Baltimore Innovation Week 2017

David W. Wise is the Director the Maryland Momentum Fund a new initiative of the University System of Maryland (USM) to provide late seed investment funding for promising technology ventures that come out of any of the twelve constituent institutions of the University System or its incubators. Mr. Wise has a business career spanning over thirty years including serving eight and half years as CEO of The Genetics & IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia an international women's healthcare company with operations in both the US and China of which the Inova Health System was the largest shareholder. In 2014 he decided to shift the focus of his career to helping develop the innovation economy in Maryland. Since 2014 he has been the Venture Advisor to the President of the Abell Foundation on its direct investment program. He is also an advisor to UM Ventures and the Sinai/LifeBridge Health Bioincubator. In addition, he is a member of the Betamore Advisory Board and of the Board of the Maryland Humanities Council and sits on the Bioscience Committee of the Greater Baltimore Committee. He has served as a business competition judge for Accelerate Baltimore, Beta City, and at both the Fischell School in College Park and their School of Medicine of the University of Maryland, among others.

In his position with the Momentum Fund Mr. Wise will be responsible for the review and due diligence and recommendations on investments by the Momentum Fund. In addition, he in conjunction with members of the UM Ventures team, will work with these early stage companies to provide business advice and counseling to help promote their success. Mr. Wise graduated with highest honors from the University of Dayton and received a graduate degree in international business from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

John H. Cammack is Managing Partner of Cammack Associates, which specializes in early stage investing in enterprises advancing brain fitness, business services and educational attainment. Representative investments include Curiosityville, Moodlerooms, Allovue, Calvert Education Services, UnboundConcepts, ReifyHealth, Interaxom, eMindful, Pear Therapeutics, Fusiform and Happlify.

From 1991 to 2009, Mr. Cammack was a senior executive at T. Rowe Price where he served as Division Head and member of the firm’s Operating Steering Committee, Institutional Marketing Steering Committee, Compliance Oversight Committee and member of T. Rowe Price Investment Services Board. Current board assignments included CureViolence.org, PersonalGenome.org, ABAG (Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers), Baltimore Corps, Betamore, Fusiform, and Calvert Education Services. Past roles include the Chairmanship of the United Way of Central Maryland and the Mutual Fund Education Alliance.

Mr. Cammack graduated from Denison University with a BA in History and received his MBA from Columbia University.

Tom Kraak is a JavaScript developer at Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon, which houses 50+ media and technology brands including AOL, Yahoo, and HuffPost. He is passionate about learning, teaching, and the web platform. Tom combines these passions in frequent contributions to his favorite open source projects on GitHub. Besides the long-standing Academy course at Betamore, he teaches and mentors at Thinkful, Baltimore NodeSchool and various local meetups for junior web developers.

Dr. Greg Walsh is an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore where he is the graduate program director for the MS in Interaction Design and Information Architecture as well as the UX Design program. He is an interaction design researcher who focuses on user-centered design. In his almost 20 years of Baltimore City residency, Dr. Walsh has worked at a number of Baltimore-based interaction design firms and continues to focus on innovation through mentoring start-ups in the art of user-centered design. He is ruggedly handsome and a recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award.

Natalie D. Eddington, PhD, FAAPS, FCP, is dean of the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy (UMSOP) and a professor of pharmaceutical sciences. She is also executive director of University Regional Partnerships for the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB).

Dr. Eddington is a nationally known expert in drug delivery and pharmacokinetics. Her research focuses on various medications used in the treatment of cancer, epilepsy, arthritis, and drugs of abuse and on understanding the role of biopharmaceutics and pharmacokinetics in elucidating the underlying mechanisms important in optimizing drug therapy. 

Under Dr. Eddington’s leadership, the School of Pharmacy has established a number of centers and programs including the FDA-supported Maryland Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (M-CERSI), which is a collaborative agreement with the FDA to promote innovation in support of the development and evaluation of safe and effective products. Dr. Eddington has designed numerous international regulatory courses for clinicians and scientists from South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Japan on the United States’ drug development process and the FDA regulatory infrastructure surrounding medication and device development. Most recently, under Dr. Eddington’s leadership, the School has launched a transformational pharmapreneurism initiative, which seeks to position the School’s world class faculty, its wonderful students, and exceptional staff to achieve their career aspirations and address our nation’s health care, research, policy, and societal needs.

