Baltimore Innovation Week 2017

Baltimore, Maryland born and raised, Dr. Jayfus Tucker Doswell, is an African American Ph.D. in Information Technology and a high-tech entrepreneur. Dr. Doswell earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Oberlin College with degrees in Cognitive Neuro-Psychology and Computer Science; a Masters degree in Systems and Computer Science from Howard University; and a Ph.D. degree in Information Technology from George Mason University. His Dissertation, defended in 2005, created the world’s first culturally adaptive artificial intelligent virtual instructor platform that delivers instruction in mixed reality (e.g.,augmented reality and virtual reality) environments. Dr. Doswell is the founder, president, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Juxtopia, LLC, (www.juxtopia.com) a privately held for-profit biomedical and information technology company with a mission for improving human performance®. Prior to starting Juxtopia, Dr. Doswell lead several commercial engineering teams at fortune 500 companies ranging from Lockheed Martin and SAIC to BearingPoint as their senior software engineer. Dr. Doswell has also successfully lead Juxtopia to secure research and development funding for the development of Juxtopia innovative wearable technology products. The Juxtopia® Augmented Reality platform is one wearable technology platform from which various wearable augmented reality products may be created for improving human performance®. Dr. Doswell lead Juxtopia to secure a contract to outfit all U.S. Army combat medics with wearable augmented reality to improve their performance during tactical combat casualty care. Dr. Doswell also invented the Juxtopia® Imhotep platform for creating wearable telehealth products. Doswell ascertains that a significant number of underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are provided apprenticeships at Juxtopia. In addition to his for profit company, Dr. Doswell created The Juxtopia Group, Inc. (www.juxtopia.org) to address the shortage of underrepresented minority populations in engineering and technology careers in year, 2000. Dr. Doswell, observing the painful-problems that prevent high-tech minority companies to achieve $1B markets, created the Juxtopia® Urban Innovation and Cooperative Entrepreneurship (JUICE) Network. The JUICE Network guides high-tech minority companies, colleges, and universities, and federal labs to transition their inventions or innovative concepts to commercial products. From the JUICE Network, Dr. Doswell helped to create Phezu Space, the first African American commercial space company in the United States focused on satellite servicing. From the JUICE Network, Dr. Doswell and two of his entrepreneurship apprentices created the 1 st Morgan State University company, iCrystal, in, at that time, Morgan’s 148 year history.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.