E102: Entrepreneurial Development

Guest Bios

Fred Farina, Director of Technology Transfer at Caltech
Guest Lecturer

Fred's responsibilities include evaluating inventions at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, making patent filing decisions, supervising patent prosecution, managing the patent portfolio, negotiating licensing deals and assisting inventors with the creation of startup companies. Prior to joining the office, Fred worked for eight year as a Research Engineer in the GPS field. He subsequently joined a law firm where he prosecuted patent applications on various electrical technologies before the US and European Patent Offices. Fred holds a "Diplôme d'Ingénieur" in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Applied Sciences, Lyon, France, and is a graduate of Caltech from which he received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Chris Halliwell, Marketing Consultant

Chris Halliwell is an independent consultant providing business-to-business
strategic marketing services to technology-based companies. She has worked with a number of high tech companies including Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, ElectroScientific Industries, IBM, Intuitive Surgical, Johnson
Electric, Northrop Grumman, Philips, Siemens, St. Jude Medical, and Veeco
Instruments. She has mentored several new technology companies in areas such as image sensors, mobile communication services, and digital power.

Ms. Halliwell has been a guest lecturer in marketing and entrepreneurship at
Caltech, the University of California, Berkeley, and Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo. She is the director of the strategic technology marketing community, www.technologymarketingcenter.com . Ms. Halliwell teaches the Strategic Marketing of Technology Products, Creating the Market-Driven Organization course at Caltech Industrial Relations Center.

Her degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, include a
master's in information services, and a master's of business administration
in marketing from The Anderson School.

Al Schneider, Pasadena Angels and Tech Coast Angels
Mentor

Al Schneider is an active angel investor, start-up board member and mentor to early stage companies. He is a co-founder and Vice Chairman of Pasadena Angels, Vice President of Tech Coast Angels-Los Angeles, and Chairman of Entretech, a non-profit focused on empowering entrepreneurs to build their businesses through capital, education, people and strategic partners.

During the past two years, Al has served on the boards of Pictage, a complete digital proofing, marketing and production solution for professional photographers; H2Scan, a leader in hydrogen sensing products for area monitoring and process control; and Unified Dispatch, a software company serving the ground transportation industry.

Most of Mr. Schneider's career was spent in the real estate and healthcare property investment, finance and development industries. He was Vice President of the B.F. Saul Company, a diversified real estate organization which then advised the public REIT now known as Saul Centers (NYSE-BFS). Later, he was the COO of The Canterbury Group, a private real estate company which developed rental apartments, condominiums, and other residential and healthcare properties. His earliest private equity investments outside the real estate field, in the mid 1990's, included Clifton Mining (NASDAQ-CFTN). Al has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harvard.

Richard Morganstern, Tech Coast Angels

Mr. Morganstern has over thirty-five years of legal, business and finance experience. He was the former Managing Partner of a Beverly Hills based intellectual property and business litigation and counseling law firm. He was the former Chairman of a NASD licensed investment banking firm which focused on arranging funding, principally from foreign sources, for domestic early stage technology companies. He was the co-founder of Language Weaver, Inc. the worlds leading supplier of statistically based natural language translation systems. Mr. Morganstern currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Tech Coast Angels and as the President of the Tech Coast Angels (LA Network), whose members are the leading source of angel funding and guidance for early stage, high growth companies in Southern California. He serves as a member of the Advisory Board of USC’s Center for Technology Commercialization, a guest lecturer for the California Institute of Technology Entrepreneurial Fellowship Program and a Distinguished Speaker at USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.  Mr. Morganstern received a BSEE degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a JD degree from Cornell University. He is a member of the Bars of California, New York, United States Patent Office, U.S. Supreme Court and various federal Circuit Courts of Appeals.

Elizabeth Tito, Tech Coast Angels

Elizabeth Pavlova Tito is a private investor. She is an active member
of Tech Coast Angels (TCA), the largest network of angel investors in
Southern California, and serves on the Executive Committee of TCA's
Los Angeles Network. Since joining TCA in 2005, she has invested in a
number of early stage companies and mentored several start-ups. As an
independent consultant, Ms. Tito provides business and corporate
development advisory services to technology start-ups.

Born in Russia, Ms. Tito moved to the United States to pursue her
graduate studies. Her diverse professional experience ranges from
business consulting, to financial and litigation consulting with CRA
International where she specialized in valuation of public and private
companies, to academic research in planetary physics, as well as
economics and finance. Ms. Tito holds graduate degrees in physics and
economics, from Moscow State University, UCLA and Stanford, and has
published a number of academic articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Calum Chisholm, Superprotonics

Dr. Calum Chisholm is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Superprotonic, Inc., an energy technology company established to develop and commercialize a new, revolutionary type of fuel cell called a solid acid fuel cell (SAFC). In 2003 Dr. Chisholm and his research partner Dr. Dane Boysen founded Superprotonic with the goal of developing their patented SAFC technology into a commercially viable product for portable, auxiliary, and commercial/industrial power applications. Superprotonic raised start-up seed money in 2004 from its founders’ friends and family. Since then, the Pasadena-based company has secured two rounds of venture capital financing and grown to fifteen employees. Dr. Chisholm received a B.S. in Physics from Yale University (Pierson,’95) and a M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. (2003) in Materials Science from Caltech. As a graduate student and then post-doctoral scholar in Materials Science at Caltech, Dr. Chisholm investigated the fundamental properties of a class of materials known as superprotonic solid acids, named suchfor their capacity to conduct protons at a rapid rate under specific temperature conditions.