About Team
Team
Tom Byers
Principal Investigator
At Stanford University since 1995, Tom Byers focuses on education regarding high-growth entrepreneurship and technology innovation. He holds the Entrepreneurship Professorship Chair of the School of Engineering, and is also a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He has been a faculty director since the inception of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), which serves as the entrepreneurship center for the engineering school. STVP includes the Mayfield Fellows work/study program, the Entrepreneurship Corner (ECorner) website of thought leader videos, and a set of global Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education (REE) conferences for educators and policy makers. He is a principal investigator for the Epicenter, which is funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to stimulate entrepreneurship education at all engineering and science colleges.
He is the lead author of a textbook called Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise that is published by McGraw-Hill. He is a past recipient of the prestigious Gordon Prize by the National Academy of Engineering in the USA and Stanford University's Gores Award, which is its highest honor for excellence in teaching. He is a member of advisory boards at Harvard Business School, World Economic Forum, Conservation International, and several private enterprises. Tom was executive vice president and general manager of Symantec Corporation during its formation, and started his career at Accenture. Tom holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also earned a PhD in Business Administration (Management Science) at UC Berkeley.
Kathleen Eisenhardt
Principal Investigator
Kathleen Eisenhardt is the Stanford W. Ascherman M.D. Professor at Stanford University's School of Engineering and the co-director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She is also a visiting faculty member within INSEAD’s Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise area. Kathleen's work centers on strategy and organization, especially in technology-based companies and high-velocity industries.
Kathleen has worked extensively in research and as a consultant with a variety of firms in the telecommunications, Internet, software, biotech and agribusiness industries. She is a co-author of Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, published by Harvard Business School Press, winner of the George R. Terry award for outstanding contribution to management thinking. She has published in a variety of academic and management journals, and was recently named the most cited research author in the domain of strategy and organization studies in the past 25 years.
Sheri Sheppard
Principal Investigator
Sheri Sheppard has been a Stanford Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Design division since 1986. Her research focuses on weld fatigue and impact failures, fracture mechanics and applied finite element analysis. Sheri is also co-director of the Center for Design Research in Stanford's School of Engineering.
Sheri is a nationally recognized expert on engineering education. She led a three-year study of engineering education, "Educating Engineers," in the United States at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For the last decade, she has been the faculty adviser to the Mechanical Engineering Women's Group at Stanford, which holds an annual seminar series and a welcome program for all female engineers. In 2010, she received the Stanford Gores Award, the university's highest award for excellence in teaching.
Dr. Tina Seelig
Director
Tina Seelig is the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. At Stanford, Tina teaches courses on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in the department of Management Science and Engineering, and within the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. She was awarded the 2009 Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, recognizing her as a national leader in engineering education. She also received the 2008 National Olympus Innovation Award and the 2005 Stanford Tau Beta Pi Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Seelig holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University.
Tina has worked as a management consultant, as a multimedia producer and was the founder of a multimedia company. She has also written 16 popular books and educational games. Her books include The Epicurean Laboratory and Incredible Edible Science, published by Scientific American; and a series of twelve games called Games for Your Brain, published by Chronicle Books. She is also the author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, and inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, both published by HarperCollins.
Leticia Britos Cavagnaro
Associate Director
Leticia Britos Cavagnaro serves as adjunct faculty of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, co-teaching the Creativity and Innovation course at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Leticia holds a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology from Stanford University's School of Medicine.She is a former member of the REDlab (Research in Education & Design - Stanford School of Education), where she explored how design thinking impacts learning in K-12 environments and beyond. She co-founded the design consultancy Lime Design Associates to bring design thinking to schools, non-profits and companies, as a means to catalyze 21st century learning skills and innovation.
Forrest Glick
Chief Information Architect
Forrest Glick serves as Associate Director at the Stanford Technology Ventures (STVP). He is project lead for Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner.stanford.edu), an internationally recognized website offering videos and podcasts of entrepreneurial thought leaders from Silicon Valley and beyond. Forrest also oversees the development of STVP’s various websites and projects related to the use of technology.
Specializing in the design and creation of online multimedia and video, Forrest serves as chair of the university-wide Video and Multimedia Group at Stanford. He has over 12 years of experience in the production of instructional multimedia. Previous to joining Stanford University, he worked at Harvard University where he was responsible for leading Harvard@Home, a website offering video and interactive content highlighting events from across the university.
