John Hartnett is President and Founder of ITLG and Technology Investor. Based in Silicon Valley, he has over 20 years of senior management experience leading global sales, marketing, and operations. His career in high tech boasts some of the industry’s leading companies such as Palm, Handspring, Metacreations, Claris/Apple, AT&T, Digital Equipment, and Wang.

Mr. Hartnett was Chief Executive Officer at G24 Innovations, a leading thin film solar company, and previously was Senior Vice President of Global Markets at Palm, Inc., where he was responsible for worldwide sales, service and support. Previously, Mr. Hartnett was executive vice president of worldwide operations, service, support and eCommerce at Handspring, Inc. and was an integral member of the executive leadership team that led the 2003 merger of Handspring and palmOne to form what is known today as Palm, Inc.

Since 2004, Mr. Hartnett has been annually honored as one of the top 100 Irish American business executives in the U.S. by Irish America Magazine. He is a member of the Wireless Advisory Board in the U.S. for Enterprise Ireland and currently serves on Secretary of State Clinton’s Northern Ireland Working Committee.

Mr. Hartnett earned a marketing degree through the Marketing Institute of Ireland, a post-graduate diploma in finance through the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and completed the executive management program at Stanford University. He is a native of Limerick, and on the board of the University of Limerick Foundation. John is a member of The American Ireland Fund and the US-Ireland Alliance.
 

Dr Saffie-Siebert is the inventor of SiSafe^® and has over 20 years experience in the fields of pharmaceuticals and drug delivery. Her previous positions include Director of Research at pSiMedica Ltd (spin out from QinetiQ) and Head of the Drug Delivery Centre at Dompe SpA (Italy).

During her career, she successfully managed several contract R&D projects for biotech companies in Europe, the U.S., and Australia and negotiated a wide range of commercial agreements on a global basis.

Dr. Saffie-Siebert obtained her PhD in Pharmaceutical Science from the School of Pharmacy at the University of London. She is named as the inventor or co-inventor on more than ten worldwide drug delivery patents and is Visiting Professor at Ulster University.

Professor McLaughlin is Professor of Advanced Functional Materials in the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Director of the new Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials Research Institute (NAMRI), and Director of NIBEC.

Professor McLaughlin has attracted over £18m of funding to establish research that has led to the establishment of NIBEC, NICAM and BEST. These centres now boast over seventy researchers carrying out both basic and applied research in topics such as nanotubes, DLC, micro-sensors, photocatalysis and tissue engineering.

He has formal collaborations with Cambridge, Surrey, Nanyang, IIT Bombay; North Carolina State University, the National University of Taiwan and various EU universities. Other past achievements include acting as a consultant to various aerospace programs on the design and fabrication of medical electrode harnesses and he is holder of fifteen patents including one for the world's best selling disposable medical electrodes.

Professor James McLaughlin obtained his BSc (Hons) degree in Applied Physics at the University of Ulster and later his PhD in the area of thin film deposition and characterisation applied to display technology. He was co-founder and leader of the Thin Film Materials & Devices Group.
 

John Stanton is the President of the Irish Innovation Center (IIC) dedicated to the growth of Irish technology start-ups in the Silicon Valley. He also serves as Executive Director of the Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG), a non-profit organisation aimed at helping Ireland embrace new technology opportunities. In addition, John is a member of the Irish Technology Capital (ITC) management team investing in "market changing" early stage, high growth companies.

John has amassed a wide variety of technology and entrepreneurial experience over his 25 year career. Prior to joining the IIC in 2010, John served as President of MarketMinds, a consultancy firm he founded dedicated to bringing new products to market. He also served as Founder and CEO of CubeGuard, a simple but elegant office productivity tool for preventing interruptions and communicating availability status to coworkers.

Prior to founding his own companies, John served at Palm as Vice President of Product Marketing, Vice President of Mobile Software and Services, and Vice President of Customer Support and E-Commerce. Previous to that, he held various leadership positions with several top technology companies in the Silicon Valley including Apple, Intuit, Hewlett Packard, as well as Eclipse, a highly successful supply chain consulting firm where he played a key leadership role in building the company's double and triple digit growth.
 

Tim Brundle is Director of Innovation at the University of Ulster. He is responsible for the University's commercial output including consultancy, knowledge transfer, intellectual property licensing, technology commercialisation and spin outs. In addition, he has responsibility for Innovation Ulster Ltd (IUL), the University of Ulster's technology venturing company.

Prior to his appointment with Ulster University, on behalf of QinetiQ Group PLC, he held the positions of both Director of Sales and Marketing and Technology Transfer Director within the Ministry of Defence Diversification Agency. He holds a number of non-executive posts and is a non-executive director of Northern Ireland's economic development body, Invest NI.
 

 Dr Torabi-Pour has extensive experience in project management from discovery to clinical phases. Prior to joining SiSaf, he worked as Technical Project Manager at pSiMedica Ltd (spin out from QinetiQ) and as Project Director at Global Technologies (NZ) Ltd.

Dr Torabi-Pour has also considerable international research experience. At the Mayo Clinic, USA, and the Royal London Hospital he worked in the area of cancer and inflammatory diseases, and he researched solid and semi-solid drug delivery formulations at the University of London and at Leipzig University in Germany.

Dr Torabi-Pour obtained an MSc in Pharmaceutical Science from King's College, University of London, and a PhD from the School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London. He is author of more than 30 scientific papers and inventor and co-inventor of 4 patents. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.