Pitch Competition: Building a Biotech Venture program

Avi Goldfarb, PhD, is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, and Professor of Marketing, at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab where he manages the health stream, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has published over 80 academic articles in a variety of outlets in marketing, statistics, law, management, refugee studies, medicine, computing, and economics. Along with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans, Avi is the author of the book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence and editor of the NBER book The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda. Avi received his PhD in economics from Northwestern University.

Robin Quirk, PhD, MBA is the Director of Technology Sourcing and Venture Development at CCRM. Robin has over 20 years of experience working with regenerative medicine start-up companies. He started his career as an industry-trained pharmacist before moving into tissue engineering research. Robin joined CCRM to support the commercial development of early-stage ideas. He leads the team responsible for identifying and developing promising technologies and nurturing them to the company creation stage by strategically leveraging CCRM’s expertise and infrastructure.

Andrea Sampson is Co-Founder & Executive Speaker Coach at Talk Boutique. She is a former Strategist and Consultant and has spent over 25 years working in marketing and advertising, presenting and developing strategies for Fortune 100 companies. With a natural talent for developing compelling stories and persuasive content, Andrea is sought after in assisting teams and executives develop their presentations or pitches. Four years ago, Andrea’s passion for ideas led her to TEDxToronto where she volunteered initially as a Speaker Coach, then as the Director of Programming in 2015 and the Conference Co-Chair in 2016. This voluntary role was instrumental in the creation of Talk Boutique, a speaker management, development and representation company. Andrea was the Co-Director of the 2017 Singularity University Canada Summit.

Emily Titus, PhD, is Vice President, Process Sciences at Notch Therapeutics. Previously, she was Vice President, Technology Advancement at CCRM, where she built cell reprogramming, genome engineering, and pluripotent stem cell differentiation programs and led the formation of Notch Therapeutics as part of CCRM’s company incubation program. Emily earned a PhD from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, where she used a combination of laboratory and bioinformatics approaches to define and interpret gene regulatory networks controlling embryonic stem cell fate decisions.