NSF I-Corps Hub Northwest

Leadership and Faculty

UC Berkeley

Rhonda Shrader

Hub Director & Lead Instructor - NSF I-Corps Northwest, LAUNCH Faculty, National Faculty, Hub Instructor, Berkeley Haas School of Business

Rhonda Shrader

Bay Area Node Executive Director, LAUNCH Faculty, National Faculty, Node Instructor, Berkeley Haas School of Business

Rhonda Shrader is the Executive Director of the Bay Area Node for NSF I-Corps as well as Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship, where she teaches two popular lean startup courses, Lean Transfer and Startup Disco. As an entrepreneur, she was an early team member of MIT spinout Organogenesis, one of the first publicly traded regenerative medicine companies. She has founded or was an early stage team member of startups in biotech, behavioral health, non-profit, retail and AI. She is an active advisor for NASA spinoff BrainAid as well as the Innovation Chair for Invisible International. She earned an undergraduate degree in neuropsychology and premedical studies from Harvard and an MBA from Berkeley Haas.

Dave Weiner

Program Director - UC Berkeley NSF I-Corps

Dave weiner

Program Director, Bay Area Node

Dave Weiner is the Program Director for the Bay Area I-Corps Node. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, he was an early hire at Springboard, a mentor-led online learning educational technology startup, and was the lead administrator for the Public School Choice program at the New York City Department of Education.

An academic at heart, Dave holds a BS in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an MPP from Georgetown University, and was a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Natalia Shamoon

Teaching Assistant Northwest Hub NSF I-Corps

Natalia Shamoon

Teaching Assistant Bay Area NSF I-Corps

Natalia Shamoon is completing her second year as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley where she hopes to major in Business Administration with a Berkeley Certificate of Accountancy. Inspired by the hardworking business owners in her family and community that she grew up with, as well as binge watching Shark Tank pitches with her aunt, she is captivated by the innovative ideas that startup founders bring to Bay Area NSF I-Corps. She recently worked with aspiring Korean startup founders, to help accelerate their lab research findings in the US Market. In her free time, Natalia enjoys jet skiing and playing card games.

Seo Yeon Yoon

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Seo Yeon Yoon

Node Instructor

Seo Yeon Yoon is a lecturer at Berkeley Haas School of Business and a lead investment fellow at the Life Science Angels. She was working as a research scientist at the Gladstone Institutes, working to understand the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease. As a lecturer at Berkeley Haas, she continues to work with leading faculties in leadership and entrepreneurship in training undergraduate and graduate students. She holds a BA and MBA from UC Berkeley, where she was a VP of Academics for her class and received the "Students Always" award. She was selected as a class speaker at the commencement of the Berkeley MBA for Executives, Class of 2022, and was nominated as 2022 Best & Brightest Executive MBA by Poets & Quants.

Paty Rubio

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Paty Rubio

National Faculty, Node Instructor

Patricia Rubio has worked in high-tech for more than 20 years. First, as a Traffic Manager at companies such as Hella & Flextronics doing international trade for more than 5 years. Then, driving business in Latin America for Intel as a Business Development Manager for more than 10 years, collaborating with ethnographers, hardware and software developers, multinational and manufacturing companies, retailers and Ministers of Education. Paty also started to drive demand generation for the brand as a Marketing Manager, creating and executing marketing strategies for the company worldwide.

After Intel, she was the Manager of Strategic Projects of the National Chamber of Electronic Infrastructure and Information Technologies (CANIETI), creating and implementing programs to drive technology adoption and increase productivity for small and medium businesses. She then founded her own company, becoming the CEO & Founder of Cognitsys, using AI to provide business intelligence and predictive analytics solutions on multiple industries such as retail, real estate and logistics. She has been a finalist and speaker at the Austin Tx TECHBA Bootcamp; she has served as a Mentor for Technovation Challenge and is currently a Mentor for the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

Patricia has a Bachelor’s degree in International Trade and a MBA in Marketing.

Marquita Qualls

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Marquita Qualls

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Marquita M. Qualls, PhD, is the founder of Entropia Consulting, a management consulting firm specializing in bringing order to chaos. With over 16 years of experience, she seamlessly blends scientific expertise with business acumen to drive strategic, innovative, and financial value. Her career began at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), where she held global roles spanning drug development, technology evaluation, business process improvement, talent development, and strategic planning across R&D. A nationally trained instructor for the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program, she was the inaugural Executive Director of Entrepreneurship for the National GEM Consortium and previously served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Innovate Mississippi. Marquita earned her B.S. in Chemistry from Tennessee State University and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Purdue University.

Chris DeNoia

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Chris denoia

National Faculty, Node Instructor

Chris is an entrepreneur with experience in business development, sales, and product management. He recently Co-Founded JetBridge, an enterprise mobile education application, in an effort to add value to the Customer Relationships and Channel sections of the Business Model Canvas. Prior to JetBridge, Chris led the business development and sales function at Amplify Health and Simplee as employee #3 and 4 respectively. He previously served as VP Product Management at OptumHealth, a United Healthcare company, where he achieved the #1 market share for the Health Savings Account (HSA) product. Chris received a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Asian studies from Lehigh University. He also received a Masters in Business Administration degree from Columbia Business School and a Masters in Business Administration degree from the London Business School.

