FEATURED SPEAKERS

Stacie Bloom, PhD
NYU Vice Provost for Research & NYU Chief Research Officer
Stacie Grossman Bloom serves as Vice Provost for Research and Chief Research Officer at NYU, collaborating with university leadership to enhance the research enterprise's impact. With a background in molecular neurobiology, she previously led NYU Langone Medical Center's Neuroscience Institute and later served as Assistant Vice President for Policy and Administration. Dr. Bloom's roles include promoting interdisciplinary research, fostering technology transfer, and engaging in national and international research partnerships. A recognized figure in her field, she has received awards for mentorship and has a diverse background, including positions at Nature Medicine and The New York Academy of Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in cell biology from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Delaware.

Dinah Chen, MD 
Grossman Faculty
Medical Officer at Envision Health Technologies
Dinah Chen is a clinical instructor at NYU Langone Health in the department of ophthalmology. She is also currently a fellow at Genentech, in the department of personalized healthcare, where her work focuses on the development of AI image analysis tools in ophthalmology. She completed her ophthalmology residency in 2021 and a fellowship in innovation at NYU. Dinah serves as a medical officer for Envision, a health tech company developing digital health solutions for the diagnosis and monitoring of eye diseases.

Dee Dao, PhD
Venture Principal at NYU Innovation Venture Fund
Leads investments on behalf of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund in life science and healthcare and provides coaching. Prior to joining the Fund, Dee did product development and intellectual property strategy in therapeutics and diagnostics for Ludwig Cancer Research. Dee holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics /Developmental Biology from Columbia University.

Vasant Dhar, PhD
Faculty at NYU Stern
Founder of SCT Capital Management
Vasant Dhar is an Artificial Intelligence researcher and data scientist, and host of the podcast, "Brave New World," which is about the world our future selves would like to inhabit. He brought Machine Learning to Wall Street in the 90s, and subsequently founded the Machine-Learning-Based hedge-fund SCT Capital Management for systematic investing. Dhar’s research focuses on when we should trust in AI systems, and the business and societal governance of AI in a world of increasingly intelligent machines that make more and more of our decisions for us. Dhar writes regularly in the media on Artificial Intelligence, societal risks of AI platforms, data governance, privacy, ethics, and trust. He is a frequent speaker in academic and industrial forums and publishes his fortnightly newsletter on substack.vasantdhar.com.

Frank Rimalovski
Executive Director at the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute
Managing Director of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund
Frank is the founder and director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute, where he supports and mentors aspiring entrepreneurs from NYU. He also manages the NYU Innovation Venture Fund, a seed-stage fund that invests in promising NYU startups. He is the co-author of two popular books on entrepreneurship: Talking to Humans and Testing with Humans, with Giff Constable. Frank has a wealth of experience in early-stage investing, spinouts and technology commercialization. He was a founding partner of New Venture Partners, worked as Director/Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Lucent/Bell Labs’s, and previously, he held product management and marketing roles at Sun Microsystems, Apple and NeXT. Frank also serves as NYU’s Faculty Lead for the NSF’s NY I-Corps Hub, and has been an Instructor for the NSF’s I-Corps program, taught entrepreneurship courses at Tandon and Courant, and mentors at Techstars.

Dmitry Rinberg, PhD 
Faculty at Grossman & FAS Neuroscience
Chief Science Officer at Canaery
Dr. Dmitry Rinberg, a Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, came to neuroscience research having completed his Ph.D. in Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His research comprises 3 key areas: fundamental principles of neural coding, olfactory information processing in the brain, and applied direction of using the olfactory system as a versatile and highly sensitive chemical detector. Combining fundamental and applied research Dr. Rinberg’s lab is pushing the limits of our understanding of signal processing in the olfactory system as well as developing novel applications, such as odor-based disease diagnostics. In 2020, leveraging his extensive academic background, Dmitry Rinberg co-founded Canaery, a startup company focused on developing bio-electronic nose technology. This groundbreaking initiative involves integrating brain-machine interfaces with animal olfactory systems to decode odor information directly from the brain. Canaery aims to detect and distinguish millions of odors in our surroundings, revolutionizing the way we perceive and interact with the chemical world around us.

Glennon Simmons (Fmr. Dentistry Researcher)
Founder & CEO of Portable Diagnostic Systems
Glennon is an inventor, entrepreneur, and creative problem solver with more than 20 years of experience developing and commercializing lab-on-a-chip devices, instrumentation, and immunoassays for in vitro diagnostic applications, with a particular focus on salivary diagnostics. His contributions to science have resulted in more than 20 scientific papers, and 6 patents, and have formed the technology base of four startup companies (LabNow, SensoDx, Oraliva, and most recently, Portable Diagnostic Systems). In 2019 Glennon founded Portable Diagnostic Systems out of a desire to improve public health and society in a meaningful way. Portable Diagnostic Systems’ novel lab-on-a-chip technology is key to detecting analytes in low volumes of biological fluid with high accuracy and precision. As a decision support tool, this technology will allow clinicians and investigators to make accurate, evidence-based decisions for a variety of high-impact diseases using only a few drops of saliva that is quick and easy to collect. Since founding Portable Diagnostic Systems, Glennon has raised more than $1.2M in pre-seed funding through grants, prizes, and investments.

