Board of Advisors

Kerrie L. Brady, B.Pharm, MBA, MS, is Founder and CEO, Traxion Therapeutics Inc., and Chief Operating, Officer Arcion Therapeutics Inc. Ms. Brady is an experienced international business development executive with a successful 25 year track record in working with both entrepreneurial ventures and established companies. Drawing on her functional expertise in business development, marketing, operations and regulatory affairs she has forged strategic alliances to bring new products to market. Prior to joining Arcion, Ms. Brady founded Traxion Therapeutics Inc., a newly established biotech company focused on the development of new drugs to treat intractable pain. Before Traxion, she was Vice President of Business Development at KMG Japan Inc were she established partnerships between Japanese and Western companies. Her representative recent client base included; Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Discovery Labs, Guilford, BIO, Arriva, Bentley, Angionics, ActivBioticis, Combinatorx, Daiichi and Mitsubishi Pharma. Ms. Brady has held senior business development positions with the US biopharmaceutical companies EntreMed and Intracell. Prior to moving to the US, Ms. Brady spent 15 years in the Asia-Pacific region working with pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and research organizations in the commercial development and marketing of new and emerging technologies. Ms. Brady began her career in the healthcare industry with regulatory and marketing positions at Rhone Poulenc. Ms. Brady is a Board Member of the Technology Council of Maryland, member of the Licensing Executives Society of USA & Canada, Women In Bio, and the American Pain Society. She has a Bachelor of Pharmacy from the Victorian College of Pharmacy, an MBA (Award of Distinction) from the University of Melbourne and a Masters in Science (Biopharmaceuticals) from the University of New South Wales.

Kathleen Clarence-Smith, MD, PhD,  is an internationally-recognized neurologist who has dedicated her career to discovering and developing new pharmaceuticals and shepherding them from early stages onto the market. She has worked in senior positions in large pharmaceutical companies (Sanofi, Roche, Otsuka) and more recently, she has founded, raised money for, and headed start-up pharmaceuticals companies. She was most recently the CEO of a development-stage, privately owned, start-up pharmaceutical company that was acquired by a publicly traded company. Dr. Clarence-Smith has more than 15 years of experience in senior positions within the pharmaceutical industry. For example, at Otsuka, she was in charge of the Neuropsychiatry Division and initiated the development of Abilify, a currently marketed drug for schizophrenia. At Hoffmann-la Roche, she was in charge of worldwide development of neurological drugs. She successfully launched two development programs in Parkinson's disease, one in Alzheimer's disease, and one in epilepsy. During this period, Hoffmann-la Roche obtained registration for an antidepressant in Europe and for an anesthesia drug in the U.S. At Sanofi, as head of the CNS group (worldwide pre-clinical discovery, clinical development, medical marketing), she developed programs in depression and Alzheimer's disease and launched new programs in anxiety, epilepsy, muscle relaxation, and pain. She was involved in worldwide Phase IV programs with an antiepileptic drug, and obtained registration for a new antidepressant in several EU countries. Dr. Clarence-Smith received her MD and PhD in Neurosciences at the University of Tours (France) and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, headed by Solomon Snyder, MD. Dr. Clarence-Smith isa board certified neurologist (Salpetriere). She is the Founder and immediate past president of the American Society of Experimental NeuroTherapeutics (ASENT) and is the member of several scientific societies. She is the author of over 40 patents and more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Christine Copple, Ph.D., is President and CEO of Starise Ventures, Inc.  Starise provides team-based services to entrepreneurs and investors designed to mitigate the intrinsic risks of translating biomedical discoveries from bench to bedside.  Previously she was President and CEO of  ASM Resources, Inc. the venture arm of the American Society for Microbiology.  With over twenty years as a senior executive in biotechnology growth companies Dr. Copple has experience in early-stage investing, public offerings, private/venture investments, joint ventures, licensing and partnering, public corporate reporting, public relations, investor relations, international marketing, product development, regulatory affairs, legislative affairs, facilities design/build-out and training entrepreneurs. Dr. Copple was the Chief Operating Officer at Neuralstem, Inc., an emerging company commercializing a CNS stem cell technology platform. Before joining Neuralstem she ran the Office of Industry Liaison for the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute where she provided entrepreneurial guidance and services for faculty and start-up companies. For the ten years prior to relocating to Maryland, Dr. Copple was V.P. of Marketing & Investor relations for the Boston public company Microfluidics International. Dr. Copple received her B.S. degree from the University of East Anglia and her doctorate from the University of Birmingham Medical School in the United Kingdom. She came to the U.S. to join the Cell Biology Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Roxanne Duan, Ph.D., is the founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc. formed to discover medicine for cancer using proteomics and RNA silencing technology. Dr. Duan uses her experiences from the National Cancer Institute and Human Genome Sciences to develop faster, cheaper and better drug discovery processes. Infinity utilizes a discovery engine that consists of three technologies, Expressionless™, TargetPro™, and DiseaseAssay™, to narrow down these data into a short list of candidates for making drugs. Dr. Duan obtained her Ph.D. degree from the University of California at San Francisco. She has worked at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Cancer Institute and Human Genome Sciences, Inc.

