Diane Bouis, PhD
Program Director, MedTech Innovator
Diane is the Program Director for MedTech Innovator. She has extensive experience designing and running innovation programs through her previous roles as the Innovation Manager at the University of Michigan’s Innovation Partnerships Startup Incubator and as an innovation consultant with The Inovo Group, Diane co-designed and -ran the HealthSpark Accelerator program at 20Fathoms in Traverse City, MI. She has lived and worked on three continents, speaks six languages, holds a PhD in Oncology from the University of Groningen, Netherlands and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Don Manfredi
Mentor-in-Residence and Communications Director, Innovation Partnerships
Don comes to the venture center with over twenty-five years of experience in a broad range of professional assignments including global business unit leadership, operations management, marketing, sales and application engineering, product development, project management, business development, education and customer training and support. Don has provided executive leadership of a global business unit, managed the accelerated growth of a startup technology business, led the global marketing team within a high-tech NASDAQ firm, re-launched a North American business unit, and provided global sales account management to Fortune 500 clients. Don is an adjunct professor at the Lawrence Technological University College of Management and has been an Entrepreneurial Boot Camp Mentor for Ann Arbor SPARK.
Dr. Jeremy Nelson
Associate Director of Licensing, Physical Sciences & Engineering, Innovation Partnerships
Jeremy works with faculty and researchers in the physical sciences and engineering to commercialize innovations developed at U-M. His focus is chemistry and materials technologies.
Prior to this position, Jeremy was a licensing manager with CSU Ventures, the technology transfer office for Colorado State University, where he supported both licensing and start-up company activities. Jeremy has held positions on several boards of directors of CSU spin-out companies and has also served as an NSF I-Corps mentor.
Jeremy received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Colorado State University and his B.A. in Chemistry from Carleton College. He is a registered patent agent with the USPTO.
Dr. David Olson
Mentor-in-Residence, Innovation Partnerships
Dr. Olson has more than 18 years of experience in building life science companies, product development, intellectual property management, business development and venture financing. He has co-founded 6 biotech start-ups, managed other early-stage businesses, and authored business plans backed by more than $61M in capital. Most recently he was co-founder and CEO of Swift Biosciences Inc. where he led the creation, funding and development of the company for six years. During that time Swift invented and brought to market multiple new technologies for genetic analysis and Next Generation Sequencing. Prior to Swift, Dr. Olson was a founding member of Accuri Cytometers Inc. (acquired by Becton Dickinson in 2011), where he was responsible for creating Accuri’s product vision and played a central role in all aspects of corporate strategy. Dr. Olson received his doctorate in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.
