Desiree Dudley

Desiree cultivates breakthrough startups and non-profit initiatives primarily in Cambridge-Boston and Silicon Valley. Organizations she's worked with in various roles – from pipette monkey and phone-answerer to ops hustler, grant writer, connection-builder, and program director – include MIT, Emerald Therapeutics, SkyPhrase, ONE-Nano, InvivoKines, Foresight Nanotech Institute, SENS Research Foundation, Stanford University, Innovations Academy, and A-Life Medical. As MIT's Director of Neurotechnology Partnerships, Desiree focused on crafting new strategies and alliances to catalyze the ground-truthing of biology, medicine, and brain technologies with Ed Boyden's Synthetic Neurobiology group. Desiree gets professional inspiration from developing, debugging, and precisely leveraging true-value integrations with teams of world-class scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, financiers, and promising young students to actualize the full potential in emerging technologies – and learning as much as she can along the way. At NewSpace, NASA-Ames, CNBC, AP Wire, TEDx, BIL, and MIT's Communicating Science forums, Desiree has occasionally expounded on what it takes to successfully identify, communicate, and ultimately turn obstacles into milestones for even the most complex and ambitious of technical aspirations; at MIT, she's been a co-instructor for the Center for Neurobiological Engineering's Neurotechnology In Action course, as well as the Media Lab's Revolutionary Ventures: How To Invent and Deploy Transformative Technologies. In her spare time, she's written a crazy-short foreword to Nanotech For Dummies, served as a mentor for The Thiel Foundation, won a San Diego Mensa No Limit Hold 'Em Poker tourney, and survived five Tough Mudders. After completing her tour of duty as Director of Neurotechnology Partnerships, she moved on to become program director for special projects for the Probabilistic Computing Project at MIT.