Shilpa Bhansali is the Senior Associate Director of Technology Licensing at PCI. Shilpa supports faculty at the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) in navigating commercialization of their research. Her responsibilities include assessing new technologies, managing intellectual property portfolios, developing and executing marketing and commercialization strategies, and structuring and negotiating licensing agreements.
Bob Schenkel is a Director in the licensing group working with various Penn investigators conducting life sciences research. Bob has been with PCI for 18 years. Prior to joining Penn, he worked for various pharmaceutical companies in business development and research and development.
Jim is the Executive Director of the Corporate Alliances team at PCI and has worked in technology partnering, licensing and commercialization at Penn since 2008. His team leads business development, strategy, negotiation, execution, alliance management and oversight of large, innovative and mutually beneficial strategic alliances for Penn with many corporate, non-profit and foundation partners.
Jim and his team pioneer and build innovative translational alliance programs with the goal to align fundamental inventions with teams of scientists and business people to develop innovative and impactful technology solutions for some of society’s biggest problems and challenges. The alliance program partnerships have generated significant basic research, manufacturing development, clinical trial funding and licensing revenue to Penn, and resulted in the creation of multiple start-up companies based in the Philadelphia area and elsewhere that have collectively raised substantial equity financing and in numerous cases have gone public. These partnerships have resulted in the approval of two transformative new products with many other products under active development.
Jim received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology from The University Chicago and a B.A. (double major) in Biology and Economics from The University of Virginia. He is also a registered U.S. patent agent. Prior to joining Penn, Jim worked for a biotechnology company in the Philadelphia area working in a business development and intellectual property management capacity.
Jennifer Langenberger is the Chief Operations Officer and Executive Director of Intellectual Property. She oversees the University’s patent estate and is responsible for the administrative infrastructure of PCI, including management of PCI’s information technology, human resources, office administrative support, and facilities.
Jennifer has been at PCI since 2006. Prior to that she worked as an IP specialist at CHOP, a patent agent at a patent boutique law firm, and as a patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Jennifer holds a B.S. in Biology and a M.S. in Nonprofit Leadership, and is a registered patent agent. Outside of work she enjoys spending time with her husband and daughters, 2 dogs and 2 cats. She also loves hiking, yoga, kettlebell, and travel.
Jay is responsible for PCI’s financial operations, including finance strategy, metrics and controls, and reporting of financial results. Jay received his MBA in Finance from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his A.B. in Government from Harvard University. He enjoys cross country skiing, woodworking, and painting.
Laurie Actman serves as the Chief Marketing, Communications and Program Officer at PCI. Laurie as part of the Executive Team oversees the strategic implementation of PCI’s programs and partnerships, marketing, and communications and helped to plan and launch the Pennovation Center, Penn’s startup incubator where she actively managed programs and partnerships. Previously she served as PCI’s Chief Operating Officer from launch in 2014 to December 2016. Before PCI she has worked for notable organizations in the private, non-profit and public sectors in Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, D.C. including as Chief Policy Officer for the CEO Council for Growth, Consultant to Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter on his Administration’s sustainability and ARRA initiatives, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Viridity Energy, and Deputy and Interim Director for the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation, a $150 million public private project capitalized by the US Department of Energy and based at Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. She received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis and a Masters Degree in Urban Planning and Real Estate from UNC-Chapel Hill. Actman lives in Bala Cynwyd with her husband and three children and spends a lot of time when not working on the soccer sidelines, playing tennis and walking her dog.
Ben Dibling is Managing Director of the Penn Center for Innovation (PCI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Ben leads the PCI team in advancing discoveries and ideas resulting from Penn’s research towards new products, services, and/or businesses to provide benefits back to Penn, its inventors, and society. The PCI team actively facilitates a broad range of technology development connections between Penn and the commercial sector, including technology licenses, R&D alliances, sponsored research, and the formation of new ventures.
Prior to joining PCI and Penn in 2016, Ben was Senior Associate Director of Licensing at UCLA. Ben started his career in technology transfer in 2004 at UChicagoTech, the office of technology and intellectual property at the University of Chicago, and was Program Manager in Oncology at the time he moved to UCLA in 2011.
Ben holds a PhD in Clinical Medicine from the University of Leeds and a B.Med.Sc. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Birmingham. He is licensed to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office and is a Certified Licensing Professional (CLP). Ben is a member of AUTM, LES and prior chair of the Board of Governors for CLP.
John S. Swartley, MBA, PhD is the Chief Innovation Officer of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) where he leads and supports innovation initiatives across the entire institution. Dr. Swartley served previously as the Associate Vice Provost for Research and Managing Director of the Penn Center for Innovation (PCI) at Penn where he led a multi-faceted team focused on new product development, corporate partnerships, technology licensing and new venture creation based on faculty expertise and discoveries made at Penn. Prior to joining Penn in 2007, Dr. Swartley was Senior Vice President and General Partner of BCM Technologies (BCMT), the venture capital investment subsidiary of Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Swartley joined BCMT in 2003 from the Yale University Office of Cooperative Research where he was Associate Director of the Medical Campus Office. Over the course of his career, Dr. Swartley has facilitated thousands of commercialization and research partnership agreements that have collectively generated nearly five billion dollars in licensing income and sponsored research funding, as well as participating in the formation and oversight of hundreds of university spin-out companies that have collectively raised several billion dollars of investment capital. He holds a B.S. in Biology from Bates College, an MBA from the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, and a PhD in Microbial & Molecular Genetics from Emory University.
Email John. Access the Office of the Chief Innovation Officer website here.
Grey manages analytic and reporting activities across the breadth of PCI. She also collaborates on organization wide effort to establish data standards and ensure data integrity.