About the Innovation Imperative

François Baneyx has served as the University of Washington Vice Provost for Innovation and Director of CoMotion since 2019. The Charles W.H. Matthaei Professor of Chemical Engineering and an adjunct professor of Bioengineering, Dr. Baneyx is an internationally recognized authority on protein production technologies and the biological fabrication of advanced materials with applications in medicine, sensing, opto-electronics, and catalysis. For his contributions to these fields, he was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (2015), the American Academy of Microbiology (2015), and the Washington State Academy of Sciences (2016).

As Vice Provost for Innovation, Dr. Baneyx drives and coordinates innovation activities, builds connections with the economic development community, and engages with industry, government, nonprofits, and the regional and global innovation ecosystems to shape the university’s innovation strategies. He directs CoMotion, overseeing intellectual property protection and licensing, training of a diverse entrepreneurial workforce, and funding and mentorship programs that support the creation, incubation, and launch of startups.

Dr. Baneyx also directs the Center for the Science of Synthesis Across Scales, a multi-institution Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. He previously served in various leadership positions, including site director of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (2004-2012), director of the Center for Nanotechnology (2005-2013), and most recently, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering (2014-2019). He is the co-founder of Proteios, a University of Washington spinoff dedicated to reducing the cost and complexity of protein and therapeutic cell purification.

Dr. Baneyx earned a doctoral degree in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a postdoctoral researcher at DuPont before joining the University of Washington faculty in 1992.

Cameron is a General Partner at FUSE, where he partners with founders building across enterprise software, vertical software, and artificial intelligence. Previously, he was a Principal at Ignition Partners, and in a prior life was a technology investment banker. He graduated from the University of Washington and is the son of two immigrant parents.

Minda Brusse is a venture investor and innovation advocate with a two-decade track record of building startups, backing early-stage companies, and designing new models for collective impact. She is the Founding Partner of First Row Partners and a Network Partner at 2048 Ventures, where she invests in transformational technologies at the pre-seed stage. A lifelong generalist, Minda applies systems thinking, critical inquiry, and startup experience to evaluate and shape new ideas.
She teaches a hands-on angel investing course at the University of Washington Foster School of Business and mentors across the startup ecosystem. Her background in enterprise systems consulting and startup founding helps her guide entrepreneurs as they navigate ambiguity, structuring innovation, and scaling impact.

Dr. Tom Daniel is trained in biology and engineering and has been working at the interface of these domains for the past 40 years. As WRF Chief Executive Officer (effective October 1, 2022), he leads all Foundation grantmaking and investment activities and works closely with the Board to advance its commitment to life sciences in Washington state.

Dr. Daniel has exceptional expertise in science and technology. At the University of Washington, he was on the Biology faculty for 38 years and held the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair, as well as adjunct appointments in Computer Science and Engineering, Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering. He was also the co-director of the Washington Research Foundation-supported UW Institute of Neuroengineering.

Throughout his academic career, Daniel published more than 100 research papers and conference abstracts. His research melded neuroscience, engineering, computing and biomechanics to understand the control and dynamics of movement in biology. He oversaw several federal grants, all focused on sensorimotor control of movement in living systems.

Dr. Daniel holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a Doctoral Degree in Biology from Duke, and completed postdoctoral training in engineering sciences at Caltech. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Science, a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

Dr. Daniel serves on the board of directors for Allen Institute, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and is part of the NSF Federal Advisory Committee for the Directorate for Biological Sciences.

Neal Dempsey is Managing General Partner of Bay Partners, one of the longest-running venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Forbes has named him as one of the top 100 venture capitalists in the world. Throughout his career, Mr. Dempsey has served on over seventy-five public and private boards for companies. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

Giving back is a cornerstone of Mr. Dempsey’s investing philosophy. In addition to being awarded the Gates Volunteer Service Award, he has endowed scholarship funds for students, young assistant professors and athletes at the University of Washington, Willamette University, and Claremont McKenna College. He provided leadership for the Capital Campaigns for Dempsey Hall and Dempsey Indoor.

A lover of outdoors, Mr. Dempsey serves on the board of ACES, an environmental organization in Aspen, Colorado. He also is the Chair of Uplift Family Services, which helps over 30,000 children and their family members recover from trauma, such as abuse, severe neglect, addiction, and poverty.

Chris DeVore is the Founder and Managing Partner of Founders’ Co-op, the Pacific Northwest’s leading seed-stage venture fund. In that role, Chris led the seed rounds for Seattle’s most recent successful IPO Remitly (NASDAQ:RELY) and $4B+ Outreach, was an early backer of Auth0 (acquired by Oka for $6.5B), and led or participated in the first round financings of over 100 additional startups in the region. Chris also co-founded and led the Seattle branch of the global Techstars startup accelerator from 2010 to 2019, supporting an additional 100+ founding teams from inception through their first fundraise.

