Workshop Frontiers of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Marco M. Muñoz

Marco is the Executive Director for Strategic Initiatives at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, working in the Office of the Founding Director. Muñoz is also a Senior Advisor on Climate to the President of MIT.

For more than 20 years, Muñoz has built and created teams and initiatives to advance social and philanthropic goals in private and public institutions, including academic and governmental organizations. At the Ragon Institute, he builds support around the world to promote the Institute’s interests and works with strategic partners who share the Ragon Institute’s aim of harnessing the immune system to prevent and cure human disease. He also oversees the Ragon’s external communications program.

Miguel Calvo

Miguel is a fourth-year Physics PhD candidate at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). He earned a Bachelor of Science in Energy Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), receiving the award to the best academic records among 1550 students in the Area of Industrial Engineering, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM).

During these studies, he worked in topics such as experimental fusion energy, materials for photo-assisted hydrogen generation, and topological superconductivity, receiving numerous fellowships and awards.

His passion for energy and physics led him to pursue his thesis in fusion energy, focusing on advancing the theoretical understanding of next-generation fusion energy systems. In his work, he develops and solves models to describe the dynamics of alpha particles in burning plasmas, with a focus on quasisymmetric stellarators.

Beyond his research, he is actively involved in outreach activities and in fostering connections with industry, and has been part of the organization of the MIT Energy Conference, the largest student-led energy conference in the world.

Catherine Tucker

Catherine is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. She is the faculty director of the EMBA program. She has also been the Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program.

Her research interests lie in how technology allows firms to use digital data and machine learning to improve performance, and in the challenges this poses for regulation. Tucker has particular expertise in online advertising, digital health, social media, and electronic privacy. Her research studies the interface between marketing, the economics of technology, and law.

She has received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for an Emerging Female Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Garfield Economic Impact Award for her work on electronic medical records, the Paul E. Green Award for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research, the William F. O’Dell Award for most significant, long-term contribution to Marketing, and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award for long-run impact on marketing.

She is a cofounder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab which studies the applications of blockchain. She has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has testified to Congress regarding her work on digital privacy and algorithms, and presented her research to the OECD, World Bank, IMF, and the ECJ.

Tucker is senior editor at Marketing Science. She has been coeditor at Quantitative Marketing and Economics and associate editor at Management Science, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Marketing Research. She is the codirector of the program on Digital Economics and Artificial Intelligence at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

She teaches MIT Sloan’s course on Pricing and the EMBA course “Marketing Management for the Senior Executive.” She has received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching as well as being voted “Teacher of the Year” at MIT Sloan.

She holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and a BA from the University of Oxford.

Paul Cheek

Paul Cheek is a global expert in innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Paul is a serial tech entrepreneur, educator, software engineer, and bestselling author of Disciplined Entrepreneurship: Startup Tactics. He is a Senior Lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to his role at MIT, he co-founded three ventures which earned him recognition by Forbes 30 Under 30, the definitive list of young people changing the world. Paul has been featured in publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc Magazine.

Paul was MIT’s first Hacker in Residence and has since taught, mentored, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Paul designed and now leads a new advanced course he developed to help student entrepreneurs build their businesses called “Venture Creation Tactics”. Additionally, Paul teaches hundreds of MIT and Harvard undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students each year in the historic “New Enterprises” course. His teaching materials have been used by educators around the world.

Prior to his work at MIT, Paul was the co-founder of Oceanworks and Work Today. Oceanworks is a for-profit company with a mission to end plastic pollution. Work Today is a venture backed digital staffing and recruiting company. Paul has also built technologies for and consulted with LogMeIn, BlackRock, Prudential, Mazda, and more. He serves on the CNBC Disruptor 50 Advisory Board, the MIT Sandbox Funding Board, and judges the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s CO—100 Awards.

Rahul Bhui

Rahul is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and affiliate faculty of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

His research combines cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and behavioral economics to reveal the deep unifying principles that capture both rationality and irrationality. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Management Science, Nature Human Behaviour, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science, and featured in media outlets such as USA Today, the LA Times, and Scientific American. He has received the Early Career Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics and the Vernon L. Smith Excellence Award from the Society for Experimental Finance, and has been named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science and one of the Best 40-Under-40 Business School Professors by Poets&Quants.

Prior to joining the faculty at MIT, Rahul was Mind Brain Behavior Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Psychology and Economics at Harvard University. He holds a BA (Honours) in economics from the University of British Columbia, as well as an MS in behavioral and social neuroscience and a PhD in computation and neural systems from Caltech.

Steven D. Eppinger

Steven is Professor of Management Science and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair. He teaches interdisciplinary courses online and on campus at both the Master’s and executive levels in product design and innovation, engineering project management, and product management. Notably, he has created an interdisciplinary product development course in which graduate students from engineering, management, and industrial design programs collaborate to develop new products.

He is coauthor of the textbook Product Design and Development, used by hundreds of universities. His research is applied to improving complex technical project management. Recent work has focused on application of agile software development methods to a range of other industries. Prior research is the basis of the book titled Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications. He is one of the most widely cited scholars in the engineering design and technical management disciplines.

Eppinger has served as Deputy Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management and has chaired many of MIT’s interdisciplinary masters degree programs (System Design and Management, Integrated Design and Management, Leaders for Global Operations, and Leaders for Manufacturing).

