Emory Innovators

How do the unique experiences of first-generation college students become strengths that they can leverage in their first jobs? The Hatchery invited Dr. Andrea Dittmann to a special episode of Emory Innovators to speak with us about her fascinating research on first generation college students entering the workforce.Dr. Dittmann is an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. She earned her PhD in Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. The Hatchery recently invited Lauren Weinberg to record a live podcast with us to celebrate her new book, Self-Made Boss. Lauren is the Chief Marketing Officer of Square, where she leads global Marketing and Communications for the $100B company that provides business solutions for millions of small business owners all over the world. She has been named on Forbes “CMO Next”, Brand Innovators “Top Women in Marketing,” Fintech Hub's “30 Most Influential Fintech Marketers.” Prior, she held leadership roles at Yahoo, MTV, and AOL. She is an AdWeek Executive Mentor and advises early-stage startups.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. The Hatchery invited Zulna Heriscar to the podcast. Zulna is the Regional Channel Executive for North America Device Partner Solution Sales at Microsoft. Her experience at Microsoft over the past eighteen years includes working in Sales, Operations, Product Marketing and Professional Services- leading the envisioning of new opportunities and products with customers, helping customers move into a cloud first world, and engaging sellers to create the technical and business elements in their path to the cloud. Zulna is a goal-oriented leader with a natural inquisitiveness to see potential in business opportunities, problems to be solved and people to be connected. She holds a Bachelor's of Science Degree in Computer Information Systems from Florida A&M University, Master's Degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University and an MBA from Emory University. In 2020, Zulna was named to the 40 Under 40 list by the Puget Sound Business Journal and Emory Alumni Association.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. The Hatchery invited Roshni Rai to speak with us about her innovative career path and how she got there.Roshni is the Field Marketing Manager at Creature Comforts Brewing, where she focuses on partnerships and Design Thinking benefitting social/sustainable impact, as well as DE&I. She has had the opportunity to increase social impact, sustainability, and diversity, equity & inclusion while also reducing costs and increasing revenue through creating partnerships with national and global corporations, non-profits, and government such as IHG Hotels and Resorts, American Red Cross, US Department of Energy, and more. Roshni has an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Emory University and an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. On Friday, January 21, we spoke with Ashish Mistry. Ashish Mistry is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of BLH Venture Partners, a private investment firm specializing in early-stage companies. His operating experience includes leadership roles with high-growth companies within Information Security, SaaS, and E-commerce. In addition to his current role at BLH, Mistry was Founder and CEO of KontrolFreek, an innovative lifestyle brand in the video game market that was acquired in 2020. Mistry has advised early-stage companies across the state through Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), and is also active in community organizations through current and prior board positions with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Venture Atlanta (where he was Co-Founder) and the Atlanta CEO Council, as well as through extensive committee work with local technology organizations. He holds a BA in Religion from Emory University.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. On December 3, we spoke with guest Chris Kennedy, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Fortinbras Asset Management (FAM). Chris graduated summa cum laude from Emory's College of Arts and Sciences with a joint BA/MA in English in 1990, spent five years with Citibank in Germany, then went on to earn a MBA from The Wharton School in 1997. In 2004, Chris co-founded Fortinbras Asset Management as a specialized fixed income boutique in Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on investment programs for institutional pension funds. Since its founding, FAM has raised $2.8 billion in assets for investment programs the company manages. FAM sold its third-party asset management business to a Chinese fintech in 2017, but retains an intellectual property shop that designs and builds systematic trading strategies. For the past year FAM has been using these trading algorithms in the carbon markets, and they expect to launch a product in this space in 2022. In 2021, Chris received an Emory Entrepreneur Award as an industry disruptor in Financial Services. Chris met his wife Elizabeth at Emory, and they have raised their two teenage children in Austria.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. Join us from 3:30-4:30pm EST on Friday, October 29, to speak with Dr. Dirk Schroeder, Adjunct Associate Professor of Global Health at Emory, with appointments at Rollins SPH and Goizueta Business Schools.Dr. Schroeder is also the Managing Director of the Advancing Health Innovation in Africa (or AHIA) Program, also based at Emory. He is an “accidental entrepreneur” who in 1999 co-founded and helped build HolaDoctor Inc into the largest Spanish-language digital health company on the Internet; HolaDoctor was acquired in full by Pan American Life Insurance Group (PALIG) in 2017. Fluent in Spanish and Indonesia, he has lived and worked in 30 countries. Dr. Schroeder has Doctoral and Masters degrees in International Health from Johns Hopkins University and a post-doc from Cornell. He completed his undergraduate work, with honors and distinction, at Stanford University.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to design their careers and disrupting their industries. Join us from 1-2pm EST on Thursday, September 23, to speak with Sharron Close, PhD, Assistant Professor at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University. Dr. Close's clinical research is focused on pediatric primary care, developmental pediatrics, management of chronic conditions of genetic origin, and variations of sex chromosome aneuploidy. Dr. Close is a hands-on practitioner of innovation, who has prototyped many products for improving health care, including a human-mimetic cuddling device to simulate warmth and touch for hospitalized infants and children known as Cuddle Care, a biologic-based automotive device to prevent hot car deaths known as CoALA (Carbon Dioxide-Assisted Life Alert), Cool-care, a silicone-based itch and pain relief device to deliver cutaneous symptom relief, FemCare, an external urinary catheter device intended to reduce the need for indwelling urinary catheters that are associated with catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and Testo Gel-dot, an absorbable polymer patch designed to deliver transcutaneous testosterone for androgen-deficient patients. She is a board-certified pediatric nurse practitioner with a BS, MS and PhD from Columbia University School of Nursing in New York. She is a Fellow in the New York Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Close teaches pediatric primary care in the School of Nursing and practices in the School of Medicine Department of Human Genetics.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory alumni and staff who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to designing their careers and disrupting their industries. This week we will be speaking with Brian McGrath Davis (PhD, Laney).Brian has been a researcher at Harvard, managed the sandbox of a billionaire, cofounded two startups, and run a 100-mile ultramarathon (twice, in two months). Brian began his career in academia, where he earned five degrees, including his PhD from Laney Graduate School (Institute of the Liberal Arts, 2013). That academic curiosity translated into a unique approach to building businesses. As an entrepreneur, Brian has spent the last 14 years working in consumer startups. He was part of the early teams at Smilebooth and Scoutmob, managed Blakely Ventures for Sara Blakely, sat on the Leadership Team at Spanx, and cofounded biotech startup Supersapiens. He is currently building a consumer wellness startup in stealth. He thinks in terms of brand and strategy, but at the core, he's a deep generalist who is most alive in the middle of a problem, connecting the dots and finding the best way out. Brian lives in Atlanta with his partner Cam and his beloved dog, Paul.

