Alicia Loffler

Associate Provost/Associate VP & Executive Director of Innovation and New Ventures Office at Northwestern University

Speaker

Alicia Löffler is Associate Provost for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the founding Executive Director of the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO), Associate Vice President for Research, and Adjunct Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. INVO was founded in 2010 to enhance the transfer of innovations to the market and nurture a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northwestern University. INVO oversees translational, transactional and commercialization activities at a number of centers and initiatives including: The Garage (University-wide incubation/collaboration space), N.XT Venture Fund, NUseeds startup fund for students, the therapeutics accelerator, NewCures, and the biomedical technologies accelerator, Lakeside Discovery.

As Executive Director of INVO, Dr. Löffler supervises the management of over 200 inventions/year, 250 active licenses, 3,880 patents, and a total of more than 70 active startups, 72% of which are in the biomedical space. Since 2010, INVO has generated approximately $1.5 Billion net income. Dr. Löffler has served as advisor on multiple for-profit and non-profit boards for biotech/medical device organizations. She also served as Board Member and Past-Chair for the Council for Biotechnology Centers (BIO). Dr. Löffler received a BS from the University of Minnesota, a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and did post-doctoral training at Caltech. She was named one of the Tech 100 stars by Crain’s Chicago Business, and received the “Women in Black” I-Street Award and the Innovator Award presented by the Chicago Chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).