He received SB, SM, and ScD degrees from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering before joining the MIT faculty in 1988. He has received many awards and honors including MIT’s Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, the MIT Sloan School’s Award for Innovation and Excellence in Management Education, ASME Best Paper Award in Design Theory and Methodology, INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speaker Award, and PICMET Medal of Excellence Award.

Michael Kearney

Mike is a Partner at The Engine. He serves as a Board Member for Osmoses, VEIR, Mantel, and Copernic. Before The Engine, Mike was the Executive Director of the MIT Roosevelt Project, an interdisciplinary study on energy transition pathways. He was the 1st employee at a clean-tech startup called Ambri, where he led business development efforts, working with customers in electric power across the United States. Mike holds a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he trained as an economist, with research focused on frictions in the commercialization of science and regulatory barriers to energy innovation and entrepreneurial strategy. Mike received an MS in Technology & Policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Williams College.

Fiona Murray

Fiona is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT School of Management and the William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship. She is the Faculty Director of MIT’s Office of Innovation and the MIT Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. Fiona is an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her BA ’89 and MA ‘90 from the University of Oxford in chemistry. She subsequently moved to the United States and earned an AM ’92 and PhD ’96 from Harvard University in applied sciences.

Fiona is Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund and has served on the British Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology. She was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) and appointed Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (DCMG) by his majesty King Charles III for her services to innovation and entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom. She is also a member of the Ministry of Defence Innovation Advisory Panel and the European Innovation Council Joint Expert Group. She also sits on several Boards including Prime Coalition and MassChallenge.

Murray is an international policy expert on the transformation of investments in science and technology into deep-tech start-up ventures that solve significant global challenges and create national advantage. Her work includes understanding new funding approaches for innovations that arise from scientific research, and educating the next generation of technical leaders to build effective ventures. She has focused on the particular issues faced by ventures who have dual-use (commercial and government) solutions and work in contexts characterized by complex global power competition. She also works with large public and private sector organizations to effectively drive their strategic goals by linking to external innovation ecosystems especially universities, start-ups, and risk capital.

Through her leadership role in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, Murray has engaged across many global regions in designing and evaluating the policies and programs that shape vibrant innovation ecosystems.

In her recent scholarship, Murray has emphasized the ways in which women and under-represented minorities are engaged in or excluded from innovation. Her research has explored the ways in which different approaches to evaluating early-stage ideas can overcome the unconscious bias that she has documented in entrepreneurial funding. Her work is widely published in Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, American Journal of Sociology, Research Policy, Organization Science, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

She teaches IDEA Week (Innovation-driven Entrepreneurial Advantage) to the MIT Executive MBAs, a series of Executive Education programs in corporate innovation, and has taught public sector executives to effectively lead innovation in their organizations. Most recently, Fiona developed a new course joint with the MIT School of Engineering to educate the next generation of scientists and engineer to become CTOs taking ideas from inception to impact.

Luis Perez-Breva

Luis is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator and the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto (The MIT Press, 2017). He is an MIT expert in technology innovation, combinatorial innovation, innovation factories, taking deep tech to impact, and applying artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems. He has enjoyed success with inventions and new companies in security, telecom, fintech, and genetics to name some. Chiefly among them is the AI-based system to locate 911 calls in case of emergency deployed worldwide. His work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC, Wharton Business Radio, Entrepreneur, Zdnet, Quartz, Epsilon Theory and several other national and international media. Currently, Luis is the Faculty Director of Innovation Teams, MIT’s flagship joint enterprise between MIT Engineering and MIT Sloan to put the Institute’s deep tech advances to work to solve real-world problems. Since 2007, through iTeams, he has helped over 200 MIT technologies find a path to impact leading to the formation of some 40 new, enduring deep tech companies across all industries from mining to telecommunications. During the covid pandemic, educational innovations pioneered from iTeams were recognized as key contributions to reinventing education. Luis has worked with venture capital and numerous corporations and adapted his work to develop innovation factories and eliminate innovation waste. Currently, Luis is developing a technology repurposing fund to rescue, recycle, and, in essence, turn around technologies analogous to how private equity seeks to turn around companies. In 2022, Luis received an Extraordinary Leaders Transforming an Industry award from Unorthodox Philanthropy to launch S1 as a new way to deploy and share the benefits from innovation. Dr. Perez-Breva holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from MIT and degrees in chemical engineering, physics, and business from leading universities in Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the United States (MIT). In 2011, the Spanish government recognized his career achievements by awarding him the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain. In 2020 Luis became an American citizen. In 2021 Luis was awarded a Rafael del Pino Foundation Chair.

Pablo Rodríguez-Fernández

Pablo works as a research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and leads the MFE Integrated Modeling group. Pablo studied Industrial Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2013), and holds a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University (2014). Despite his engineering background, Pablo focused on the study of fundamental transport phenomena with computational plasma physics for this doctoral degree, which he received in 2019 from MIT. In his work, Pablo utilizes state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to solve complex physics and engineering optimization problems, and he has been leading the efforts of predicting the performance of the SPARC tokamak, poised to be the first magnetic-confinement fusion device to study net-energy plasmas. Despite his young age, Pablo has authored over 45 peer-reviewed journal papers, a third of which as first author. He has been the recipient of important awards during his academic career, including the Manson Benedict Award and Del Favero Doctoral Thesis Prize at MIT, and was listed by Forbes magazine as part of their 30 Under 30 list in Science in 2021.