Professional training course for
researchers

John Whelan, Ph.D.

Commercialization Manager

Trinity College Dublin

Currently ICT Commercialisation Manager at Trinity College, University of Dublin. Founder of a three tech start ups two of which raised 7 figure venture capital rounds. One of these stratups, Alatto traded for 9 years with sales averaging over €1m per year.

More recently consultant to Vodafone Ireland and then in 2008 became Technology Transfer Case Manager at Trinity College, Dublin responsible for commercialisation of ICT research. While In Trinity I set up and ran Trinity College's start-up accelerator LaunchBox.

While Executive Director of Blackstone LaunchPad at Trinity College, Dublin designed and secured European funding to implement Trinity’s Connected Health accelerator “Validator”. BSc in Applied Physics and Electronics, and PhD in Geophysics.

Niklas Gronberg

LTU Business

Niklas Grönberg is responsible for development of methodologies at LTU Business, and is the product owner of our core method ‘Innovation Due Diligence’, the core process used to manage the idea flow. Prior to joining LTU Business. Niklas was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, focusing on Industrial applications.

LTU Business AB is the largest innovation management company in northern Scandinavia, currently with 35 consultants. In addition to being the official Technology Transfer Office and Industry Liaison Office for Luleå University of Technology, we serve clients from both private and public sector. Each year LTU Business performs analyzes of over 200 ideas sprung from the academy, and additionally 50-100 from external companies and organizations.

Unai Calvar Aranburu

Tecnalia Ventures

Unai Calvar Aranburu has worked at Tecnalia since 2007 in different positions: as researcher in the field of Innovation Policies, where he provided strategic advice to public institutions on the definition, implementation and assessment of innovation policies, strategies and programmes that promote technology-based competitiveness and generate optimal environments for economic and social development; as visiting researcher at the Joint Institute for Innovation Policies; prior to this he worked closely with the Basque Government in different projects related to the development of the Information Society in the period 2007-2013.

He is experienced in the design, development and management of workshops related to transferring knowledge, especially within the ICT sector. He has participated in the design of the Basque Government’s strategic plan for the Information Society, defining programmes and initiatives which aim at bridging the digital gap in society and SMEs.

Burcin Temel McKenna

R&D Director

FLSmidth

Burcin Temel McKenna is currently an R&D Mining Director at FLSmidth in Copenhagen, Denmark where she has worked since 2017. She is leading the Research & Partnerships department. Burcin previously worked as a Project Manager and Research Scientist at Haldor Topsoe from 2008 till 2017. In this role, she was responsible for catalyst and process developments for new explorations in chemicals. Prior to working for Haldor Topsoe, Burcin worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley and previously received her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006 and a B.S. in Chemistry from Bilkent University in 2001.

She is an expert in chemistry and modelling of solid surfaces with an h-index of 14. She has guided a number of graduates/young professionals at the beginning of their professional careers and mentored not only on industrial R&D but also on project and innovation management and IPR.