Linda van de Burgwal is 50% academic and 50% entrepreneur. She is co-founder of several successful Life Sciences companies (incl. consultancy companies) and Director of the Demonstrator Lab at the VU, a pre-incubation facility for entrepreneurial staff and students. As an academic she holds a cum laude PhD and is recipient of a VENI grant on societal impact of infectious disease preparedness. She teaches, among others, Societal Entrepreneurship and Finance for Growth at Master level at the VU. Her research focuses on accelerating societal entrepreneurship and innovation in health and life sciences. 

During her work in microbial strain engineering at Perfect Day and Zymergen in California, Elise was inspired by the huge potential of industrial biotechnology to produce everyday products like dairy protein in a more sustainable way. Despite many technological advances, it is still risky and expensive to bring a new bioprocess to the market. This motivated Elise to co-found Cradle in 2021. Cradle aims to empower scientists with advanced Machine Learning models for designing improved proteins and enzymes with fewer experiments. Accelerating the contribution of biotechnology to a sustainable future is a goal that unites people from different backgrounds and disciplines, and this is where networks like TOPX can play a part!

Katty Hsu is a Senior Researcher and Startup Facilitator at Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship. As a researcher, Katty investigates innovative startups and high-growth firms (scaleups) and the innovation ecosystems surrounding them. As a startup facilitator, Katty trains and supports student and international entrepreneurs to grow their startups in the Dutch ecosystem. Katty is also the Research Lead and Initiator of SHE LEADS - an initiative that encourages female entrepreneurship and leadership by uncovering the latest research insights around the topic, and a platform that promotes female representation in entrepreneurship education at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Maarten Rotman is neuroscientist with an entrepreneurial mindset, with a PhD in Alzheimer's disease and post-doctoral training in the brain cancer glioblastoma and now teaching the lean startup methodology for life sciences at the Mayo Clinic Office of Entrepreneurship. In 2022 he and collaborators from the all-women college St Catherine University in Minnesota received funding from the National Science Foundation to establish a community of practice that invites entrepreneurs, scientists, educators, and students to share expectations, experiences and best practices in the field of biosciences entrepreneurship, with a focus women bioscience entrepreneurs.

Mayo Clinic is a non-profit healthcare institution, ranked as the Top US hospital for 7 straight years, committed to clinical practice, education and research, providing expert, whole-person care to everyone who needs healing. The Mayo Clinic Office of Entrepreneurship provides entrepreneurial educational to Mayo Clinic students and staff, increasing the rate of translation of medical discoveries to patient care at scale and promoting a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the institution.