In Episode 5 of Emory Innovators Shannon Clute chats with Duncan Cock Foster, a 2017 graduate of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. With his twin brother Griffin, Duncan founded Nifty Gateway, the premiere marketplace for non-fungible tokens (aka "Nifties"). Based on the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrency, Nifties are unique digital objects you can buy, own, and sell—just like physical goods. The brothers are on a mission to create a marketplace of one billion collectors of Nifties, and also foresee a future in which these digital tokens may be pared with physical assets as proof of ownership. In 2019, their one-year-old startup Nifty Gateway was acquired by the cryptocurrency company Gemini, owned by the famous Winklevoss twins.This program is brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory's Center for Innovation.

Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to designing their careers and disrupting their industries. This week we will be speaking Meaghan Kennedy, MPH.Meaghan's experience intersects innovation, public health, and social entrepreneurship. After an epidemiology research career at CDC, she founded Orange Sparkle Ball, an innovation and impact consultancy that accelerates initiatives in the private and public sector and works with both domestic and global partners. With an acceleration methodology rooted in design thinking, Orange Sparkle Ball focuses on external or open innovation, innovation program design, social entrepreneurship and community activation. Meaghan has taught at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has been a guest reviewer at Georgia Tech since 2007, a judge and mentor for the Global Social Venture Competition and Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), a mentor for social entrepreneurs and is frequently invited to sit on innovation and entrepreneurial panels.

This week we are excited to welcome alumna Quinn O'Briant to the show. Quinn is a graduate of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, where she earned a BA in Religion before going on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and Master of Liberal Arts from Stanford University. She worked at Google, as both Content Writer & Strategist and Senior Content Strategist, before founding O'Briant Group, a boutique consulting and training firm headquartered in Atlanta. Grounded in the methods of Design Thinking, they offer an array of custom services including innovation labs, visioning sessions, tools training, and leadership experiences, and are a proud partner of Google Cloud, Google for Education, and Grow with Google.”

This week we're excited to welcome Stacey Epstein, 91C. Stacey is the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at ServiceMax and a go-to-market expert—having served as the first head of marketing at both ServiceMax and SuccessFactors when each was a small startup. At SuccessFactors, Stacey helped lead the team from $10m to over $150m in revenue, and was instrumental in the company's IPO in 2007 and subsequent acquisition by SAP. At ServiceMax, Stacey joined the founding team at less than $1m in ARR and lead the marketing function through 6 years of triple-digit growth, departing just prior to the $1b acquisition by GE. Most recently Stacey was CEO of Zinc, a real-time communication app for field service workers, which was acquired by ServiceMax in 2019. In addition to graduating from Emory College in 1991 as an English major, Stacey was a four-time all-conference soccer player. She is a fierce advocate for women and parents in the workplace, and has published numerous articles in Fast Company, Recode, Fortune, and Forbes, among others. Her writings can be found at staceyepstein.com.

In this episode, we welcome our first alumnus guest to the show. Chris Hjelm is a graduate of Emory University's Goizueta Business School (Bachelor's in Business Administration, 2010) and a Partner in Connetic Ventures, where he serves as the Chicago Office Lead and Head of Data. Chris ran his short-focused prop trading firm out of the Connetic Office for three years until his wife decided he should lower his blood pressure by investing in start-ups instead. Prior to trading, Chris worked in various data analytics roles creating and selling custom analytic solutions. In his latest data role, Chris stood up a data practice for an e-commerce specific consulting company.