Previously, a co-founder of Adjacency (acquired by NASDAQ: SAPE), Chris also created outdoor retailer Patagonia’s first online store and led product and business strategy teams at AT&T and McCaw Cellular. As a community volunteer, Chris co-chaired the City of Seattle’s Economic Development Commission, partnered with the University of Washington to create Startup Hall (a commercial innovation space located on the UW Campus), and is a current Board member of Friends of Waterfront Seattle, a non-profit helping to revitalize Seattle’s downtown waterfront. Chris holds a BA from Yale and attended Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Emer Dooley is an adjunct faculty member at the UW Foster School of Business and teaches entrepreneurship and strategy. Through the Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, Ms. Dooley works to involve students in all aspects of company creation, technology commercialization, and investment. She raised and ran the Alliance of Angels first $4.4 million dollar Seed Fund and is a former board member of the Washington Research Foundation.

She is a trustee and former board chair of the Ashesi University Foundation, and a member of the Women’s World Banking Board. Ms. Dooley holds a PhD and MBA from the University of Washington and a BSc (Electrical Engineering) and M. Eng. from the University of Limerick.

Dr. Mike Halperin is a life science investor/entrepreneur and served as a General Co-Chair of the University of Washington’s 5-billion-dollar campaign – Be Boundless / For Washington, For the World. Raised in Seattle, Dr. Halperin attended Brown University and the University of Washington, where he received his M.D. He practiced Emergency Medicine for 20 years during which time he ran a clinical practice and managed a group of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Halperin is active in the bioscience startup community as a Scientific Advisor, Corporate Advisor, Board member, and investor. He is a past president of Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences (SAAS), was a founding member of numerous 501c3s, and is actively engaged in a number of civic causes as a philanthropist and fund raiser.

A founder at heart, Ken has supported 250+ entrepreneurs in their fundraising over the last 10+ years and has personally been involved in 100+ investments.

An alum of M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Ken cofounded the Venture Out community and accelerator. He has also angel invested in multiple companies in the Seattle area.

Ken is a Double Dawg with both a BA and MBA from the University of Washington.

Bill McAleer is Managing Director at Voyager Capital, an early-stage venture firm with over $525 million under management focused on investing in tech opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. He has over 30 years of combined investing and senior executive experience in the information technology industry. At Voyager, he has participated on the boards of 27 companies, including 21 portfolio companies, focusing on cloud, software, digital media, and mobile opportunities. Fifteen of his portfolio companies were sold for exits including Amplitude, Attenex, Blue Box Group, Melodeo, NetPodium, Placecast, Tegic Communications, Yapta, and, most recently, Zipwhip for $940 million to Twilio. He has been involved in over $4.5 billion in exit transactions, including several IPO’s. He currently serves on the boards of Rowan TELS and Thoughtexchange.  He is also a board observer for Ayla and Hiya.

Prior to co-founding Voyager in 1997, Mr. McAleer was President of e.liance Partners, a consulting firm that advised information technology companies on strategy, venture financing, and corporate partnering. He served as Vice President of Finance, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary of Aldus from 1988 to 1994 when the company’s revenues grew from $30 to $240 million. Mr. McAleer was responsible for global finance, legal, operations, and acquisition activities, including completing the merger with Adobe in 1994. He also served as a senior executive with Westin Hotels from 1979 to 1987.

Bill has been active in several university organizations, including serving as the past chair and a current member of the Advisory Board for the University of Washington Buerk Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He was also a Cornell University Trustee and has served on the Advisory Boards for Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business, the Cornell Hotel School, e.Cornell, and the Center for Entrepreneurship. He has also been active on several tech industry boards, including the Washington Technology Industry Association, Washington Technology Association, DEMO, the Canadian Financing Forum and Thayer Ventures. He earned a B.S. and an M.B.A. from Cornell University.

As Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Ecosystems, Annie Pearl leads a globally-distributed organization that empowers current and future customers to discover and engage with AI capabilities on the Microsoft Cloud. Teams under her oversight develop and build on platforms, such as Founders Hub and Microsoft Learn, to reach new audiences, skill them on Microsoft’s technology, and help them build the most innovative and AI-driven solutions.

Annie joins Microsoft with +15 years of tech leadership experience in both startup ventures and established enterprises. She served as the Chief Product Officer at Calendly, a premier scheduling automation platform. There, she led the end-to-end strategy and execution of the product vision and roadmap. Under her guidance, Calendly achieved remarkable growth, solidifying its position as the leading scheduling automation tool in the market.

Before her tenure at Calendly, Annie held the role of Chief Product Officer at Glassdoor, where she shaped the product vision and user experience for millions of job seekers and employers worldwide. Earlier in her career, she led Enterprise product teams at Box, contributing to its trajectory both before and after its 2015 IPO. Notably, Annie also played a pivotal role as the VP of Product and a founding team member at Xpert Financial, an early-stage financial services startup.