Laurie Moore
Communications Specialist
Laurie Moore is Epicenter’s communications specialist, leading the community outreach efforts at Epicenter. She manages the website content, social media accounts and email campaigns, and tells the stories of engineering faculty and students who exemplify the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit that defines the center. She has worked for six years as a writer and editor for web and print, with experience in website management and graphic design. Before joining Epicenter, Laurie worked for the University of Southern California as the web editor for the USC Dornsife College.
NCIIA
Phil Weilerstein
NCIIA Executive Director
Phil Weilerstein leads NCIIA's role as the Epicenter's key partner in creating a nation of entrepreneurial engineers. Phil began his own career as an entrepreneur as a student at the University of Massachusetts. He and a team launched a start-up biotech company which ultimately went public. This experience, coupled with a lifelong passion for entrepreneurship, led to his work with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
Phil’s tenure at NCIIA is marked by his skill for network-building and expert leverage of resources. As an entrepreneur in a not-for-profit organization, he has grown the NCIIA from a grassroots group of enthusiastic faculty to a national in-demand knowledge base and resource center. Phil also serves as the Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division of the American Society of Engineering Education.
Angela Shartrand
Epicenter Research Development (NCIIA)
Angela Shartrand is developing many of the Epicenter's external research and evaluation initiatives. Most recently, she has helped NCIIA to build that organization's capacity to conduct research in areas that are closely aligned with NCIIA's mission, through developing collaborations with faculty researchers and developing successful research proposals to the National Science Foundation.
Prior to NCIIA, Angela worked as a researcher and evaluator in several organizations, including the Young Sisters for Justice at the Boston Women's Fund and the Harvard Family Research Project. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology from Boston College, an Ed.M. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Williams College.
Alan Peterfreund
External Evaluator (SageFox)
Alan Peterfreund, Ph.D., is the executive director of SageFox, the firm overseeing external evaluation of the Epicenter. Alan has 25 years of experience as a consultant, evaluator and researcher for clients in the public and private sectors of business, government and education. He has a Ph.D. in Geology from Arizona State University, and has been a research faculty member at Brown University.
A career shift in 1984 led to 16 years of consulting in the private and public sector with primary emphasis on organizational change, quality management, and employee participation. In 2000, Alan began to focus on supporting higher education partners in projects that address the broadening of participation in the sciences, graduate student development, and other educational reforms.
Curation Board
Stephanie G. Adams
Virginia Tech
Stephanie G. Adams is the Department Head and Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. She has held faculty and administrative positions at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, North Carolina State University, Texas Tech University and the University of Notre Dame. As a student she interned with the 3M Corporation. Stephanie earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering with honors from North Carolina A&T State University, the Master of Engineering degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Her research interests include Team Effectiveness, Collaborative and Active Learning, and Quality Control and Management. In 2003 she received the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. She holds membership in a number of organizations and presently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Engineering Education and the National Advisory Board of the National Society of Black Engineers.
Mark L. Chang
Olin College
Mark L. Chang is Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Olin College. He joined the faculty in 2004, and is a current Resident Scholar at the college. He is a Creative Technologist at The Globe Lab, dedicated to the research and development of next-generation news production and consumption technologies. He holds his M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Northwestern University and a B.S. from Johns Hopkins University.
Mark’s honors include an Intel Foundation Graduate Fellowship to study computer-aided design tools and methodologies for easier implementation of arithmetic hardware onto FPGA devices. His current research interests are mobile, social, and ubiquitous computing; engineering education, in particular design and student motivation; and reconfigurable computing.
Andrew Hargadon
University of California, Davis
Andrew Hargadon is the Charles J. Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis and a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. He is the author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Harvard Business School Press 2003). Andrew’s research focuses on the effective management of innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in the development and commercialization of sustainable technologies.
His research has been used to develop or guide new innovation programs in organizations as diverse as Hewlett-Packard, Avery Dennison, Clorox, Edmunds.com, Mars, Canadian Health Services, and Silicon Valley start-ups. He teaches corporate executive programs and serves on the advisory boards for Physic Ventures and American River Ventures. Andrew is the founding director of two key centers at the University of California, Davis—the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center.
