Experience

The Convergent team earned its stripes at the lab bench, in the corporate trenches and on the start-up firing line. We are experts at academic-to-industry technology transfer, corporate development, strategic business development, seed-stage financing and venture management.



William L. Robbins, Managing Director

William L. Robbins, M.B.A. has more than 25 years of experience as a seed-stage venture investor, entrepreneur, start-up executive and manager in the pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical technology. Mr. Robbins founded Convergent Ventures and is a founding Managing Member of Convergent Investors, LLC and President of Convergent Management, Inc. He is a founder and Managing Director of Calisra Ventures, LP, which creates, funds and develops life science companies in Israel. He serves as Chairman of the Board, President and CEO of Neurion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He is also a co-founder and director of Encode Bio, Inc. and a co-founder of ORFID Corporation. Mr. Robbins' international business experience includes Europe, Canada and Israel.

In 1997, Mr. Robbins founded Convergent Management, Inc., a consulting firm focused on early-stage life science companies. From 1992 to 1997, he served as Director, and then VP, Business Development, at Bio-Imaging Technologies, a medical imaging and clinical research company that went public during his tenure. Previously, he held marketing and new product development positions at Warner-Lambert Company, and account management positions at the healthcare division of Grey Advertising in New York.

In the not-for-profit sector, Mr. Robbins is a Trustee of Israel Cancer Research Fund, Inc. and a Director of the American Technion Society – Southern California Chapter. Mr. Robbins is a frequent guest lecturer and panelist for academic programs and industry conferences on the life sciences and entrepreneurship and is, a frequent mentor to graduate students. Mr. Robbins earned his M.B.A. at Columbia Business School and his A.B. in psychology, modified with biology, at Dartmouth College.

Mr. Robbins is the author of Seed-Stage Venture Investing: The Ins and Outs for Entrepreneurs, Start-ups, and Investors on Successfully Starting a New Business.


Nima Shiva, Managing Director

Nima Shiva, M.B.A. has been in the life science industry since 1990 as a scientist, entrepreneur and investor. He is the Chairman, President and CEO of Encode Bio, a privately-held company which he co-founded in 2006. As a Managing Director of Convergent Investors, LLC, he contributed to the formation of Neurion Pharmaceuticals and ORFID Corporation. Mr. Shiva continues to serve both companies as an operating executive. As the Vice President of Strategic Development at Neurion, Mr. Shiva played a key role in establishing research alliances with Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck as well as managing the direction of research and intellectual property development. Prior to joining Convergent Ventures, Mr. Shiva was an equity research associate in biotechnology and medical devices at Wedbush Morgan Securities. From 1990 to 1998, Mr. Shiva held technical and research management positions at UC San Diego and Sequana Therapeutics. Mr. Shiva holds an MBA from the University of Southern California and a BS in Physiology and Neurosciences from UC San Diego.


Kenneth C. Aldrich, Managing Director

Kenneth C. Aldrich, J.D. as more than 25 years of experience as a private equity investor and entrepreneur. He has provided early-stage funding for a variety of biomedical and technology start-ups, both individually and as a manager of various private investment partnerships. Mr. Aldrich is a Managing Member of Convergent Investors, LLC. He is a member of the Board of Directors of ORFID Corporation. Through investments prior to the formation of Convergent Ventures, Mr. Aldrich is a founder of WaveTec Vision Systems, an ophthalmic device company and International Stem Cell, Inc., a cell biology company of which he is Chairman of the Board. He has also been involved in a variety of other ventures outside the life science area, including his role as a current board member of Next Estate Communications. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. from Harvard University, both with honors.


Winn Hong, Principal

Winn Hong, M.S.E., M.B.A., is an experienced technology development engineer, business development manager and entrepreneur, with experience in the life sciences, high technology, materials science and information technology. As part of his role at Convergent, Mr. Hong is the President of portfolio company ORFID Corporation. Prior to joining Convergent, Mr. Hong was VP of Business and Product Development at Genefluidics, Inc., a medical diagnostic device company that integrates nanobiotechnology and microfluidics into a molecular analysis platform. Mr. Hong also helped to found Sega.com, Inc., a global on-line gaming company. He was VP of Business Development and interim COO at Sega.com Asia, Inc, and was responsible for setting up Sega.com Asia's Asian headquarter and expanding the company’s on-line gaming services within Asia. Mr. Hong was also responsible for developing strategic partnerships and joint ventures. Previously, Mr. Hong was a research scientist at Jet Propulsion Lab, a NASA research lab, where he conducted research on infrared photo-detectors for deep space exploration and medical imaging. Mr. Hong received a patent for the fabrication of these novel infrared sensors, which were used f or deep-space monitoring and for search and rescue efforts during the 1996 Santa Monica Mountain forest fire. Mr. Hong received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and both a B.S in aerospace engineering and a M.S. in mechanical engineering from UCLA with emphasis on MEMS-based medical devices and biomedical engineering.


