Luda Kopeikina is Investment Director at DSM Venturing, a global corporate venture arm of DSM, a multi-billion-dollar material science company headquartered in the Netherlands. She leads investments in solar and additive manufacturing markets. Before DSM, Ms. Kopeikina was a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, where she co-founded the Institute for Engineering Leadership, which nurtured more than 28 start-up teams based on breakthrough technologies. Ms. Kopeikina is an entrepreneur who started three successful companies. Before starting her own companies, she was a CEO of a public company, Celerity Solutions Inc., which she turned around and grew six-fold in two years, and VP of General Electric, where, among other roles, she restructured business processes to deliver multimillion-dollar bottom-line impact. Ms. Kopeikina is an author of a popular book, The Right Decision Every Time: How to Reach Clarity on Tough Decisions, published by Prentice Hall. Ms. Kopeikina holds a Master's Degree from MIT's Sloan School of Management as a Sloan Fellow and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from St. Petersburg University, Russia, where she also completed a PhD thesis in Computer Science.
Douglas Heintzman is an innovation and technology consultant. He is a strategic advisor to Insolar (a leading blockchain platform company). He was formally the Head of Innovation and disruptive technology at The Burnie Group. He was the cofounder of CueContext (context-adaptive mobile) and the COO of Flybits (a company specializing in AI). He was at IBM for 25 years, for most of which he was a worldwide strategy executive, including being the Director of Technical Strategy for IBM Software Group. He was the chairman of the board of the SyncML initiative and a founder of the Open Mobile Alliance. He was the sponsorship executive for the ACM ICPC (world programming championship) and the chief open-source officer for IBM Corporation. He is the past chair of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Synergy Innovation Awards selection committee. He is a former board member and chair of the investment committee at MaRS Innovation/TIAP. Mr. Heintzman has a Masters in International Economic and Social Administration (MAES) from the University of Grenoble Alps and a BAH in Political Studies from Queen’s University.
Jim Henderson is an advisor of start-ups and SMEs. He has a long association with deep tech commercialization, established in roles at the University of Utah, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of New South Wales in Sydney. As COO of UNSW Innovations, Jim led the commercialization team and worked closely with UNSW’s renowned School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy, a world leader in developing industry-relevant Silicon PV solutions for partners such as Suntech, Longi and Jinko. He has been a start-up CEO, advisor, and board member with companies based worldwide, including Nano Bubble Technologies, Bionic Vision Technologies, Medad Technologies, and NOMADD Desert Solutions. He has certification from the Alliance of Technology Transfer Professionals and The Australian Institute of Company Directors. Mr. Henderson has a PhD in Molecular & Cellular Biology from the University of Utah.
Dr. Ted Sargent is a university professor and VP-International at the University of Toronto. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the AAAS, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has held visiting professorships at MIT, UCLA, Berkeley, and Harvard. He is the author of The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives (Penguin 2005). His papers have been cited 43,000 times, and 105 of his papers have been cited more than 105 times. Dr. Sargent has a BScEng (Engineering Physics) from Queen’s University and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Photonics) from the University of Toronto.
Dan Shea has been in technology industries for 40 years, much of it in executive management, including his 27 years at IBM/Celestica, where he was Senior VP and Chief Technology Officer. Dan was Senior Vice President at BlackBerry, President and CEO at Arise Technologies Corporation (Solar), COO at Infobright (Database), and is a senior advisor and investor in 3E Nano Inc. (Nanotech). Dan has a BScEng from the University of Toronto.
