Charlie Cooney
Chairman MIT $100k Board of Advisors
Faculty Director of the Deshpande Center

A Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Dr. Cooney is Co-Director of the Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry at MIT. He earned both his master's degree and Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering from MIT, and joined the faculty in 1970. Currently, his research group is pursuing the fundamentals of absorption and filtration in downstream processing, the use of genetic engineering to solve process problems, and the application of benchmarking to measure performance in pharmaceutical manufacturing. He has worked with several biotechnology companies in their early stages, such as Genzyme, Microbia, Bioprocessors and Dyax; as well as with larger pharmaceutical and chemical companies. He is a director at Genzyme, Cuno, and BioCon India.

Joe Hadzima

Joe graduated from MIT in 1973 and went to work as the third employee of a MIT startup doing systems dynamics computer modeling. After two years he went back to school (Harvard Law 1979 and Sloan 1977) and spent the next 17 years in law practice in Boston starting at Ropes & Gray (3 years) and then Sullivan & Worcester (14 years) involved in High Technology New Ventures. In his legal career he worked with over 120 companies from raw startups to billion dollar companies in areas ranging from venture capital, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, corporate and securities law, intellectual property, licensing, distribution, etc. Joe also represented numerous venture capital funds, investment banks/underwriters and other financial institutions. Joe is a Senior Lecturer at Sloan, where he has been teaching part-time since 1984 (Manager's Legal Function, Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans, various guest lectures). He was a founding judge of the competition in 1990 when the prize was only $10k. Joe is also Chairman of the Global MIT Enterprise Forum with over 20 chapters.

Ken Morse
Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center

Ken Morse leads the MIT effort to educate and nurture leaders to bring innovative concepts and technologies to market and build successful new high tech start-up businesses. He co-teaches Technology Sales and Sales Management (#15.387), as well as the Entrepreneurship Laboratory course (#15.399) in which teams of engineering, science, and MBA students work on important problems in startup ventures that are "keeping the CEO awake at night." Ken studies the use of corporate venture investing to achieve strategic advantage, and the international sales and marketing challenges faced by fast-growing high tech firms.

Ed Roberts
Founder and Chairman of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center

Ed Roberts joined the faculty of Sloan in 1961 as a founding member of the System Dynamics Group. Two years later he co-founded what is now Sloan's Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship (TIE) group. He long chaired TIE and co-founded and until recently co-chaired the MIT Management of Technology Program, a mid-career executive education Master's degree program aimed at producing technology leaders, now merged with the Sloan Fellows Program. Over the past forty five years Dr. Roberts has become internationally known for his research, teaching and active involvement in many aspects of technology management, including technology-based entrepreneurship, venture capital, and internal corporate venturing. Among many endeavors Dr. Roberts spearheaded the MIT Alumni Entrepreneurship Program in the 1960s, leading to the founding of the worldwide MIT Enterprise Forum and stimulating the formation of many new companies. In 1991 he founded and currently chairs the MIT Entrepreneurship Center.

Dean Subra Suresh
Dean of the School of Engineering

Suresh is the Dean of the School of Engineering and the Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds joint faculty appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, and Health Sciences and Technology at M.I.T. From January 2000 to January 2006, he served as Head of M.I.T.’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He began his tenure as Dean of Engineering in July 2007.