MIT Startup Exchange is convening a new installment of its quarterly Demo Day on Thursday, June 6 (12 PM – 1:15 PM ET). The event will feature several exciting industry-ready startups in brief lightning talks and Q&A. Breakout rooms will follow at the end of the event.
This event is for ILP members. You can confirm your company's ILP membership here: https://ilp.mit.edu/search/members.
Ariadna Rodenstein is a Program Manager at MIT Startup Exchange. She joined MIT Corporate Relations as an Events Leader in September 2019 and is responsible for designing and executing startup events, including content development, coaching and hosting, and logistics. Ms. Rodenstein works closely with the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in promoting collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry, as well as with other areas around the MIT innovation ecosystem and beyond.
Prior to working for MIT Corporate Relations, she worked for over a decade at Credit Suisse Group in New York and London, in a few different roles in event management and as Director of Client Strategy. Ms. Rodenstein has combined her experience in the private sector with work at non-profits as a Consultant and Development Director at New York Immigration Coalition, Immigrant Defense Project, and Americas Society/Council of the Americas. She also served as an Officer on the Board of Directors of the Riverside Clay Tennis Association in New York for several years. Additionally, she earned her B.A. in Political Science and Communications from New York University, with coursework at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico City, and her M.A. in Sociology from the City University of New York.
Paloma Gonzalez-Rojas, co-founder and CEO of Atacama, is an entrepreneur and material scientist with expertise in machine learning. She earned her Ph.D. at MIT, where she developed AI tools for materials science and engineering, driven by her passion to commercialize renewable products. Atacama, an MIT spinout, is pioneering the development of cost-effective plastic replacements using diverse, local raw materials. The company's innovative approach could significantly reduce the use of single-use packaging by lowering costs and CO2 emissions. Paloma created a machine learning model for rapid material formulation, leading to the development of Atacama's first product, WPk. Having produced full-size samples and spurred by initial customer interest, Atacama is expanding its pilot line to facilitate broader material sampling.
Mo Alkhadra is the co-founder and CEO of Lithios, a startup developing disruptive technologies and processes for advanced lithium extraction. As a chemical engineer, Alkhadra is passionate about lowering current energy needs in the mining sector and catalyzing industrial electrification and decarbonization. He is also an environment enthusiast and hopes to leverage his experience to shape the future of mineral extraction and refining. Alkhadra earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022.
Emre Gencer is the lead developer and chief architect of a novel software platform called Sustainable Energy Systems Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), which provides comprehensive cost and sustainability assessment for the converging electric power, transportation, and industrial sectors to decision-makers and technology analysts with high technological, temporal, and geospatial resolution. He was lead on the chemical storage chapter of The Future of Energy Storage report and co-lead on the thermal storage chapter.
Gençer is also a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). The central theme of his research is to identify optimal utilization of resources for the evolving energy system facing the dual challenge of increasing demand while profoundly reducing its environmental footprint. His research focuses on integration of emerging and conventional energy technologies, their policy implications, multiscale modeling, and optimization. He is the principal investigator of various ongoing projects at MIT including Understanding Carbon Mitigation Technologies, Analysis of Options towards Fully Decarbonized EU by 2050, and Exploring Power and Transport Sector Decarbonization Pathways via Direct and Indirect use of Electricity.
Gencer holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University. He received both a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering and B.Sc. in Mathematics from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.
President, CEO & Director, Bilayer Therapeutics
Thomas Collet is a serial life sciences entrepreneur with deep drug development expertise. He serves as President, CEO, and Director of Bilayer Therapeutics. Dr. Collet has founded and led several life sciences companies, including ProNAi Therapeutics(subsequently went public, now Sierra Oncology); Neural Intervention Technologies (subsequently acquired by W.L. Gore); and Rubicon Genomics (subsequently acquired by Takara Bio). He also served as Vice President of Business Development at Integrated Protein Technologies, a unit of Monsanto Company that Dr. Collet helped start. Prior to entering the start-up space, Dr. Collet served as a General Partner at Tullis-Dickerson &Company, a healthcare-focused venture fund, and as a consultant at McKinsey &Company. He earned a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed post-doctoral studies in Dr. Richard Lerner’s laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute.
Andrea is founder and CEO of MESPAC, a Politecnico di Torino’s spinoff. Andrea holds an M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and from Politecnicodi Milano. He has been a Fulbright-Finmeccanica scholar and holds an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.With multiple experience of technology transfer processes and 15 years in the offshore renewable energy industry, Andrea has led the development and licensing of an innovative marine offshore renewable energy technology to a global energy player.
Ishaan Grover is a 3rd year PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests are in Machine Learning and its applications in the field of human-agent interaction and early-literacy education. Prior to this work, he worked on algorithms to enable reinforcement learning agents to learn from human feedback. In industry, he has interned at Apple, Palantir and Microsoft where he worked on applications ranging from natural language understanding to anomaly detection.
Sami Shalabi is a technology entrepreneur and inventor. He is currently the Founder & CTO of Maven AGI, a Generative AI platform on a mission to reimagine customer experience starting with support. Prior to Maven AGI, Sami led the reinvention of Google News integrating AI and expanding its user base by over a billion users. During his tenure at Google, he co-founded Google Play Newsstand (grew it from zero to over a billion users), Google Play Magazines, Google Currents, and Google Friend Connect. In healthcare, Sami was COO at Outcomes4Me, an AI oncology patient empowerment platform leading the expansion of its footprint to over 25% of breast cancer patients in the U.S. Before joining Google, Sami co-founded several companies including Zingku, a venture-backed mobile social startup that was acquired by Google, and Istikana, the largest SVOD platform focused on Arab Indie films. Sami holds over 55 patents and was awarded the 2009 MIT Young Professional Award. He is a partner at the Mentors Fund and is an advisor and startup mentor with the US State Department, MIT, Harvard, Techstars, Endeavor, and others. Sami received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT and started his career at Lotus / IBM.
Disclaimer: MIT Startup Exchange can make introductions that ideally provide open ended discussions in order to share mutual interests and potentially create common ground that incite the parties to collaborate. MIT Startup Exchange introductions may eventually lead to mutual partnerships, but that is not in any way guaranteed by MIT, MIT Corporate Relations, MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) or MIT Startup Exchange, which takes no responsibility for these outcomes and no formal part in such discussions following our introduction. MIT Startup Exchange and its activities and events are not for purposes of soliciting investment or offering securities.