Brian Ellerman
With 30 years in health and technology, Brian has founded or helped launch numerous companies. His experience includes 15 years at French pharma giant Sanofi, leading global tech scouting and digital strategy. As the founder of FORGE at the University of Arizona, Brian has invested in over 150 startups and advises companies on strategy and innovation. Brian is the Executive Director of XLR8 PBC.

Noreen Scheu, MBA
Noreen Scheu is a strategic business executive with 25+ years of experience in corporate strategy, market analysis, and commercialization across pharma, biotech, and combination product sectors. She has led strategic planning, asset prioritization, and market opportunity assessments for clinical and preclinical-stage companies, influencing C-suite and Board decisions. Noreen brings a unique ability to bridge early R&D with commercial strategy, support fundraising with robust modeling, and drive cross-functional alignment. Her leadership has shaped pivotal initiatives across emerging, venture-backed and scaling organizations, consistently delivering insight and clarity in complex, high-stakes environments.

Noreen holds an MBA and a bachelor’s in chemistry. In her spare time, she volunteers with Venture Café Phoenix by leading their Ambassador program, serves as Committee member for the Southwest Veterans Chamber of Commerce Annual Patriots Ball and co-chairs the Flinn Foundation’s Entrepreneurship Committee.

Tracey Dodenhoff
A proven entrepreneurial leader and venture builder with a track record of launching, scaling, and commercializing high-impact innovations. Her venture expertise and investment areas spans industries, including medtech, software, robotics, AI augmented tech platforms and material science. She has also served as an Embedded Entrepreneur for MIT Lincoln Labs, where she continues to advise on strategies to translate innovations to sponsor solutions.

Kirk Barnes
Focused on commercialization, capital access, and enterprise deal-making, Kirk has over 20 years of experience across the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical technology, and digital health sectors. He has coached B2B sales teams for GSK, UCB, and Takeda, co-chaired TogetherHealth—the largest U.S. digital health consortium—and advised startups through MATTER, MassChallenge, ATDC, and Tulsa Innovation Labs. His work has helped companies secure millions in funding, forge partnerships with pharma, and expand into the U.S. and LATAM markets.

Specializing in market analysis, product-market fit, and healthcare innovation, John has nearly 20 years of experience with industry leaders like UnitedHealth Group, Dignity Health, and Accenture. Holding a Master’s in Healthcare Innovation from ASU, he has advised health tech startups on regulatory compliance and go-to-market strategies.

Irina Kukuyeva
Dr. Irina Kukuyeva is a business operations-focused technology leader who helps companies understand and unlock customer behavior and feedback loops to build scalable, profitable companies with market fit, generating 25M+. In the process, she’s invented and implemented ML algorithms on a global scale, led global data and AI teams, and taught graduate students best practices for developing real-time AI algorithms. She mentors over 100 startups annually, guiding them on their pitches, growth strategies, and how to avoid common mistakes.

Andrew Steele
As both an operating executive and 3-time co-founder & CEO, Andrew has led start-ups from concept through scale-up, contributed to exits that generated over $500M in returns, and created category leadership in the MedTech, Healthcare IT, and B2B SaaS sectors.  He currently leads Growthplane Advisors, a firm he established to bring that experience to the benefit of growth-stage companies in Arizona, and is also an active coach and mentor for the venture development programs at the Arizona Commerce Authority.