Katherine Hawkes, Manager, Business Development and Administration

Katherine Hawkes has overseen administration of business development, finance and human resources at Convergent Ventures' portfolio companies since 2005. Previously, she was Manager, Finance and Administration at Convergent’s portfolio company Neurion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Prior to joining Neurion, Kate was a Financial Analyst at Accenture LLP. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Claremont McKenna College.




Advisors


William B. Adams (Convergent Investors, LLC)

William B. Adams, C.P.A. has 30 years of experience in the corporate consulting and financing arenas. Mr. Adams has provided seed capital and secondary and bridge financing to numerous start-up companies both individually and as a manager of various private investment partnerships. He was a co-founder of Convergent Investors, LLC and participated in the founding of Neurion Pharmaceuticals.


Jonathan G. Lasch, Ph.D., Venture Advisor

Jonathan G. Lasch, Ph.D. has more than 25 years of experience in science and technology development and evaluation in the fields of biomedical instruments and systems, biotechnology, chemistry and materials science. Dr. Lasch is Director of the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC. Previously, he was a Managing Director of Convergent Investors, LLC, of which he was also a founder. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of ORFID Corporation and was the Founding CEO and former Board Member of Neurion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He was co-founder, President and CEO of Materia, a materials science company spun out of Caltech. Also, he was VP, Business Development and the first employee of Cyrano Sciences, a Caltech spin-out based on chemical sensor technology. Prior to Cyrano, Dr. Lasch was VP, Technology Development for The Scripps Research Institute, the largest not–for-profit biomedical research institute in the United States. Previously, he was Director of Research, Biotechnology for PPG Industries. Author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and inventor on several patents, he has served on the advisory committees and boards of several for-profit corporations and non-profit organizations, including Precision Dynamics Corporation. Dr. Lasch earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. in biological sciences from the University of Texas at El Paso.


Rivka Sherman-Gold, Ph.D., Venture Advisor

Rivka Sherman-Gold, Ph.D., has more than 20 years of operational experience in R&D, marketing, business development, executive-level management, seed-stage fund-raising, and investing in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical technology industries.

Dr. Sherman-Gold has directed business strategy, and led and executed multi-million dollar transactions (in-licensing, out-licensing, co-development, R&D and commercial collaborations, alliances) for technology platforms and therapeutic products, involving U.S. and European pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies ranging from seed-stage start-ups to Fortune 100 and multi-national large pharma. Her experience also includes industry-academia collaborations/licenses and M&A transactions. Dr. Sherman-Gold is a founder and Managing Director of Calisra Ventures, LP and a member of several prominent angel investment groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She has held management positions in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, including Chief Business Officer of Diatos, a European biotechnology company; President, CEO and member of the BOD of Alydar Pharmaceuticals, a seed-stage Israeli biotech company; Director of Business Development at Abgenix, one of the most successful young biotech companies and the leader in the commercialization of human antibody technology for the treatment of cancer and other diseases that did its IPO only two years after being founded and subsequently acquired by Amgen in 2006; Associate Director of Business Development at Athena Neurosciences, a neurology-focused U.S. public company that was acquired by Elan Pharmaceuticals in 1996; and Director of Marketing and Scientific Applications at Axon Instruments, a leading electrophysiology instrumentation company that was acquired by Molecular Devices in 2004.

Dr. Sherman-Gold earned her B.Sc. in chemistry with honors and M.Sc. in biophysics and physiology from the Technion and a Ph.D. in life-sciences from the Weizmann Institute of Science. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine and earned an M.B.A. from California State University at San Jose.


David Margolese, Ph.D., Venture Advisor

David Margolese, Ph.D., has more than 20 years of experience developing new technologies and materials. He has contributed in both technology and business development in the fields of organic electronics, semiconductor etch processes, filtration, and energy storage. He also co-founded his own start-up, Semzyme, Inc., whose technology utilized biological viruses to form nanostructured materials.

In the past 10 years, Dr. Margolese has worked in a variety of technology start-ups, and is currently employed at a Convergent Investors portfolio company, ORFID Corp., as Vice President and CTO. ORFID is an organic electronics company working on processes and devices for display and RFID applications.

Dr. Margolese consults for NanoTune Technologies, located in Sunnyvale, CA, in business and technology development for water desalinization and energy storage. In addition, he has worked extensively in the semiconductor industry. He worked in the microelectronics center at TRW in Manhattan Beach, California, developing new processes and devices, and was employed at Systine, Inc., a start-up company in Pasadena, California, as both Principle Investigator and Senior Scientist on a nanotechnology program to develop displays. Dr. Margolese received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, his M.S. from the University of Oregon, and his B.S. from UCLA.


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