Bay Area NSF I-Corps
Leadership and Faculty
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, 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 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.
DARREN COOKE
Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center Executive Director, LAUNCH Faculty, National Faculty, Node Instructor
Darren Cooke is the Executive Director of the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, and adjunct faculty at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Prior to leading Berkeley LSEC he chaired the Bio Track at Berkeley SkyDeck. Darren teaches entrepreneurship at Haas, and the I-Corps program for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. As an attorney, he led the IP legal team for the life science tools group of Bio-Rad Laboratories, and was a life sciences patent litigator at Covington & Burling. Before law school Darren was a mechanical engineer developing cochlear implants at UCSF.
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, 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.
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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.