Christina Pellicane is the Assistant Director of Innovation and Lead Instructor for the $15M National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Northeast Hub at Princeton University. She’s also co-founder and COO at Lignolix, a chemical tech startup and a nationally certified NSF I-Corps Instructor.

Previously, Ms. Pellicane served as the first Director of Commercialization for the University of Delaware (UD) Horn Entrepreneurship Center. In this role, she developed and/or managed several initiatives including a $2M Proof of Concept fund, the Venture Mentoring Service and the UD I-Corps Site. She also served in a part-time role as an Expert at NSF reviewing applications and making invite/decline decisions for the I-Corps Teams program and the Small Business Innovation Research/ Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program.

Prior to UD, she served as the first Executive Manager of the NYC I-Corps Node, funded by NSF for nearly $4M, led by CUNY in partnership with NYU and Columbia. She also served as CUNY’s manager of the PowerBridgeNY cleantech accelerator, funded by NYSERDA for $10M, with top-tier NYC institutions such as Columbia University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cornell Tech. Before helping scientists become entrepreneurs, she was one herself. Ms. Pellicane held positions as a Clinical Business Administrator and Study Monitor at a veterinary clinical research organization, AlcheraBio, and a Research Associate at a biotech startup, Venenum Biodesign. Christina has also been an independent consultant through her company Antevasin with projects including the U.S. Department of State’s Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) with VentureWell and The New York Academy of Sciences’ NYSERDA Proof of Concept Center Metrics and Evaluation Project.

Ms. Pellicane is a patented inventor and holds a B.S. in Biology and Animal Science from the University of Georgia and a Master of Business and Science with a concentration in Biotechnology and Genomics from Rutgers University.