Baltimore Innovation Week 2017

Aaron is a radio and podcast producer at WYPR. His current project with Wendel Partrick is called Out of the Blocks. It is an immersive podcast that blends voices and sounds from the streets of Baltimore. A tapestry of stories hidden in plain sight, with an original musical score.

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.

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.

Dr. Miriam Boer is the founder of Sonify Biosciences, an ultrasound-based hyperthermia device company based in the Alexandria LaunchLabs incubator in New York City. Dr. Boer founded Sonify Biosciences in 2012 after receiving her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Maryland College Park, where she studied mechanosensation in bacterial cell membranes. Prior to that, Dr. Boer studied chemistry at New York University and worked as a color and flavor chemist in international research and development at PepsiCo.

Stephen Auvil is the senior vice president for technology transfer and commercialization at the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). In this role, he is responsible for overseeing TEDCO’s funding programs. He is also responsible for other programs that foster the transfer of technologies from universities and federal laboratories into the commercial sector. From 2008 - 2010, Mr. Auvil served as the assistant vice president for research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he assisted UMBC’s vice president for research in his effort to build and support UMBC’s research enterprise. He was also responsible for supporting UMBC’s economic development mission as it relates to research, technology transfer, and new venture creation. Mr. Auvil, who was one of the architects of UMBC’s ACTiVATE® and INNoVATE™ programs, served as a co-principal investigator on the National Science Foundation grants that supported these programs. From 2000 - 2008, Mr. Auvil served as the director of UMBC's Office of Technology Development (OTD). During his tenure, he oversaw significant growth in OTD’s active license agreements, intellectual property portfolio, and licensing revenues. He actively promoted UMBC’s research capabilities and helped to build ties with Maryland companies. Before arriving 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 many agreements involving equity and faculty initiated start-up companies. Prior to working at Johns Hopkins, Mr. 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. He began his career as a laboratory technician studying ion channels in membranes. Mr. 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.

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.

Ronan Perry is a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University, double majoring in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Math, and originally from Ithaca, NY.