Sharon Mates, Ph.D. is a co-founder and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Functional Genetics, Inc. (FGI) and Intra-Cellular Therapies, Inc. (ITI). From 1989 to 1998, Dr. Mates was the President of North American Vaccine and its predecessor companies. Since 1998, Dr. Mates has been involved in the formation of several biotech and healthcare companies, including FGI and ITI. Dr. Mates is a member of the Board of Visitors of the Biotechnology Institute of the University of Maryland, and a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for Society and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Mates received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Amy Millman has established a successful 25-year career working for and with business and government officials. As one of the founders and current president of Springboard Enterprises, she has built an organization which has assisted hundreds of women-led high-growth enterprises raise $3 billion in investment capital in less than three years. Prior to Springboard, she served as Executive Director of the National Women's Business Council, a federal statutory commission providing advice and counsel to the President and Congress on issues of importance to women business owners. During her tenure, she launched several public and private sector initiatives which increased access to capital and market opportunities for women. Ms. Millman is a career advocate who has represented the interests of various corporate and industry groups. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and received a Masters degree from The George Washington University where she is currently an adjunct professor. She and her family reside in the Washington, D.C. area.

Julia A. Spicer  is Executive Director for the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association (MAVA), where she represents the collective interests of more than 500 venture capital professionals from 100 venture and private equity funds, with cumulatively more than $100 billion in capital under management. Ms. Spicer's background provides a combination of serial entrepreneurship, venture fund expertise, and more than a dozen years of corporate and technology experience. Ms. Spicer joined MAVA after serving as vice president with Columbia Capital, a specialty communications and technology mega fund, where she helped build their investor relations program, directed strategic planning for the market launch and growth of the fund's early and expansion-staged investments, and provided strategic marketing expertise to its portfolio companies and their product offerings. Previously, for nearly a decade, Ms. Spicer was with GTE Corporation where she served as corporate vice president of strategic planning and communications directing investor relations and marketing for the corporation's wireless and emerging technology businesses including air-to-ground, government systems, PCS and wireless companies, representing more than $4B of company operations. In addition, she directed federal telecom public policy communications for the corporation and had oversight for the GTE Corporate Foundation, one of the top 20 in the country. Her first entrepreneurial enterprise was a media production company she founded in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina where her clients included Burroughs Welcome, SAS Institute and Glaxo Pharmaceuticals. In addition, she launched for GTE the first of its kind videoconferencing network company. Later in her career, Ms. Spicer was President and co-founder at IntellEvents, a strategic market-positioning firm focused on improving access to capital and business services for growth-oriented entrepreneurial companies. Strategic partners included AT&T, First Union, Office Depot, Bank Boston and Women Incorporated. Ms. Spicer received her B.A. in Communications from the University of North Carolina where she was a John Motley Morehead Scholar. Also, she has been an active participant of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) where she has served as a Member of the Washington DC Board of Advisors since 2006 and recently joined the Board of Advisors of Women In Bio in 2007. She is also an Advisory Member of Able Flight, a nonprofit organization offering people with disabilities a unique way to excel through flight-training.