backed organization; and Atlas Container, a privately held, well-established company.
Olson has received numerous awards throughout her career including: Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year, Smart Woman's Woman f the Year, and The Daily Record 's Healthcare Leader of the Year finalist. She was the subject of the Smart CEO cover story featuring crisis management leadership in 2006.
Ms. Olson holds an Executive MBA from Loyola College and a BS in Chemistry and a BS in Medical Technology from California Lutheran University. She is currently working towards her MS in Biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University and is an instructor of the national, award winning ACTiVATE program at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Kären is also active on several non-profit boards including the Board of Sponsors of Loyola College's Sellinger Business School and Young Presidents' Organization (YPO). She resides with her husband in Baltimore City.
Renee Lewis
President
Pensare Group
Renee Lewis has over 20 years of experience helping emerging companies succeed and grow. Ms. Lewis is the President and CEO of the Pensare Group dedicated to helping entrepreneurs outperform their expectations getting the right results at the right time. She has hands-on expertise in the technology, pharmaceutical technology, telecommunications, banking, eLearning, pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. She has held the position of CEO, COO, CTO, CIO and Director role for several technology-based start-ups developing skills in all areas of the business. She has also held senior positions directing large systems integration projects in organizations such as Cerner, Bell Atlantic, Citi-Street (previously Wellspring Resources), and Booz, Allen and Hamilton. She has experience raising money, selling companies and implementing successful mergers and acquisitions.
Ms. Lewis is a requested speaker at industry conferences including FOSE, Extreme Markup Languages, and E-Gov authoring papers and presentations on a wide range of topics from delivering on budget/on time to exploring the implications of semantic web technology adoption.
Ms. Lewis holds a BS from the Pennsylvania State University and an MS from George Washington University . She sits on the Advisory Board for the Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD ) at George Washington University focusing on the infusion of technology in education , supports several organizations as an advisor to the board, and is very active in the local community through her civic and PTA endeavors. She is certified by Achievement Seminars International (ASI) as a Facilitator and the Total Quality Institute (TQI) as a Quality Process Advisor.ACTiVATE ADMINISTRATION BIOGRAPHIES
Ellen J. Hemmerly
Executive Director, UMBC Research and Technology Park
Special Assistant to the Vice President for Administration and Finance
UMBC
Ms. Hemmerly is Executive Director and President of the UMBC Research Park Corporation and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Institutional Advancement at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). She is responsible for managing the development of a 515,000 SF high technology research and technology park (bwtech@UMBC) which includes an incubator and post-incubator facility, and is a co-principal investigator of ACTiVATE, a technology commercialization program. bwtech@UMBC currently houses 50 companies including 24 incubator companies and 9 emerging technology companies. These technology and biotechnology companies have access to faculty research collaborations, student workers, specialized technology training programs, and a full range of business services including access to experienced entrepreneurs and funding. ACTiVATE is a regional technology commercialization program geared toward professional women which produced 12 start-up companies in its first three years of operation.
Ms. Hemmerly sits on the boards of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, Baltimore County Loan Board, New Markets Venture Fund, Technology Leadership Consortium, Maryland Business Incubator Association and Research Parks Maryland . Ms. Hemmerly is Past President of AURP, the Association of University Research Parks, and is a 2006 graduate of Leadership Maryland. In 2007, she was elected by The Daily Record as one of the Fifty Most Influential Marylanders and chosen by the Greater Catonsville Chamber of Commerce as 2007 Business Person of the Year.
Prior to joining UMBC, Ms. Hemmerly was a Vice President at the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) serving as its Senior Lender and Director of the Enterprise Development Fund, the City's venture capital fund. While at BDC, Ms. Hemmerly successfully started up the city's first business incubator and spent two years as a business development officer marketing Baltimore to high technology businesses. Prior to joining BDC, Ms. Hemmerly was an Associate with K.S. Sweet Associates, a real estate advisory and development firm, and TDH, a venture capital firm. In addition, after graduating from Cornell University 's Johnson School of Management with an M.B.A., Ms. Hemmerly spent six years as a banker with Mellon Bank (formerly Girard Bank). Ms. Hemmerly has a B.S. (magna cum laude) in Mathematics from Moravian College.
David J. Fink, Ph.D.
Director of Entrepreneurial Services
techcenter@UMBC
David Fink 's career in biotechnology and biomedical product development spans over 30 years as a researcher, research manager, consultant, entrepreneur and officer of several start-up biotech companies. Dr. Fink was trained in chemical engineering at the Universities of Cincinnati and Michigan and was a post-doctoral fellow in biochemistry at Purdue University. He then joined Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio where he conducted and managed research on more than 100 projects over a 12-year period. In 1986 he founded his own biomedical consulting business, Bio-Integration Inc., which was active until 1997. In 1988 he founded and served as President of CollaTek, Inc., in collaboration with Gattefossé SA of Lyon, France, to develop and commercialize technology licensed from Battelle for manufacturing collagen-based medical implants. Dr. Fink became the second employee of Osiris Therapeutics at the time it was founded in 1993. Osiris is a Baltimore tissue regeneration company with a platform technology based on adult stem cells. In 1997 Fink became Vice President for International Technology Development and was responsible for planning and coordination of all international programs and collaborations conducted by Osiris, including a major corporate partnership with Novartis Pharma, Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Fink joined Chondros Inc., a start-up cell therapy company in Baltimore, as its first employee in 2001, and continued as its President and COO until November 2003. He is currently Vice President for R&D of Cell Targeting, LLC, a cell therapy start-up in Cleveland, Ohio. As Director of Entrepreneurial Services for bwtech@UMBC, Dr. Fink advises early-stage incubator companies and is Program Manager for UMBC's ACTiVATE program. He has authored 40 scientific papers and book chapters, and he has been awarded 22 US patents.
Stephen P. Auvil
Director, Office of Technology Development
UMBC
Stephen Auvil has been the director of UMBC's Office of Technology Development since October 2000. Prior to his arrival at UMBC, he worked as an assistant director in the Office of Technology Licensing at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he evaluated inventions and negotiated license agreements for a variety of technologies. He has successfully negotiated dozens of license agreements including several agreements involving equity and a number of agreements with faculty initiated start-up companies. Prior to working at Johns Hopkins, Auvil worked for two small medical device companies where he had a variety of responsibilities ranging from rebuilding medical devices under GMP to setting-up and networking computerized accounting systems. Auvil began his career as a laboratory technician studying ion channels in membranes. Auvil graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Engineering Science from Loyola College in Maryland , and went on to earn a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Baltimore and a Masters of Science in Biotechnology from the Johns Hopkins University.
Vivian Armor
Director, Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship
UMBC
Vivian Armor is the director of the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship and an adjunct faculty member at UMBC. She was actively involved in creating the Alex. Brown Center in 2000 and has worked closely with the Baltimore business community and UMBC faculty and staff to develop innovative educational programs and services to foster entrepreneurism in the region. She also teaches undergraduate management classes in the administrative sciences program at UMBC. Prior to joining UMBC, Armor was an executive at the Northrop Grumman Corporation in Baltimore . She has a Bachelor of Arts from UMBC, a Master of Science from Johns Hopkins University and has completed an intensive executive management program at Harvard.