Elizabeth C. Kisenwether
Penn State University
Elizabeth C. Kisenwether is Assistant Professor and Director of the Engineering Entrepreneurship (E-SHIP) minor in the College of Engineering at Penn State University. She holds her B.S.E.E. degree from Penn State, and M.S.E.E. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Johns Hopkins University. After eleven years with HRB Systems/Raytheon, she co-founded and worked for five years with a high-tech startup that developed digital video add-in cards/modules for portable computers.Since joining Penn State in 1999, Elizabeth has taught design-focused courses in three engineering departments: the School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs and the Engineering Entrepreneurship (E-SHIP) minor. She supported the launch of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) at Penn State, as well as the NSF-sponsored Hybrid and Electric Vehicle M3 (Manipulatives, Motivation and Mentoring) Education Project. She is president and founder of KidTech, Inc., a non-profit engineering outreach company developing hands-on design and problem-based learning kits and activities for K-12 youth.
Steven Nichols
University of Texas, Austin
Steven Nichols’s research interests include topics in engineering design and manufacturing, technology commercialization, and professional aspects of engineering practice. He currently serves in three administrative posts at The University of Texas at Austin (Area Coordinator for Dynamic Systems and Controls in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Director of the Advanced Manufacturing Center in the Cockrell School of Engineering, and Director of the Chair of Free Enterprise. As the Director of the M.S.E. in Engineering management, Steven focuses on creating and nurturing a culture of technology innovation, creativity, leadership, and entrepreneurship in the program.
Steven organized the Roden Scholar (Leadership) program and supported the start-up of the Engineering Entrepreneurship Society, and the Idea to Product (I2P) technology competition. He has also initiated multidisciplinary research and classroom activities that encourage collaborative learning environments for students, faculty and staff from the College of Engineering, the College of Natural Sciences, the McCombs School of Business and the School of Law. He previously serves as the Associate Chair for the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Andrew Singer
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Andrew Singer received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees, all in electrical engineering and computer science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a Professor in the ECE department and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. During the academic year 1996, he was a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.
His research interests include signal processing and communication systems. He was a Hughes Aircraft Masters Fellow, and was the recipient of the Harold L. Hazen Memorial Award for excellence in teaching in 1991. In 2000, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, in 2001 he received the Xerox Faculty Research Award, and in 2002 was named a Willett Faculty Scholar.
Advisory Board
Jim Breyer
Accel Partners
Jim Breyer has been an investor in over thirty consumer Internet, media, and technology companies that have completed public offerings or successful mergers. Jim is currently on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., where he is the Lead/Presiding Independent Director, and serves on the Strategic Planning and Finance Committee, and the Technology Operations Committee. Jim also serves on the board of Dell Inc, where he is the Chair of the Finance Committee, and where he serves on the Incubation Advisory Board, the Leadership Development and Compensation Committee and the Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee.
Jim is currently the lead/co-lead investor/Director in several privately held-companies such as Brightcove, Etsy, and Facebook, where he is the founding Chairman of the Compensation Committee. Earlier, Jim worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and in product marketing and management at Apple, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard. In April 2011, Forbes published its Midas List of top technology investors and ranked Jim Breyer #1.
Shona L. Brown
Independent startups and nonprofits adviser
Shona Brown is an independent adviser to startups and nonprofits and the former Senior Vice President of Google.org. She joined Google.org in April 2011 after building the People Operations and Business Operations groups at Google for the last eight years. Shona’s education is in engineering and, prior to joining Google, she was a partner at McKinsey & Company. At McKinsey, she was a leader of the global strategy practice and worked with a wide range of firms on strategy development, business model transformation and operational issues. Her experience includes extensive work in consumer software and hardware technology, online consumer services, and Internet media markets.She has taught in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and within McKinsey’s mini-MBA program. She is the co-author of the best-selling business book, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, which introduced a new strategic model for competing in volatile markets, and she has published broadly in both applied and academic journals. She received her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degree from Stanford University’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. Shona is also a director at several respected nonprofit organizations including The Bridgespan Group, The Nature Conservancy and San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
Leah H. Jamieson
Purdue University
Leah H. Jamieson is the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University, Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and holds a courtesy appointment in Purdue’s School of Engineering Education. She served as 2007 President and CEO of the IEEE. She is co-founder and past director of the EPICS – Engineering Projects in Community Service – Program.With colleagues Edward Coyle and William Oakes, she was awarded the 2005 NAE Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education for the creation and dissemination of EPICS. She was an inaugural recipient of the National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars, the IEEE Education Society’s 2000 Harriet B. Rigas “Outstanding Woman Engineering Educator” Award, and the Anita Borg Institute’s 2007 “Women of Vision Award for Social Impact.” She was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering “for innovations in integrating engineering education and community service” and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE for her research on parallel processing algorithms.
