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Keynote Speaker:

Sally Hatcher | J.D.

Venture Capital Investor | Board Member | Serial Entrepreneur | Startup Accelerator Faculty Member

Sally's current work as Managing Partner of Buff Gold Ventures stems from extensive experience founding and managing her own startups, then training deep tech founders to become the next generation of innovators solving critical problems including climate change, quantum technologies, and drug discovery. Sally co-founded and was President of two companies, including Precision Photonics, a  laser & opto-electronics design and manufacturing company.  Starting in the garage, the company shipped high-volume products to China, and grew to a 50+ person, highly profitable venture before a successful acquisition.  Her second company, MBio Diagnostics, focused on point-of-care medical and animal diagnostics, using laser-based waveguide systems to detect up to 80 biomarkers at once.  Sally’s worked with several digital women’s health companies, and spent a year as President/COO of a Kindara, where she shipped the first hardware product (a connected device (IoT) to generate revenue off a free app) and gained ISO 13485, CE mark, FDA Class II, FCC and HC/ICC marks.  Sally regularly consults with diverse teams of innovators who want to spinout or start up a company.  Her business and law background comes from her time as a consultant with McKinsey & Co. and an Assistant Attorney General for Colorado. She sits on several boards and is active in environmental and women’s issues.

Scott R. Davis | Ph. D. 

CEO and co-founder Vescent

Dr. Davis is a physicist entrepreneur with an emphasis on new technology transition from the laboratory to manufacturing.  He has spent his career inventing, developing, and commercializing a wide variety of technologies.  As a VP of technology at Vescent he led the development of non-mechanical beamsteerers and oversaw the asset sale of that technology to Analog Devices for the autonomous vehicles market.  He came back to Vescent as CEO in 2020. Since then, he has been leading the development of technologies and products, such as compact laser systems for trapping and cooling atoms, compact and deployable frequency combs, miniature spectroscopic standards, and other tools aimed at furthering the development and deployment of quantum systems.  He has over 30 papers published, has co-authored two book chapters, and has twenty-seven patents pending and/or issued. 

Panelists

Lora Nugent | Ph. D.

Sr. R&D Manager – Lasers, Optics and Photonics, Quantinuum

Lora currently leads a group of scientists and engineers who design and build optical systems for Quantinuum’s trapped ion quantum computers, based at the Broomfield, CO site. Before joining QTM in 2017, Lora worked in academic and government labs building laser and optical systems for a range of research projects, including biophysics (optical tweezers – NRC postdoc at CU Â鶹ӰԺ with T. Perkins), atmospheric (spectroscopy with frequency combs – NIST Â鶹ӰԺ with S. Diddams), and metrology (NIST Â鶹ӰԺ with D. Howe) applications. Lora has a PhD from the University of Colorado in physical chemistry. 

Stacy Capehart | Ph.D.

Director Protein Sciences, Mosaic Biosciences

Stacy is a scientist with a background in chemical biology. Stacy has held roles of increasing responsibility since joining Mosaic Biosciences in 2019. As a Director at Mosaic Biosciences, Stacy has led several teams for projects involving protein engineering, expression, chemical modification, and characterization as well as bioassay development and external PK/PD studies. Prior to joining Mosaic, Stacy worked as a Scientist II at Editas Medicine and a Scientist I at Velocity Sciences. Stacy received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

Daniel Hickstein | Ph.D.

Principle Scientist, Octave Photonics

Dan Hickstein is currently the Principal Scientist at Octave Photonics, a four-person company in Louisville, Colorado. Octave Photonics makes nanophotonic chips (like computer chips, but for light) and packages them into easy-to-use devices. Previously, he worked at Â鶹ӰԺ-based laser company KMLabs, where he developed high-harmonic-generation-based products to produce extreme-ultraviolet light. He completed a postdoc at NIST working with Scott Papp and Scott Diddams on nanophotonic light sources and frequency combs. He completed his PhD at the University of Colorado working with Henry Kapteyn and Margaret Murnane on using femtosecond lasers to study atoms, molecules, and nanoparticles.