INVO I NewCures

Dr. Alicia Löffler is the founding Executive Director of the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO), Associate Provost for Innovation and New Ventures, and Associate Vice President for Research. Dr. Loffler is responsible for all short and long term strategies and operations for INVO, including all educational commercialization and new ventures.

Dr. Löffler has served as advisor and director on multiple profit and non-profit boards for biotech/medical and investment firms.

Dr. Löffler received a B.S. from the University of Minnesota, a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and had her post-doctoral training at Caltech. Dr. Löffler was named one of the Tech 100 stars by Crain’s Chicago Business, and received the “Women in Black” I-Street Award and the 2011 Innovator Award presented by the Chicago Chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).

Dr. Karl Scheidt is the Executive Director of NewCures, Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology, Director of the Center for Molecular Innovation and Drug Discovery (CMIDD), and Associate Director of NU-GoKidney. His research interests lie at the intersection of catalysis, chemical synthesis and bioorganic chemistry for translational research. Dr. Scheidt has led the development of new translational resources for Northwestern, including the NewCures Accelerator and the creation of ChemCore, a highly successful shared resource for medicinal chemistry.

Dr. Scheidt received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Indiana University, and had his post-doctoral training at Harvard University as an NIH NRSA fellow. Dr. Scheidt is the author of over 155 publications (h-index of 67) and trained over 130 students and postdoctoral fellows. He is a regular consultant for pharmaceutical companies and also the cofounder of two biotech startup companies focused on translating the promise of small molecules to clinical success in oncology (Third Coast Therapeutics, Seneca Therapeutics).

Dr. Caroline Ko joined INVO in 2017 as Project Leader of NewCures. She manages the NewCures effort along with its Executive Director, Prof. Karl Scheidt, and INVO Executive Director, Alicia Loffler, to accelerate biomedical research from early discovery stages to more advanced clinical stages or commercialization.

Dr. Ko’s passion is to help translate research ideas into viable products for societal benefit. She is experienced in drug development from the bench to bedside as demonstrated by her postdoctoral research, which focused on a Northwestern technology for which she facilitated IND approval by the FDA for early phase clinical study. The clinical study opened and dosed its first patient in 2017.

Prior to joining INVO, Caroline was Chief Scientific Officer and Industrial Liaison at International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) at Northwestern University. At IIN, she was responsible for representing and managing scientific and industrial efforts of the IIN and Prof. Chad Mirkin’s Research Group.

Dr. Ko received her B.S. in Chemistry from University of Michigan, her M.A. in Psychology (Brain & Behaviour) and Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Psychology (Brain & Behaviour) from University of Toronto. During her Ph.D., she also pursued projects at Northwestern’s Department of Neurobiology and Physiology. Her post-doctoral work at Northwestern focused on nanoparticle based therapeutics development. She is author of over 25 peer-reviewed publications.