Investment is critical for advancing promising biomedical research out of the lab and into the hospital. Dr. Tom Skalak has worked widely on innovation ecosystems with the White House, U.S. Congress, and Fortune 500 CEOs and C-suites seeking cultures to advance creative ideation and implementation of innovations. He urges VCs to invest locally with research universities and shares his perspective of some of the most exciting, emerging fields of research.

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Tom Skalak joined the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation in 2018 as Senior Advisor to Clara Wu Tsai and was previously the founding Executive Director of The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group in Seattle, and Vice President for Research Emeritus at the University of Virginia. In these roles, Tom led creative synthesis of research and innovation programs spanning biosciences, environmental sustainability, physical sciences, engineering and technology, arts, design, entrepreneurship, and humanities. In this episode of Biomedical Frontiers, we dive into how small start-ups can grow and thrive in the competitive biomedical technology industry, innovative research in the discipline of protein design and the future applications, and the challenges in studying the emerging fields, human cognition and performance.

As Professor and Chair of Biomedical Engineering at UVAs, Tom’s original research included:

cardiovascular biomechanics, computational modeling, wound repair, and regenerative medicine, conducted with continuous NIH funding over 28 years. He is a past president of both the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). He was the founder of the UVA-Coulter Foundation Translational Research Partnership and early-stage investment funds with corporate partners such as Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.

Follow Dr. Tom Skalak on Social Media

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-skalak-81000611b/

Learn more about the Human Performance Alliance: https://humanperformancealliance.org/

Faculty profile: https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/thomas-c-skalak

The Wu Tsai Institute at Yale: https://wti.yale.edu/

Director & Host: Dasha Tyshlek, StratCraft, Inc. www.strat-craft.com

Executive Producer: David Chen, Managing Director & Instructor of Engineering Design, UVA

Senior Producer: Hannah Moore, Associate Director, UVA Coulter

Design Director: Carolyn Wagner, Inc. & Link: carolynwagnerinc.com

Produced on behalf of Wallace H. Coulter Center for Translational Research at University of Virginia https://engineering.virginia.edu/centers-institutes/coulter-center-translational-research