Brad Hennessie is the CEO of NextStep Robotic Inc., a company whose portable robotic ankle exoskeleton is being developed as the first ever treatment option to reverse foot drop in stroke victims. Foot drop, which occurs in a wide range of neurological and orthopedic conditions, is recognized as the inability to lift the toe during normal walking. He has been working with the inventors of this technology for 8 years, managing multiple grants with Drs. Macko, Roy, and Forrester. He started with the team as a single study coordinator and quickly grew into a leadership role over the past few years, helping manage the day-to-day tasks and long term goals for the Maryland Exercise and Robotics Center of Excellence (MERCE). MERCE is a ~$7M/year research organization originally founded by Dr. Richard Macko that is part of the Baltimore VA Medical Center and the Department of Neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Brad’s conception of the business model and commercialization plan led to the team’s successful TEDCO MII Phase I/II submission and attracting their first external investor.

Since transitioning out of the robotics lab and starting full time with NextStep Robotics, he has directed an engineering team with Dr. Gil Blankenship at the Maryland Development Center to create the first prototype of the portable ankle robot.

Brad’s early development as a leader was shaped by his 8 years in the Maryland Army National Guard where he learned the importance of having confidence in the quality of a product by being a parachute rigger.

Julia Spicer serves as the Executive Director for the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association (MAVA) and fosters innovation and company building by bringing together private and public investment capital and high growth enterprises across stage and industry. As head of MAVA, Ms. Spicer presents industry thought-leaders and best practices in support of emerging as well as established companies. From helping the earliest of innovators secure seed capital to discussing the latest in market intelligence important to high growth enterprises, she supports the full life cycle of company growth and investment interests. Her corporate technology career, experience in private investment, and most notably, her early entrepreneurial roots as company founder provide a useful foundation for fostering the success of high growth technology companies, from start-up to exit. She joined MAVA from Columbia Capital, a private equity growth capital firm specializing in communications technology. Previously, she served as Corporate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Communications for GTE Corporation, with responsibilities for investor relations and both public policy and strategic positioning for the company’s $4B emerging technology businesses which included wireless, mobile, air-to-ground, satellite, and R&D operations. Ms. Spicer also served as President of the GTE Foundation, one of the top 20 corporate foundations in the United States, focusing principally on science and mathematics education and the arts. An industry leader, Spicer founded TechBUZZ which to date over a five year period has helped launch more than 330 early market-entry companies, which have collectively raised more than $700M in reported seed and follow-on investments. In 2008, she was instrumental in launching a first-ever Mid-Atlantic Bio initiative to further support the biotechnology industry and encourage collaboration among investors, industry, academia and companies from laboratory to exit. Spicer has served or is currently on the boards of the Network of Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an international organization assisting disadvantaged children through chapters located in 33 countries; the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering Board of Visitors; Summit Executive Resources; and Able Flight, a scholarship program providing assistance to individuals with disabilities by challenging them through flight training. Through a gubernatorial appointment, Ms. Spicer serves on the Commonwealth Health Research Board, which has the primary responsibility to make grants for human health research, especially for those efforts that have the potential of maximizing human health benefits for citizens of the Commonwealth. Ms. Spicer is a graduate of the University of North Carolina, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar.

John W. Davis, II, founded Notice and Comment (N&C) in January 2013. He is the former Director of Major Crimes Division and Chief Homicide Prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice in the U.S. Virgin Islands, during the Clinton administration. Following his several years of public service, John practiced as a criminal defense attorney, debate coach, and professor of ethics and communications law at George Mason University, Howard University, and Towson University.

John has served as a consultant to numerous federal agencies through Debate Solutions Inc., a Washington, DC-based frm he launched to organize debates between student teams from leading national universities. These venues focused on actual policy issues of the day, eliciting unique insights for regulators as they considered specific rules.

Prior to his policy debate work, John served as Vice President with Northern Trust, based in Chicago, where he spearheaded the bank’s program to attract high-net-worth clients. Until recently he served as chairman of the board of directors of Sharp Dressed Man, a nonproft organization based in Baltimore, dedicated to providing professional clothing to disadvantaged men who are seeking employment.