September 23, 2024
Rob Cohen, a seasoned professional in innovation, intrapreneurship, and entrepreneurship with more than 30 years of experience developing products, services, and solutions in the health, healthcare, and life sciences sectors, has joined the University of Maryland as the new program manager for Mtech Ventures.
Mtech Ventures is a UMD incubator for technology-based innovations commercialized at the university. The incubator helps early-stage startups survive the critical period in their development between conducting customer discovery and raising their first round of venture capital.
Throughout his career working with startups, successful technology companies, and the National Institutes of Health, Cohen has remained at the forefront of innovation. He is an inventor on over 30 patents that have been issued or are pending.
“It’s important to me to be a part of something where what you do matters,” said Cohen. “At Mtech Ventures, we help young companies working hard to make a difference. Starting a company is hard and full of risk. The opportunity here to work with these companies and the greater innovation ecosystem to increase their chances of success is really exciting.”
Cohen has a co-appointment with UM Ventures and will support its activities. He will also serve as both a regional instructor and mentor for the NSF I-Corps Mid-Atlantic Hub.
A three-degree UMD alumnus, Cohen earned his B.S. in aerospace engineering in 1991, his M.S. in aerospace engineering in 1999, and his MBA in 2006. He also worked as the Space Systems Laboratory's lead engineering/project manager from 1992-1998.
Cohen’s first foray into innovation was developing the world’s first commercial virtual reality surgical training simulators at Immersion Medical. These systems were used to train medical students and physicians on procedures, tools and techniques that could be difficult or risky in the real world. While at Immersion Medical, Cohen’s role transitioned to focus on innovation and business development. In this role, he actively studied the commercial landscape of unmet needs and matched that with the company’s technology portfolio to develop new product concepts.
In 2009, Cohen joined the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health as a product development manager. He has contributed to many products, including the genome assembly and annotation pipelines producing data used by researchers worldwide.
In 2019, Cohen joined Adaptive Phage Therapeutics (APT) as Director of Product Development. APT focused on using bacteriophages to combat recalcitrant bacterial infections. While there, he led the development and deployment of the APT PhageBank, a collection of phages produced under Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for clinical trials.
Cohen also served as CTO and lead engineer for a startup developing sensors attached to helmets for young athletes. These sensors detected head impacts that could lead to concussions and/or repetitive brain injury.
This combined experience led him to UMD.
“When someone asks ‘Which are the best universities for starting companies with support for innovation and entrepreneurship?’ I want the University of Maryland to be at the top of that conversation,” he explained.
Mtech Ventures is a program of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech), an initiative of the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland.
