Baltimore Innovation Week 2017

Jessica Reynolds is an international trade and investment specialist serving as Regional Manager for Europe at the Maryland Department of Commerce. Prior to joining Commerce, Mrs. Reynolds worked as a consultant for an economic development and planning firm, and as a Senior Manager and consultant in the international economic development field, working on US Government, World Bank, and other donor projects. She started her international career as an intern at the World Trade Center Institute in Baltimore. Mrs. Reynolds holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Loyola University Maryland. She holds professional memberships in the International Economic Development Council and the Maryland Economic Development Association.

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.

Michelle Menard is an award wining game designer, published author (Game Development with Unity), and 10-year veteran of the industry. She has previously worked in both the mobile and AAA market, and as a consultant under Artemic Games, LLC, partnering with other companies to provide core system design, itemization, auditing, and documentation. Once she was invited to the White House to blabber about game design and crowd-sourcing for big data. Michelle is currently the lead designer at Oxide Games, and is also a co-founder of Fishwizard Games, a small boardgame company exploring strategy games set in the Gateway universe. Gateway: Uprising, their first title, is due out in stores Q3 of this year.

Michelle also serves as an adjunct professor at UMBC and SCAD, teaching game design, theory, and game history, and has taught intro C# game development courses for the local non-profit Code in the Schools. She holds a double BA in Applied Mathematics and Music Theory from Brown University, and an MFA in Game and Interactive Design from SCAD.

Param first experienced the inefficiencies of today’s manufacturing when setting up fabrication pipelines for orthopedic devices in rural India. Through his nonprofit, he provided orthopedic treatment to children with muscular disorders to change the stigma against disability. He turned his experiences there into FactoryFour, a software company creating the Internet of Manufacturing to enable manufacturers to take advantage of the future’s digital technologies.

Moss Amer works at the Maryland Venture Fund, where he serves as a board observer for several portfolio companies, including Aledade, Fugue, and Harpoon Medical.

Prior to joining the Fund, Moss worked as a Senior Analyst at TCP Venture Capital, where he helped to build a 10-company portfolio with significant positive write-ups. Select investments include RedOwl Analytics (acquired by Forcepoint), WellDoc, and ZeroFOX.

Moss graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, where he studied entrepreneurship and technology management. He is a 2013 Venture for America fellow.

Founder, Shrenik was motivated to work on Sunrise Health after watching fellow first responders struggle with PTSD and substance use issues in silence due to the social stigma surrounding getting help. After meeting Ravi while at Johns Hopkins, he decided to put his undergraduate education on hold to found Sunrise Health, a mobile application for text-based group psychotherapy that harnesses AI to make mental health care more accessible for patients and more cost-effective for providers. Beyond Sunrise, Shrenik has experience working in business development at multiple medical technology startups, and conducting academic research at Johns Hopkins and the NIH.

Dr. Jennifer Reynolds is an experienced and entrepreneurial executive with more than twenty years of experience growing companies in start - up/early stage biotechnology and high technology environments. She is currently overseeing the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s 60+ company incubation/acceleration program in life sciences, cybersecurity and clean technology and has a deep passion and interest in advancing the commercialization of new technologies within diverse high-technology sectors. Previously, she served in a COO capacity at a molecular diagnostics platform company in MD, growing the company from the ground up. She has also served as a DNA Forensics Expert and Crime Laboratory Director at one of the nation’s most prestigious private forensics testing laboratories. Jennifer has a B.S. degree in Biology from Virginia Tech, a PhD in Human Genetics from the Medical College of Virginia (VCU), and an MBA degree from the Executive MBA program at Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland College Park.

Milt Reder is VP of Engineering at Yet Analytics, where he and his team use Clojure(Script) to model human experience, learning and performance. He is a co-organizer of the Baltimore Clojure meetup, now in its 4th year.