Dr. Sharkawy is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Material Impact, a unique venture fund that focuses on investing in and building companies with material-based technology innovations making a large impact. He serves as member of the Board of Directors for many companies including Soft Robotics, Fusion Coolant Technologies, NextGen Jane, Orbion Space Technologies, Folio Photonics, Actnano, and Lynq and as Chair of Nohbo, and BloomerTech. He also serves on the Graduate School Board at Duke University and as a Chief Mentor for NYU Stern Endless Frontiers.
Previously, Adam held a series of operating roles on the executive leadership team of publicly traded healthcare companies such as the Medicines Company where he led a number of acquisitions and ran the Surgical Care division, Smith & Nephew’s Emerging Market division, Abbott’s Medical Device division, and Guidant’s Vascular Intervention division. Prior to large corporate roles, Adam was an entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley where he helped start Ventrica (technology acquired by Medtronic), and served varying roles at Heartport (acquired by Johnson and Johnson) and Advanced Cardiovascular Systems (acquired by Eli Lilly). Dr. Sharkawy received his Ph.D. from Duke University in Biomedical Engineering, an MSME in Chaos Theory from Texas A&M and a BSME from the American University, Cairo. He is a scientific inventor and holds 23 issued U.S. patents and numerous international patents.
Kris Vulgan is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ferocity Capital. Ferocity's cross border fund's focus is on pre-seed, deep tech research spin outs. She is an experienced investor, executive, and entrepreneur. Previously, she co-founded a successful political party in Slovakia (8% parliamentary seats in 18 months since inception); co-founded a new global department at Cisco during 2008 recession that grew from 5 to 300 employees in just 2 years and is a co-founder of four deep tech spin outs. Kris is an advisor at UC Berkeley SkyDeck, CalTech Technology Transfer, Helmholtz Association (Germany) and a few Fortune 100 CVCs. She studied Roman Law and Psychology.