Annam Quraishi

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Annam Quraishi, Node Instructor

National Faculty, Node Instructor

Annam Quraishi is a Bioengineer and seasoned Lean Startup connoisseur and instructor. She has 6+ years of experience in the Berkeley Startup Ecosystem as a former VP of Programs of UC Launch Accelerator, a former member of Skydeck/QB3-based startups, and is a current regional instructor of the Bay Regional NSF I-Corps. She is the founder of Think Lean LLC where she advises early-stage startups and small business owners on finding product-market fit and customer discovery through Lean Startup. She also works at Intuitive Surgical in EU MDR Post Market Surveillance and enjoys working with robotic devices to improve the state of minimally invasive surgery. Annam was a former member of a previous Bay Area National I-Corps Team, Voyage Biomedical, where she worked on customer discovery and key activities leading to an acquisition in 2020 by Penumbra. Annam has a Master's of Translational Medicine Degree (MTM) from UCSF/ UC Berkeley and a BS in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley.

Carl Bouthillette

National Faculty, Hub Instructor

Carl Bouthillette

National Faculty, Node Instructor

Carl is the founder and managing director of Metis Lighthouse LLC – an advisory firm providing strategic guidance and investments to early-stage companies focused in the medical device and digital health sectors. He has over 30 years of international experience in general management, sales, and marketing in the medical devices and biotech industries. He is a former senior investment officer for the CHCF Health Innovation Fund, which invests in technology and service companies with the potential to significantly lower the cost of care or improve access to care for low-income Californians. Carl leads the screening and evaluation process for HealthTech Capital, and volunteers as an advisor at StartX, an educational nonprofit accelerator, and with the CLSI Fast Program.Carl served as director of Coronary Marketing at Abbott Vascular and ran the company’s operations in Southeast Asia and Canada as general manager. At the start of his career, Carl was an early employee at a start-up company manufacturing custom DNA, genes, and peptides. Carl received a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences from Texas A&M University and a master’s degree in business administration from INSEAD in France.

Chris Bush

Executive Director - Institute for Business Innovation, Berkeley Haas, Hub Instructor

Chris Bush

Executive Director - Institute for Business Innovation, Berkeley Haas, Node Instructor

Chris Bush is the executive director of the Institute for Business Innovation (IBI) at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Prior to joining IBI, he served as the CEO and CFO of Monarch Media, an educational technology start-up, for five years before overseeing the sale of the company at the end of 2016. He previously led digital marketing teams at Saba Software and Sybase in Silicon Valley, and has also worked as a technical project manager, consultant, and business journalist in his career. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Rich Lyons

Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer, UC Berkeley, Principal Investigator

RICH LYONS, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer, UC Berkeley

Rich Lyons is the Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer for UC Berkeley, overseeing Tech Transfer, Accelerators/Incubators, and other related areas. From 2008-18 he served as Dean of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He received his BS from Berkeley (finance), his PhD from MIT (economics), and served on the faculty at Columbia Business School before returning to Berkeley. His research and teaching are mostly in international finance, though his more recent work explores the links between leadership and innovation. In 1998 he received Berkeley’s highest teaching honor and in 2006-08 he took leave to serve as the Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs.

S. Shankar Sastry

UC Berkeley College of Engineering & Blum Center for Developing Economies, Principal Investgator

S. SHANKAR SASTRY, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

UC Berkeley College of Engineering & Blum Center for Developing Economies

Shankar Sastry served as Dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley and is currently Faculty Director at the Blum Center. He received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 1977, a M.S. in EECS, M.A. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley, 1979, 1980, and 1981 respectively. He was formerly the Director of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) and the Banatao Institute @ CITRIS Berkeley. He served as chair of the EECS department from January, 2001 through June 2004. In 2000, he served as Director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA. From 1996-1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, an organized research unit on the Berkeley campus conducting research in computer sciences and all aspects of electrical engineering. He is the NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, EECS and Mechanical Engineering. Prior to joining the EECS faculty in 1983 he was a professor at MIT.

Oregon State University

Karl Mundorff

Executive Director, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Molly Arnowil

Innovation Impact Catalyst

Wendy Morgan

Innovation Impact Catalyst

Sara Cravens

Innovation Impact Program Manager

University of Washington

Soraya Bailey

Director, Innovation Training at UW CoMotion & NSF I-Corps Northwest Evaluation Lead

Terri Butler

Associate Director, ITHS Innovation and Entrepreneurship & Hub Instructor

Sara Ramsay

Innovation Training Program Manager at UW CoMotion

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Peter Webley

Interim Director, Center for Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship (Center ICE), & UAF Faculty and Instructor Lead

Laura Conner

Vice Chancellor for Research, PI

UC Davis

Janine Elliot

Associate Director, New Venture Resources

UC Irvine

Matt Li

Manager, Scalable Ventures

Matt Hanson

Director, New Ventures

Errol Arkilic

Executive Director and Chief Innovation Officer

UCSF

Charles Hart

Director for the UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center & UCSF Faculty Lead

Peter Kotsonis

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Business Development, Innovation and Partnerships, PI

Nathaniel Prorok

Program Director

UC Santa Cruz

Susan Grasso

Innovation Programs Manager