Baltimore Innovation Week 2017

Dr. Abigail McElhinny joined Personal Genome Diagnostics as Senior Vice President, Research & Development and Operations in May 2016 from Ventana Medical Systems (Roche Tissue Diagnostics), where she held a number of different roles of increasing responsibilities. At Ventana, Abigail held the position as Vice President of Assay and Reagent Development where she built and led Research & Development teams with the goal of developing new assays for the BenchMark and next generation platforms. Dr. McElhinny represented Ventana on the pivotal PD-L1 Blueprint initiative, and successfully oversaw key scientific projects critical to the business, while her organization doubled in size. Abigail previously served as Senior Project Leader for CDx lifecycle projects, working with regulatory, clinical affairs, quality, and biostatistics teams to build the necessary processes and requirements to support pharma clinical trials and obtain FDA approval for CDx assays, including Ventana’s ALK (D5F3) CDx IHC assay and HER2 Dual ISH assays. Abigail received her Ph.D. from Northeastern University in Immunology and Biochemistry, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Arizona in Cell Biology, focused on molecular mechanisms of cardiac muscle development, cardiomyopathies and muscle remodeling.

Robert Lord is the Co-Founder and President of Protenus, an analytics platform that leverages artificial intelligence to detect data breaches in healthcare. Protenus protects the nation’s top healthcare systems, ensuring trust for tens of millions of patients, and was named the 2016 International Association of Privacy Professionals’ Privacy Innovator of the Year.

Robert is a sought-after speaker and commentator in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, healthcare analytics, and data privacy. He has been invited to speak at premier industry conferences like the HIMSS17 National Conference, to brief at the U.S. Senate, and to provide insight to national, state, and local leaders on cybersecurity preparedness. His insights have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Forbes, The Baltimore Sun, and a wide array of other publications.

Robert is a Fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology and teaches courses on entrepreneurship at Johns Hopkins. He has been named to the Baltimore Business Journal’s “Tech 10” and to Becker’s Hospital Review’s “Healthcare Entrepreneurs to Know.”

Before co-founding Protenus, Robert was an MD candidate at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Robert received his A.B. in Social Studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard University.

T.J. Tate is the Web Director of Agora Financial where he oversees the company’s technology stack.  Prior to his five years at Agora Financial he held a position at Blackboard as Senior Manager of Interactive Design where he oversaw web design, web development and web personalization efforts for many and vertical marketing teams. Over the past 10 years T.J. has architected, developed and designed technical solutions for a wide range of businesses from fortune 500 companies to Silicon Valley startups and even a well-known local brewery in Frederick MD. He is passionate about User Experience Strategy, Personalization, Data Science, and Predictive Analysis and is a huge music nerd.

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.

Our team project, "ABSP - Active Bed Sore Prevention," was a creative concept and prototype model to prevent bed sores through a sensor-based pad that may be placed on an existing patient bed. The idea was to detect the location and magnitude of pressure differences, then use a feedback mechanism to create an air pocket at the target site in order to alleviate the pressure. Our presentation included a consideration of the potential for a large public health impact across the world, as pressure ulcers currently result in a largely preventable mortality risk and incur a heavy economic burden.

Sarah Jennings started building things as soon as she was big enough to hold a hammer, and hasn't stopped since. As the Creative Director of Brand and Ad Innovation at OATH, she is obsessed with making the advertising world a better place for consumers of content. Sarah came to Oath through AOL and Millennial Media, where she built mind blowing creatives for big brands on every kind of small screen since phones had internet. She was named one of Business Insider's 30 most creative people in mobile advertising, and loves sharing her excitement about the power of technology with anyone who will listen. Sarah's previous life was as a propsmaster and costumer, graduating from UVA and working at opera houses and other theaters around Europe and the United States. Sarah learned how to build pretty much any physical object during that time, but became more and more interested in what could be built on computers. She got her masters in Publication Design from the University of Baltimore and started working in ad tech. Sarah always tries to bring an element of spectacle to every project, digital or otherwise. When she's not getting paid to play on her phone, she spends her time with the best thing she ever made - her daughter Riley.

Gary is a Data Engineer at Arena.io. He dabbles in UI and knows way too much Clojure. He has applied FP languages (currently OCaml) and approaches to problems for over 6 years in Baltimore.

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.