Meet The Team
Geoffrey Gill, CEO
Josh Tolkoff
Josh is Accelerator Executive at CIMIT (the Consortium for Integrating Medical with Innovation & Technology), accelerating the commercialization of research projects. Josh is former Managing Director of Ironwood Equity Fund, a later-stage venture investor. He also founded and managed Seedling Enterprises, one of the most successful medical device accelerators, and ACT Medical, a premier medical device developer and manufacturer. Josh was Head of R&D for Medi-Tech, which became Boston Scientific. He is also the Past Chair of industry trade group MassMedic, and an advisor and lecturer for the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology. He is a director of numerous for-profit companies and the founding Board Chair of Interise, a non-profit helping small urban companies grow, which is now in 75+ US cities. Josh has an AB from Harvard College and an MS from MIT.
Geoff is a serial entrepreneur who has spent the last 15 years in and around the wearables business. Prior to leading the spin-off of Verisense Health from Shimmer, he was President of Shimmer Americas, a wearables manufacturer. Geoff’s primary role at Shimmer was as a member of the global management team with particular focus on business and product strategy for the consumer neuroscience and medical markets.
Prior to Shimmer, Geoff was CFO and SVP of Operations at Innerscope Research, Inc., a leading consumer neuroscience company. Innerscope used wearable sensors to measure consumers’ emotional responses to a wide variety of stimuli in a wide range of contexts. Other experience includes VP of R&D for Bayer Diagnostics Critical Care division and Global Market Manager at Weidmann Electrical Technology. Geoff has an AB in Applied Math and Physics from Harvard University and an MS in Management of Technology from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Board of Advisors
Ron Kessler
Ronald C. Kessler, PhD, is the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of 700+ publications and has been the most widely cited psychiatry researcher in the world in each of the past 10 years. He is also recipient of the Senior Scientist and MERIT Awards from the National Institute of Mental Health. Ronald is principal investigator on the US National Comorbidity Survey, studying mental disorders in the U.S., and Co-Director of WHO’s World Mental Health Survey Initiative. He is also a principal investigator for the Army STARRS-LS program of research on risk and protective factors for suicide among Army personnel, the AURORA study of adverse neuropsychiatric reactions to traumatic life events, and the Appalachia Mind Health trial augmenting pharmacotherapy with remote cognitive behavioral therapy for major depression. Ronald received his PhD in sociology from New York University, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin, and then joined the University of Michigan as a Professor of Sociology and a Program Director at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.
Paul Hartung
Paul has a long, proven track record as a life sciences and technology executive with extensive leadership experience in financing, operations and business development in the technology and medical device industries. He has launched successful startup businesses (Cognoptix, Summit, Winphoria) and has held leadership roles in Fortune 500 organizations (GE, 3Com, Motorola). Paul serves on corporate and advisory boards of life science startups (Leuko, Clairways), and as a mentor in several programs, including MIT VMS. He graduated from MIT with an MS in Mechanical Engineering with honors and holds a number of patents and publications.
Dr. William Crown
Dr. Crown is a Distinguished Research Scientist in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He is an internationally recognized expert in real-world data analysis, focusing upon research designs and statistical methods for drawing causal inferences from transactional health care datasets such as medical claims and electronic health records. Bill began his career at the Heller School in the early 1980s focusing on the demography and health economics of aging and he taught a series of statistics courses in the Heller PhD program. He left Brandeis to lead health economics consultancies at Truven and Optum. As Chief Scientific Officer at OptumLabs, he conducted research comparing the results obtained from analyzing claims data from over 100 million covered lives with those from randomized clinical trials. He received his PhD in regional economic modelling from MIT, and an MA in Economics from Boston University.