Steering Committee

David Hsu

Richard A. Sapp Professor;
Professor of Management,
The Wharton School

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David Hsu is the Richard A. Sapp Professor and a Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Stanford University with undergraduate majors in economics and political science. After a few years working in industry, he received his master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University, followed by his Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hsu’s research interests are in entrepreneurial innovation and management. Within that domain, he has investigated topics such as intellectual property management, start-up innovation, technology commercialization strategy, and venture capital. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Journal of Finance, Management Science, RAND Journal of Economics, and Research Policy. He serves as an associate editor of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation department of Management Science. In 2008, Hsu was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Fellowship. At Wharton, he teaches two MBA electives, Entrepreneurship and Technology Strategy. At Penn, Hsu is Associate Faculty Director of the Weiss Tech House, which encourages and supports students in the creation, development, and commercialization of innovative technologies. He is a co-founder of the Y-Prize competition.

Cherie Kagan

Stephen J. Angello Professor
Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE)
Materials Science and Engineering (MSE)

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Cherie Kagan uses chemistry’s chemical flexibility to tailor the physical properties of nanostructured and organic materials and their devices. She combines spatially and temporally resolved spectroscopies and electrical techniques to characterize charge and excitonic processes and leverages these insights to guide the design and integration of nanoscale and organic devices. These devices impact low-cost and flexible macro- and nanoelectronics, solar photovoltaics, and nanophotonics.

Jax Kirtley

Assistant Professor of Management,
The Wharton School

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Jacqueline (Jax) Kirtley studies how strategy and technology evolves in early stage entrepreneurial firms developing revolutionary and disruptive technologies. Her dissertation entitled: “How Strategy Evolves in Entrepreneurial Nascent Technology Firms” is a longitudinal field study of strategy and technology product evolution at seven early stage energy and cleantech hardware firms. She is a Kauffman Dissertation Fellow and an INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition Finalist.

Jax did her doctoral studies in the Strategy & Innovation Department at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She holds a bachelor of science from MIT in Ocean Engineering with a minor in Mechanical Engineering as well as a master of science in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, also from MIT. She received an MBA with high honors from Boston University.

Prior to entering academia, Jax worked in computer modeling at the Monitor Group strategy consulting firm and information architecture and usability design for a website development firm. For more than a decade, Jax taught science and engineering through live demonstrations at the Museum of Science Boston.

Vijay Kumar

Nemirovsky Family Dean,
Penn Engineering

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Vijay Kumar holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University. His research expertise includes control systems, robotics, and mechanical systems, and he is a member of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, the Penn Genome Frontiers Institute (PGFI), and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS). He was honored as a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2005 and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2003 and was awarded the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1996 and the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He is a co-founder of the Y-Prize competition.

Vijay studies collective behaviors in biological and robotic systems. He and his group design novel architectures, create abstractions for systems of interacting individuals, and develop new algorithms for cooperating robots. The overarching themes in his research include modeling nature and developing bio-inspired architectures and algorithms, understanding group/individual dynamics, and the design and composition of controllers for robust, scaleable autonomous systems. Vijay’s key challenges include operation in unstructured, dynamic environments, integration of control, communication and perception, and scaling down to smaller sizes with limited actuation, sensing, and computational resources.

Prior to entering academia, Jax worked in computer modeling at the Monitor Group strategy consulting firm and information architecture and usability design for a website development firm. For more than a decade, Jax taught science and engineering through live demonstrations at the Museum of Science Boston.