Sree served as senior advisor to US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo from early 2021 to 2024, focusing on emerging technology, supply chain resiliency, and industrial policy. He is currently a Fellow at the nonprofit NobleReach Foundation, advising that organization on technology, talent, and investment initiatives to support US national and economic security.
Sree’s achievements at Commerce including developing and facilitating the CHIPS and Science Act and other Biden administration initiatives on semiconductors, supply chains, and critical technologies. He also developed Commerce’s CHIPS strategy and investment thesis to guide implementation of the CHIPS program and helped recruit key leaders to build the CHIPS program office at Commerce. He served as Commerce’s key technology and industrial policy interlocutor with the private sector, national security community, and Congressional leadership and staff.
He continues to advise a wide range of policy and industry leaders on ways to promote, protect, and scale up emerging technologies and industrial investments in the United States.
Sree was formerly a Partner in McKinsey & Company’s Washington DC office and at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the non-profit business and economics research arm of McKinsey. In this role he was responsible for shaping MGI’s and McKinsey’s research on trends in global competition, technology disruption, and the forces impacting multinational firms. For more than a decade Sree has researched and written extensively about American manufacturing and supply chains, the impact of deindustrialization on economic and national security, and opportunities to revitalize industrial investment in established and emerging sectors.
Prior to joining McKinsey in 2008, Sree spent nearly a decade in the US aerospace and telecom sectors with roles in engineering and regulatory affairs. He holds three patents, an MBA, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in computer engineering and telecommunications.
Nina is a passionate leader and super-connector, helping scientific innovators around the world unlock their ideas and solve problems that measurably improve lives.
She has worked with scientists and entrepreneurs in over 35 countries across therapeutics, food and agriculture, synthetic biology, and laboratory tools. Her support to researchers and entrepreneurs has ranged from fundraising (over $10M in non-dilutive capital and over $40M in material support), to commercialization advising and brokering connections to investors, government agencies, corporate business development teams, and scientific manufacturers.
As Founder and CEO of Seeding Labs, Nina secured startup and growth capital; oversaw finance, legal, and HR; built a cohesive team and Board; led communications and marketing; and scaled the organization’s revenue 100x over 10 years. In her roles in Strategy and in Government Affairs at MilliporeSigma, and as Chief Business Officer at BioLabs, she negotiated corporate partnerships and secured enterprise customers, and worked with US and foreign government agencies on pandemic responses.
Nina brings to bear a unique global network that encompasses corporations, universities, governments, and NGO’s. She has served on the Boards of Seeding Labs, BioLabs and 500 Women Scientists, and currently advises a therapeutics startup and a nonprofit addressing the intersection of genetics and climate change.
Nina holds a PhD in Molecular Biology, from Harvard University and a B.S. in Biochemistry from Brown University.
Dr. Luiz Miguel Camargo is a Senior Commercialization Advisor at NobleReach Emerge, helping translate cutting-edge government-funded research into the commercial sector, with an emphasis on pharmaceutical and biotech projects.
Miguel has more than 20 years of experience in drug discovery, with much of his work being motivated by translating data sciences into real-world applications, He has led innovative data efforts at Merck, Novartis, and UCB working on translational medicine, target & biomarker discovery, lead identification & optimization, phenotypic screens, and efforts to better define disease using electronic medical records.
In addition to his role as computational biologist, Miguel has also led multidisciplinary drug discovery teams, as well as academic and industrial collaborations. At UCB, Miguel was responsible for identifying key and disruptive technologies by fostering partnerships with academic institutes, biotech companies, and venture funds. Miguel was deeply involved in building UCB’s research presence in the US and was responsible for building UCB’s Targeted Protein Degradation Platform that spans all three UCB research hubs (Belgium, UK, and US).
Miguel is a visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health, and Nutrition, in Osaka, Japan. He received his PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Cambridge, has several publications in leading journals, and is on the board of the Riverbend School in Natick, Massachusetts. He lives in Wellesley, MA.
Dr. Petros Kotidis is a Senior Commercialization Advisor at NobleReach Foundation. Dr. Kotidis has been in the high-tech industry for more than 30 years and has commercialized numerous technologies in the energy, materials, artificial intelligence, photonics, safety and security, sensors, and life sciences markets.
