Baltimore Innovation Week 2017

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.

In November 2015, Stacia became the creator and producer of Baltimore: The Rise of Charm City, a radio and podcast series that tells intergenerational stories of place and memory in Baltimore City. Baltimore: The Rise of Charm City is part of the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)’s 2015 Finding America: Localore project and is produced in partnership with WEAA 88.9.

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.

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.

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.

Babila Lima is the Director of the Business Process Improvement Office for the Department of General Services. Since 2007, Babila has worked in City government in a number of different agencies and capacities including the City Council President’s Office, Mayor’s Office and as a consultant on cross agency process challenges. Prior to the current role, his City projects included an overhaul of the City’s special event permitting process, and the establishment of a regulatory, licensing and management system to support the growth of food trucks and mobile vendors in the City of Baltimore. He also developed and managed a yearlong initiative in Mongolia to improve garbage and recycling collection through a business social responsibility program funded by USAID.

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.

Founder, Ravi created the messaging platform that would become Sunrise Health after watching a close friend go through depression and seeing her suffer from loneliness between therapy sessions. Ravi has previous experience engineering AI products in multiple settings, from patient-doctor matching at a startup in India, to building out and selling a robotic vertical at a British multinational corporation. While a masters student at Johns Hopkins, he also helped found the VC firm A-Level Capital, raising its first fund and making multiple investments.