Bilal Sher (Tandon '22)
CEO & Founder of Building Diagnostic Robotics
Bilal Sher serves as the CEO of Building Diagnostic Robotics (BDR), a company specializing in cutting-edge hardware-software roof survey solutions. The core technology involves a mobile roof scanning robot capturing multi-modal roof data, subsequently processed using proprietary AI to generate comprehensive roof condition surveys. BDR has successfully secured over $1.4 million in non-dilutive funding for research, product development, and commercialization from various sources. The BDR team comprises experts in robotics, deep learning, computer vision, and civil engineering, collaboratively working to revolutionize the field. Through their Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) solution, they empower building science principals to enhance team productivity by 8x and reduce inspection project costs by 50%. Beyond his role at BDR, Bilal is not only an enthusiastic hiker but also wholeheartedly dedicated to advancing and enriching the Shia community in New York City, actively contributing to its improvement and development.

DEMO DAY JUDGES

Daniella Cohen
Investor at 2048 Ventures
Daniella Cohen is a Senior Associate at 2048 Ventures. Prior to 2048 Ventures, she was a Managing Partner at Rough Draft Ventures where she invested in student founders across the country. She was a summer associate at Techstars NYC and joined the portfolio company, The Clear Cut (DTC diamond startup) as their Head of Content while the company grew over 100% year-over-year. She also took time off from college to work on social and emotional learning projects at Facebook as the youngest person at the company. Daniella holds a B.A. in Neuroscience from Princeton University.

Abby Lyall (Stern ‘18)
Investor at Tribeca Venture Partners
Abby is an Investor at Tribeca Venture Partners, where she focuses on sourcing and conducting diligence on disruptive New York-based tech companies across industries. Prior to joining Tribeca Venture Partners, Abby was a Vice President and an early employee at Big Idea Ventures, an early-stage venture fund focused on alternative protein and food technology. She began her career at Quake Capital Partners, an industry-agnostic venture firm and accelerator in NYC where she was the second employee. Abby graduated cum laude from New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she studied Finance, Computing and Data Science. While at NYU, Abby co-founded MyDrop, an education technology company focused on student community service, which inspired her to pursue a career in entrepreneurship and innovation.

Marcia Mitchell
Director at NY Ventures, Empire State Development
Marcia Mitchell is a Director at NY Ventures where she invests in Seed and Series A stage technology companies across NY state. Marcia believes that there are amazing investment opportunities in NY and enjoys meeting and supporting founders from all backgrounds and walks of life. Marcia holds a B.A. in Economics from Tufts University and an M.Sc. in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship from RPI.

Kojo Osei
Partner at Matrix Partners
Investor at Matrix Partners focused on early-stage investments. Previously, he led product development at a startup building AI copilots for medical image analysis.

DEMO DAY TEAMS

Building Diagnostic Robotics
Team: Bilal Sher (Tandon ‘22), Talha Javed (Tandon ’23), Sruti Madhusudhan (Tandon ’23), Chen Feng (Tandon Faculty)
Building Diagnostics provides robotics-as-a-service to generate data driven insights for roof inspections. Through automated report generation, they enable building science principles to reduce labor costs, enhance client value, and demonstrate their expertise.

Envision Health Technologies
Team: Lama Al-Aswad (Fmr. Langone Health Clinician), Nicholas Neissa, Dinah Chen (Langone Health Clinician), Vipul Patel
Envision Health Technologies integrates virtual reality gaming with novel visual function testing to diagnose glaucoma. Their solution increases efficiency, grows revenue and decreases costs for optometrists while improving glaucoma diagnosis, progression prediction & treatment to save at least 10 years of vision for patients.

GetNOISY
Team: Tae Hong Park (Fmr. Steinhardt Faculty), Johannes Moenius, Christian Staack, Minjoon Yoo
Get Noisy provides location-specific continuous and comprehensive airplane noise data to create noise mitigation insights necessary for compensation and implementation of noise abatement measures for airports, airplane noise associations, and individuals.

Portable Diagnostic Systems
Team: Glennon Simmons (Fmr. Dentistry Researcher), Nico Vansnick (Tandon ‘13), Ty Gabriel (CAS '99)
Portable Diagnostic Systems provides a toxicology lab in a box for clinicians and investigators that can streamline investigations, saving time and money, and in some cases, save a life.

Sunthetics
Team: Daniela Blanco (Tandon ‘20), César Urbina Blanco
SuntheticsML is a SaaS Machine Learning platform that empowers scientists to design successful experimental campaigns for new chemicals, formulations, and processes, achieving results and knowledge up to 32x faster.

Vital Audio Inc
Team: Nyamitse-Calvin Mahinda (Tandon ‘23), Harsh Sonthalia (Tandon ‘23), Divya  Mehta (Stern ’23)
Vital Audio creates digital voice biomarkers for remote cardiopulmonary care. In just 8 seconds of a patient's voice recording during a phone call, we provide real-time heart rate, heart rate variability, lung capacity and respiratory rate data to care teams, powered by AI.