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Keynote Speakers:

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Bryn ReesÌý| MSc.

Sr. Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Partnerships, Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØBoulder

Bryn Rees is senior associate vice chancellor for Innovation & Partnerships at the Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ. Together with his team, he works with university researchers, creators and entrepreneurs to partner with the extended innovation ecosystem and transform lives and society through innovation.Ìý He leads three primary functions at Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØBoulder: commercialization of university innovations, industry partnerships and the central campus entrepreneurship hub. Venture Partners at Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØBoulder provides entrepreneurship training and mentorship, the NSF I-CorpsTM Hub West, Ascent Deep Tech Accelerator, Lab Venture Challenge, Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator and other founder funding opportunities, intellectual property management, licensing and strategic partnerships. Venture Partners works side by side with faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers and bridges externally with investors, entrepreneurs, mentors and innovative companies.

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Heather A.S. Platt | PhD.

NREL West Gate fellow and Director of Materials Engineering and R&D at Mana Battery

Dr. Heather A.S. Platt excels in demonstrating the feasibility of early stage energy storage technology by inventing new solutions to industrially relevant problems, as well as by working with academic and national laboratory inventors to vet and scale their discoveries. Her experience is rooted in post doctoral work at the National Renewable Energy Lab, six years at Solid Power that included spinning out of Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØBoulder, and several years of independent consulting. Dr. Platt is currently an NREL West Gate fellow and Director of Materials Engineering and R&D at Mana Battery, where she and her team are working to develop and scale the highest energy density sodium-ion battery cell design in the market.

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Panelists:

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Mike Hoffman | BSc.

Account Manager and Product Manager at Keysight Technologies

Mike graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with his BSEE in 2012, joining Agilent Technologies (now Keysight Technologies) immediately thereafter. He spent almost a decade in their oscilloscopes product division in Colorado Springs as a Technical Marketing Engineer and Product Manager for their mainstream and midrange products. He then joined the sales team in 2021, covering customers across the four corners. In his free time, you’ll find him at the pool table, RC rock crawling, or doomscrolling on car auction websites.

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Mike Hoffman | PhD.

Principal Scientist at Enveda

Colleen earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ in 2017 and went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA. After three years at Sandia, she transitioned into industry and is now a Principal Scientist at Enveda, where she focuses on mechanism of action and target identification for the company’s lead drug discovery programs.

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Maya Fabrikant | PhD.

Lead Physicist at Quantinuum

Maya is a Lead Physicist at Quantinuum where she does research focused on improving the speed and efficiency of ion transport and on designing novel ion traps. Maya holds a bachelor's degree from UNL and a PhD in physics from Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØBoulder where she worked on cold molecule collision research with Dr. Heather Lewandowski.