Staff
Charles Young
Program Director
young.2631@osu.edu
Charles is the Director of Business Development for the Center of Design and Manufacturing Excellence (CDME) in the College of Engineering for The Ohio State University. Responsible for directing projects and pursuing collaborations with students, faculty, government, and industry. CDME specializes in applied engineering by performing real-world projects to improve technology readiness and workforce readiness for manufacturing.
Retired from ABB in 2016 as Vice President / Global Managing Director for the Measurements and Analytics Business Unit. Responsible for the P&L and all aspects of the business, including manufacturing. Held multiple roles during a 32-year career with ABB in process automation including service and projects, sales, sales management, and P&L Management.
Graduated from The University of Virginia – BS Chemical Engineering, 1984.
Nikki K. Modlich
Program Manager
modlich.5@osu.edu
Nikki has 20 years of experience in managing entrepreneurial educational programs and business accelerators affiliated with both independent and university startups with an emphasis on technology commercialization. Strengths include strategic planning, process improvement, marketing, program implementation and logistics, and delivering high-level communications; serving as liaison between academic, industry, and community stakeholders.
Medtech Instructors
Mark Low is Managing Director of both the Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center (GCIC) and the NIH Center for Accelerated Innovations (NCAI) at Cleveland Clinic. He comes to these roles with a career of building successful programs to introduce new technologies to address new market opportunities in healthcare. He has managed all facets of product and market development spanning diagnostic and interventional cardiology, interventional radiology and neuroradiology, stroke treatment, image-guided surgery, drug delivery and oncology. He has served on the senior management team of TomTec Imaging Systems, Image Guided Technologies, EKOS Corporation, and Sonus Pharmaceuticals and in senior consultant roles to a half dozen other start-up companies. Prior to concentrating his focus on start-up ventures and early stage market development, Mark held lead positions in marketing and business development for Hewlett-Packard’s Medical Products Group (now Philips Healthcare). Specializing in cardiovascular ultrasound, he managed high performance cardiac diagnostic systems, introducing 3D ultrasound, stress echocardiography, and catheter-based intravascular ultrasound, among other applications. In conjunction with these programs Mark managed strategic relationships with various corporate partners, investors, universities, inventors, clinical investigators and manufacturers. Mark received a B.A. degree in Natural Science from Johns Hopkins University, an M.S. degree in Physiology from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and an M.S. degree in Technical Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Ofer Reizes, PhD, is Staff in the Department of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences, Director of Research Core Services at the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, Director of Skills Development for the NIH Center for Accelerated Innovations at Cleveland Clinic, and holder of The Laura J. Fogarty Endowed Chair for Uterine Cancer Research. Dr. Reizes received his PhD in molecular pharmacology at UT-Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at The Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. In 2001, Dr. Reizes was recruited by Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to lead drug discovery efforts in obesity and metabolic diseases, progressing several obesity targets from early discovery to pre-clinical evaluation. In 2006, Dr. Reizes joined the Cleveland Clinic, where he studies the interface between obesity and women’s cancers including breast, ovarian, and uterine. His team discovered that a fat tissue hormone, called leptin, causes cancer tumors to grow larger and promotes the survival of tumor-initiating cells also known as cancer stem cells. Dr. Reizes research has been published in Cell, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and Nature Communications. He has presented at multiple national and international meetings including the Endocrine Society and the American Diabetes Association. He is a co-inventor of a patent titled “Methods and Reagents for Regulating Obesity” and has consulted for several biotechnology companies.
Elliot Reed, serves Northeast Ohio Medical University as the Executive Director for the newly created Institute for Innovation, Commercialization, and Economic Development, Entrepreneur in Residence, and as a Graduate Faculty member of the College of Graduate Studies. Prior to NEOMED, he was running two orthopedic-focused medical device companies as CEO for 9 years. Additionally, he served in the technology transfer office at Los Alamos National Laboratory and supported the translation of over 15 early-stage disruptive technologies. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from Arizona State University and a Masters of Business Administration and Juris Doctor from Case Western Reserve University.
Caroline Crisafulli, an expert in the medical device and healthcare management industries, is Director of Innovation for Ohio State ADVANCE in the Office of Research at The Ohio State University. In this role, she coaches and mentors’ faculty and postdoctoral scholars as they pursue commercialization as a way to amplify the impact of their research. Crisafulli is a senior leader of REACH for Commercialization™, an evidence-based program that increases the representation and success of women innovators in academia.
Crisafulli joined Ohio State from her previous role as co-founder of Minimally Invasive Devices (MID), a venture backed medical device startup, where she held the position of Vice President of Operations for ten years. Her experience at MID included product development from concept to commercialization; quality and regulatory affairs; global sales and marketing; raising angel and venture capital funds; and human resource management. Her earlier career in healthcare management included healthcare policy, compliance, coding and reimbursement.
Crisafulli earned a Bachelor of Science in Genetics and Development from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a certified Project Management Professional and is listed on 6 issued US patents.
Science & Engineering Instructors
Bill Nemeth is a “recovering” serial entrepreneur who currently runs the Burton D. Morgan Mentoring Program for JumpStart in Cleveland. In that role, he has directly assisted over 1000 entrepreneurs by providing guidance, expertise and helping them learn and execute the lean startup methodology. The mentored companies have garnered in excess of $185 million in revenue and capital. In addition to his responsibilities at JumpStart is a National Science Foundation I-Corps instructor and one of the lead instructors of our I-Corps@Ohio program.
Bill has a wide-ranging background in manufacturing, information technology, retail, services and healthcare. He has had a variety of roles in sales, business development, project management, practice management and as an executive at companies including Oracle, SAIC and Cognos. As a “recovering” entrepreneur he is always on the lookout for his next startup.
With I-Corps@Ohio since it’s inception in 2015, Bill has had the opportunity to instruct many teams that have gone on to advance their science, license their technologies and form startup ventures. He is dedicated to providing our teams the necessary skills to succeed in technology commercialization upon program graduation.
Dr. S. Michael Camp Michael is an entrepreneur, investor and strategic advisor to numerous corporations and technology ventures for the commercialization and monetization of innovative technologies. As principal of Prophetech Global IP Solutions, Michael currently supports deal flow pipeline development and investment due diligence for Carmen Ventures (Columbus, Ohio). Carmen is an alumni-based investment fund that leverages its global innovation network for access to qualified early-stage investments in life, environmental and material sciences.
Prior to Carmen, Michael led a number of academic and research initiatives in technology entrepreneurship at The Ohio State University. He served as Executive Director of I-Corps@Ohio and Director of Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation in the College of Engineering’s Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence. He also founded and led the Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (TEC) Institute in the Fisher College of Business where he designed and administered numerous award-winning commercialization programs, training more than 1,200 students, research faculty and business professionals. His programs reviewed the commercial potential of more than 500 scientific discoveries, leading to dozens of new technology ventures that to-date have attracted nearly $100 million in various forms of venture funding. Michael holds a doctorate in strategic management from The Ohio State University, an MBA in business analytics, an MS in organizational design, and a BS in marketing research (with honors).