Most recently, as president of Miracor Consulting, he advised large and small high-tech companies in technology commercialization, raising capital, and expansion into new markets. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of Block Engineering, a leader in AI-driven, laser-based chemical analysis systems.
Before that, he was the VP of Business Development at Axsun Technologies, an optical microelectromechanical systems company. He joined Axsun from Nortel Networks, a leading optical telecommunications company, where he led strategic acquisitions and corporate investments. He also worked at Textron Systems, a defense manufacturer of smart weapons, industrial sensors, and optical systems, where he was responsible for the development and market introduction of new optoelectronic products.
Dr. Kotidis has PhD and MS degrees in aeronautics from MIT with a minor from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has been awarded 26 patents for various optoelectronic and algorithmic inventions.
Charlene Marini joined the team in January 2023 when Emerge was spun out from In-Q-Tel and into the new merger with NobleReach. Charlene works with a portfolio of DARPA performers, advising early stage deep-tech startups through the first stages of their commercialization journey.
Charlene spent more than two decades in the semiconductor, computing and software industries and brings expertise in semiconductor supply chain, chip design, network infrastructure, wireless technologies, IoT applications, data services, and cybersecurity. She has extensive experience in building new business ventures in leading edge technology areas, having held executive roles or leadership roles in product and marketing, technology and corporate strategy, and product management and rollout.
Charlene was chief product and marketing officer at Pelion, an IoT SaaS platform company. Before that, Charlene was with Arm Ltd for over 10 years, working with the broader semiconductor and computer ecosystem to bring computing intelligence to the many devices across our daily lives. She also served as a non-executive board member of Arduino, LLC, an open-source hardware and software company.
Charlene has a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Brown University.
Kirt Poss is a Senior Commercialization Advisor with NobleReach Foundation and brings more than 25 years of executive leadership to the company.
Prior to this role, he was CEO-US of ProtaGene, a provider of advanced analytics solutions for biopharmaceutical and gene therapy platform development. He also served as President and CEO of BioAnalytix, where he led the company from early commercialization through two successful M&As, including with Protagen Protein Services in 2019, and then with a private equity firm to create ProtaGene in 2021. Mr. Poss also served as President and CEO of VisEn Medical, a biomarker imaging company that he co-founded and guided from its formation in 2000 through product development, worldwide commercialization, pharmaceutical partnerships, and M&A with PerkinElmer in 2010.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Poss worked in healthcare business strategy consulting with Kendall Strategies and in scientific research at the Center for Molecular Imaging Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is a coauthor of several scientific publications and multiple patents in biomarker imaging and pharmaceutical development.
Mike Thomas provides fractional CEO services for several medical technology, digital health, and medical device startups. He also is a Senior Commercialization Advisor for DARPA and NobleReach Foundation for the Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative (EEI). He has managed a portfolio of over a dozen DARPA-funded performers and, at the request of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was a founding architect of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
Mike was a VC at the Inova Health System Strategic Investments (ISI) in northern VA. Prior to that, he was a serial healthcare technology CEO for over 20 years. Mike raised $125 million in capital and drove shareholder returns that ranged from 4x to 80x, including one IPO and one acquisition. Previously, Mike was CEO of iSonea Ltd (ASX:ISN), a publicly traded global mobile health app developer and medical device manufacturer in the respiratory disease market, where he increased the company’s market capitalization from $4 million to $250 million. He is a former board member of AdvaMed, the global medical device association.
Mike was most recently the founder and CEO of Appian Medical, a digital health firm that served the sleep apnea market, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Tanzen Medical, Inc.
Glenn Gaffney joined the team in January 2023 when Emerge was spun out from In-Q-Tel (IQT) and into the new merger with NobleReach. He was a co-founder of Emerge along with Simon Davidson while serving as an EVP and Senior Fellow at IQT, where he served from 2017–2022.
Before joining the private sector, Mr. Gaffney served in the US Intelligence Community for 31 years. His government service included senior positions as the Director of Science and Technology for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection, and the Associate Director of CIA for Talent. Throughout his career he has led new endeavors in technical collection operations, the analysis of space and advanced conventional weapons systems, information operations, and identity intelligence to address critical national security challenges.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Gaffney has received two Presidential Rank Awards, two National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medals, three CIA director’s awards, and two CIA Distinguished Service Medals.
Mr. Gaffney is an engineering sciences graduate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.