Taymur Ahmad is the Founder and CEO of actnano Inc.  Prior to founding actnano, Mr. Ahmad had 18 years of manufacturing management experience with Fortune 50 companies such as Alcoa and Philips Electronics.  Among other accolades, in 2010 he was awarded the “Visionary of the Year” award by Surface Mount Technology magazine.  Dell’s Center for Entrepreneurs picked Mr. Ahmad to be one of the top 50 CEOs in the world.  He earned his MBA from Business School Lausanne in Switzerland, and his Engineering degree from the University of Iowa.

Dr. Barmak Heshmat is the founder-CEO of BRELYON. A company that is using computational optics to realize headset-free virtual displays. He has over a decade of expertise in optics with 4 years at MIT Media Lab as a Research Scientist and 1.5 years at Meta AR as Head of Optics. Dr. Heshmat’s inventions have been featured on many top-tier academic journals and press outlets including Nature photonics, Guardian, BBC, TechCrunch, and many others. With 7 TEDx talks, 21 patents and 23 publications and tens of conference and keynote presentations, Dr. Heshmat is a well-recognized face in the world of AR/VR and in the field of optics.

Dr. Natalie Wisniewski is Co-Founder and CTO of Profusa, where she conceived the technical approach, co-built the company road map, enlisted top talent and secured start-up funding. Natalie leads Profusa’s technology development efforts and the grants program, which has secured $10M of DARPA and NIH funds. Natalie is the co-inventor of Profusa’s tissue-integrating biosensor technology and optical reader. Winner of the NIH Transformative Research Award, she is a recognized leader in understanding the body’s reaction to foreign materials and the design of bioengineered sensors. In addition to her science career, she was a business consultant at McKinsey & Company and a consumer products developer at Kimberly-Clark. She has nearly two decades of regulatory, clinical and technical consulting experience in the medical device industry. Natalie earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute where she developed her passion for continuous monitoring of body chemistries.

Dr. Grayson Zulauf is the CEO and Co-founder of Resonant Link, a company transforming the last mile of electron delivery for autonomous fleets around breakthrough wireless charging. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, a recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy honor in 2021, and is an Activate / Cyclotron Road Fellow.  

Dr. Adam Sharkawy, prior to co-founding Material Impact, was Sr. Vice President of The Medicines Company and Head of their Surgery and Perioperative Care Global Business Unit where he led the the $170M acquisition of Tenaxis Medical and the integration of three other acquired companies in deals totaling in excess of $1B. Before that, he helped establish Smith & Nephew’s Emerging Market divisions in Dubai where he served as a member of their executive leadership team. There he developed the product portfolio across all of Smith & Nephew’s businesses (orthopedics, sports medicine and advanced wound care). Prior to that he started the Advanced Healing Technologies / Biomaterials franchise within the Smith & Nephew Endoscopy division in the Boston area and led their R&D organization.

Christian Theriault is an award-winning serial entrepreneur with expertise across several deep tech industries.  He has co-founded or been involved with startups in robotics, machine vision, medical devices, and new chemical entity development.  His latest company was acquired by a Japanese multinational and had the distinction of producing the world’s fastest focusing lens - widely used across several market verticals ranging from laser material processing to metrology, quality assurance and biomedical engineering.  More recently, Christian has been involved with mentoring and investing in high-tech startups and participates in various accelerator programs, the NSF’s America’s Seed Fund and various angel groups where he regularly serves as the diligence team lead or domain expert for sensors/advanced manufacturing, energy technologies, data science, and machine vision.  Christian holds an MSE in Material Science and Process Management and an A.B. in Molecular Biology and Bioengineering, both from Princeton University; he has authored several academic papers and holds numerous patents.  He currently serves as an advisor to several technology and consumer facing startups and resides in New York City.