Joe Tanous, Chairman, CEO of Adherial, Inc.  Mr. Tanous has been a venture capital investor and entrepreneur for over 30 years. He has executive management experience at several startups including AutoDesk, Mentor Graphics, OrCAD. Most recently, he served with Oregon State University’s Technology Commercialization which spun out 30 companies during his 6 year tenure. In the case of Adherial, Mr. Tanous spun it out and joined it in a full time capacity.

Bill Kelly, COO of Adherial, Inc..  Former co-founder and CEO of Learning.com, a web-enhanced learning objects repository and content management system for K-12 schools.  Prior to Learning.com he was the co-founder and Executive Vice President of Sapient Health Network, an online provider of personalized health information and community support that merged with WebMD in 1999.  Mr. Kelly has worked in a variety of publishing related companies since 1986.  He holds a BA from BYU and an MBA from Harvard Business School.  He lives in Portland, OR with his wife and four children and serves on a variety of industry and community boards.

Jack Brittain, Ph.D., Vice President, Technology Venture Development University of Utah. Professor Brittain transformed the University of Utah’s technology commercialization efforts in 6 years into one of the world’s premier commercialization organizations.  A frequent speaker at national and international conferences on commercialization organization and reorganization, Professor Brittain is an international thought leader on this topic and the role of commercialization in the modern university.

Rex Smith, Former Cisco VP, Microsoft VP and HotMail Chairman and COO.  Most recently, Mr. Smith served as MSN’s Vice President of Operations, having operational responsibility for all MSN web services (including Hotmail) and corporate IT.  Prior to Hotmail he was the Vice President of Software and Hardware Engineering at FutureTel, where he led the development of MPEG hardware and software.  Mr. Smith has also held engineering and operations leadership positions at Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard.  In 2006, he received acceptance into Oregon State University’s Engineering Hall of Fame.

Debi Coleman, Managing Partner of SmartForest Ventures and the Founder & General Partner of Rainy Day Productions in Portland, Oregon. Previously, Ms. Coleman was Chairman and CEO of Merix (1994 – 2001) and VP of Materials/Operations at Tektronix. From 1981 to 1992, she held the positions of VP Operations, CFO, and VP Information Systems & Technology at Apple Computer. Ms. Coleman holds a BA from Brown University, an MBA from Stanford, and was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute in 1997