Julie Lenzer Kirk
President and CEO
Path Forward International
Julie Lenzer Kirk harnesses her experience as a successful and award-winning IT entrepreneur to assist others in realizing their dream of entrepreneurship and taking their already-established entrepreneurial companies to the next level.
Ms. Kirk is President of Path Forward, International, which blazes forward paths in entrepreneurship through workshops, training, and consulting. She is a sought-after speaker on topics of entrepreneurship, business management and leadership, and balancing work and family.
Her upcoming book, “ The ParentPreneur Edge: What Parenting Teaches About Building a Successful Business ” (John Wiley & Sons) due out June 2007, provides actionable tips for entrepreneurs, business leaders, and managers. Even if you're not a parent, you've been a child, which makes the lessons learned through analogies between parenthood and business easy to relate to and implement.
She received the Athena Award in 2004 as recognition for her contributions to other business women and the community and was named to Maryland 's Top 100 Women 2005 sponsored by The Daily Record . She is also the Lead Instructor for UMBC's ACTiVATE® program, an ex-officio member of the Board of the Center for Women in Information Technology at UMBC and a business advisor for Women Entrepreneurs, Inc.
Ms. Kirk graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.S. in Computer Science and is leader in numerous community organizations. She currently resides in the Washington D.C. metro area with her husband and two children.
ACTiVATE® ADMINISTRATION BIOGRAPHIES
Ellen J. Hemmerly
President & Executive Director, UMBC Research and Technology Park
Special Assistant to the Vice President for Administration and Finance
UMBC
Ellen Hemmerly is responsible for managing the development of the 350,000-square-foot bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park located on the main campus at UMBC. Hemmerly also oversees the techcenter@UMBC which houses 28 companies including incubator companies and emerging technology companies, most of which are actively collaborating with faculty and students at UMBC. In addition, Hemmerly oversees the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship. Hemmerly is a member of the Association for University Research Parks (AURP) Executive Committee and serves as immediate past president. She also sits on the board of the Greater Baltimore Tech Council and the advisory committees of the Baltimore County Loan Fund, the New Markets Growth Fund and the Greater Baltimore Committee's Bioscience Steering Committee.
Prior to joining UMBC, Hemmerly was vice president of the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC), serving as the senior lender and director of the Enterprise Development Fund. While at BDC, she successfully started a business incubator and marketed the city of Baltimore to high technology businesses. Before joining BDC, Hemmerly was an associate with K.S. Sweet Associates, a real estate advisory and development firm, and TDH, a venture capital firm. After graduating from Cornell University's Johnson School of Management with a Master of Business Administration, Hemmerly spent six years as a banker with Mellon Bank (formerly Girard Bank). Hemmerly earned a Bachelor of Science (magna cum laude) in Mathematics from Moravian College.
Stephen P. Auvil
Assistant Vice President for Research
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.
David J. Fink, Ph.D.
Biotech Entrepreneur-in-Residence
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. 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. 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 . 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 techcenter's Biotech Entrepreneur in Residence, Dr. Fink advises early-stage incubator companies and is an instructor for UMBC's ACTiVATE® program. He has authored 40 scientific papers and book chapters, and he has been awarded 22 US patents.
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.