Kristina M. Johnson
Enduring Energy; Former U.S. Under Secretary of Energy
Kristina Johnson most recently served as Under Secretary of Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. As Under Secretary, Kristina was responsible for unifying and managing a broad $10.5 billion Energy and Environment portfolio, including an additional $37 billion in energy and environment investments from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The portfolio included research, development, demonstration and deployment projects involving the national laboratories, universities, state and local governments and private industry in renewable energy, carbon-capture and sequestration, nuclear power, energy efficiency, smart grid and nuclear waste.
Kristina previously served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, the largest research university in the U.S. From 1999-2007, she was Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. In addition to her academic career, she is an inventor and entrepreneur, holding over 45 U.S. patents (129 U.S. and international patents) and co-founder of several successful companies.
Gary S. May
Georgia Institute of Technology
Gary S. May is the dean of the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. From May 2005-June 2011, he served as the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and previous to that, he was the executive assistant to Georgia Tech President G. Wayne Clough from 2002-2005. Gary joined the ECE school faculty in 1991 as a member of the School's microelectronics group. His research is in the field of computer-aided manufacturing of integrated circuits.
He was a National Science Foundation "National Young Investigator" (1993-98) and was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing (1997-2001). He has authored over 200 articles and technical presentations in the area of IC computer-aided manufacturing. In 2001, he was named Motorola Foundation Professor, and was appointed associate chair for Faculty Development. He is the founder of Georgia Tech's Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering/Science (SURE) program, a summer research program designed to attract talented minority students into graduate school.
David C. Munson
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
David C. Munson became Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2003. In 2006 he assumed the position of Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering. From 1979 to 2003 he was with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. David’s teaching and research interests are in signal and image processing. His current research is focused on radar imaging, passive millimeter-wave imaging, and computer tomography.He has held summer positions in digital communications and speech processing, and he has served as a consultant in synthetic aperture radar to the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. He is co-founder of InstaRecon, Inc., a start-up to commercialize fast algorithms for image formation in computer tomography. He is affiliated with the Infinity Project, where he is coauthor of a textbook on the digital world, which is used in high schools nationwide to introduce students to engineering. David is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a past president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and co-founder of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
James D. Plummer
Stanford University
Jim Plummer is currently the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering at Stanford. He also holds the John Fluke Professorship in Electrical Engineering. His career at Stanford has included serving as director of the IC Laboratory, senior associate dean in the School of Engineering, and chair of the Electrical Engineering Department. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1978 as an associate professor and became professor of electrical engineering in 1983. Plummer has worked in a variety of areas in the broad field of silicon devices and technology. Much of his early work focused on high-voltage ICs and on high-voltage device structures. His recent work has focused on nanoscale silicon devices for logic and memory.Jim is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the IEEE. He has received many awards for his research, including the 1991 Solid State Science and Technology Award from the Electrochemical Society, the 2001 Semiconductor Industry Association University Research Award, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He serves on the Board of Directors and on the technical advisory boards of several public and start-up companies and was one of the founders of T-RAM.
Karan L. Watson
Texas A&M University
Karan L. Watson has served as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of Texas A&M University since March 2011. She previously served as vice provost and as dean of faculties and associate provost. She joined the faculty in 1983 and is currently a Regents Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Karan is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the American Society for Engineering Education. Her awards and recognitions include the U.S. President's Award for Mentoring Minorities and Women in Science and Technology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science mentoring award, and the IEEE International Undergraduate Teaching Award. Since 1991, Karan has served as an accreditation evaluator and commissioner and is now on the Board of Directors for ABET, Inc., formerly the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. She has been elected to serve as president-elect for ABET beginning in October 2011.
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