Annie started her career as a lawyer and held roles in management consulting before transitioning to the tech industry.

Chris joined Madrona in 2017. As a partner on the investment team, Chris focuses on identifying, evaluating, and leading new investment opportunities and working closely with existing companies. Chris leads Madrona’s investments in companies innovating around the intersection of life and computer science through combining novel wet lab science with cutting-edge machine learning. His focus is on novel therapeutic platforms and software that enables companies to take advantage of the immense amount of biological data now being produced. Chris has invested in multiple inception stage biotech companies across the Seattle, San Francisco, and LA markets. He is a Board Director at Terray Therapeutics and three other biotech companies currently in stealth.

From 2008-2014, Linden Rhoads was Vice Provost for the UW Center for Commercialization (now known as CoMotion), the unit of the University that seeks to commercialize discoveries emerging from research conducted at the UW. A scientist and J.D., prior to this Ms. Rhoads was a serial entrepreneur, mentor capitalist, and investor.

Ms. Rhoads co-founded and managed numerous high-tech start-ups including: Virtual i-O, ChiliSoft (acquired by Sun Microsystems), streaming media-search-services provider Singingfish.com (acquired by Thomson Multimedia, then by AOL), online advertising metrics leader AdRelevance (acquired by Media Metrix, then Nielsen Netratings), personalized large-scale email-campaign software provider GBI (acquired by Exchange Applications) and Nimble Technology. Through her investment company Seattle Ventures, she’s been an active technology investor, and a participant in organized angel investment groups such as the Alliance of Angels and Element 8. She has served as the General Manager of the W Fund since its inception. The W Fund backed 19 spin-outs from Washington State research institutions. Ms. Rhoads serves on the Guaranteed Education Tuition Program Governing Board, overseeing Washington’s GET and DreamAhead 529 tuition savings programs.

Mary is Senior Vice President for University Advancement at the University of Washington, overseeing the marketing and communications, development, alumni and stakeholder engagement, and advancement operations functions.

Mary’s career has been defined by a brand and mission-focused approach to building integrated strategy and structures for University Advancement — uniting the disciplines of communications and marketing, alumni relations, and development to serve the University’s public mission and aspirations with the greatest possible impact. She serves on the University’s Race and Equity Steering Committee and believes deeply in building shared equity leadership and in University Advancement’s role in building community internally and externally.

Prior to her appointment as Senior Vice President, Mary served as Vice President for Communications and Chief Marketing Officer for the University of Washington since 2013. Prior to joining the UW, she was the principal at Mary Gresch & Associates and served in communication capacities at Washington State University — including as the Associate Vice President for Strategic Communications and Marketing and Director of Foundation Communications. Prior to her tenure at WSU, Mary was the director of public relations and publications at the Cate School in Carpinteria, California, and a development coordinator for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Mary has also been active in CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Higher Education, for many years, and currently serves as chair of the national CASE Advisory Committee on the Value of Higher Education.

Robert J. Jones took office as the 34th president of the University of Washington on Aug. 1, 2025. He holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to leading the UW, Jones served as chancellor of Illinois’ flagship university, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and prior to that as president of the State of New York University at Albany (SUNY Albany). He is a distinguished scholar whose research focuses on crop physiology, and he has served in leadership roles in national academic organizations and the Big Ten Conference.

Jones served for nine years as the 10th chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the state’s largest and flagship land-grant university. He was previously chair of the board of directors for the Association of American Universities (AAU), board chair of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and chair of the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors.

A Georgia native, Jones is a first-generation college student who earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Fort Valley State College, a master’s degree in crop physiology from the University of Georgia, and a doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy and the Crop Science Society of America. He began his academic career in 1978 as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, where he spent more than three decades as an internationally respected authority on plant physiology and a nationally recognized university administrator. For more than 30 years, Jones also recorded and performed with the Grammy-award winning choral ensemble The Sounds of Blackness.

Tricia Serio joined the University of Washington as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs in August of this year. A biochemist, she also holds a faculty appointment in the UW School of Medicine’s Department of Biochemistry.  

As the University’s academic and budget officer, Dr. Serio leads the faculty and allocates resources to promote each student’s academic experience and success. 

Dr. Serio (she/her pronouns) came to the UW from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, as well as a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. A first-generation college graduate, Dr. Serio earned her bachelor’s degree in molecular biology at Lehigh University and completed her master’s degree and Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale. 

Dr. Serio’s research centers on prion proteins, which are associated with infectious neurodegenerative disease in mammals (e.g., mad cow disease and Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease). She has earned numerous recognitions for her research, including being named a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. She has also received awards from the National Cancer Institute and the American Society of Cell Biology. 

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Tadataka Yamada, 1945-2021: Pioneer in drug development led global health at Gates Foundation (Geekwire)