Image caption: Christy Wyskiel
Christy Wyskiel, an entrepreneur and investor who has started, supported, and analyzed businesses in health care and the life sciences for nearly 20 years, has been appointed senior advisor to the president for enterprise development at The Johns Hopkins University.
Wyskiel will oversee university commercialization of discoveries and inventions by faculty researchers. She will also cultivate its growing relationships with entrepreneurs and the corporate community.
"Christy brings a singular blend of experience, ideas, and passion to this position," said Ronald J. Daniels, president of the university. "She is the perfect leader to help us amplify our innovation and entrepreneurship efforts and develop even more new and exciting partnerships with businesses and other stakeholders in the region."
Wyskiel will fill the role beginning Jan. 1, succeeding Aris Melissaratos, the former Maryland secretary of business and economic development who has been at Johns Hopkins since 2006. Melissaratos has accepted a new position as executive-in-residence and senior adviser to Dean Bernard T. Ferrari at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Daniels praised Melissaratos' "distinguished record of service to Johns Hopkins."
"Aris has had a wide-ranging impact on the university," Daniels said. "He has expanded our relationships with the start-up and entrepreneurial community, cultivated intellectual property opportunities and relationships with stakeholders across our university, and supervised a tech transfer office that has seen significant increases in measures such as new start-ups, invention disclosures, and revenue."
Johns Hopkins has spun off an average of 12 new companies each of the past five fiscal years and earned $15.9 million in royalties and licensing fees in 2012, up from $4.8 million in 2004. The university has more than 2,100 patents under active management.
Wyskiel has co-founded two Baltimore-based companies with Johns Hopkins faculty members: Cureveda LLC, formed in 2010 to develop drugs for inflammatory, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative diseases, and GrayBug LLC, created in 2011 to focus on time-release drug-delivery systems for eye diseases such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. She was chief executive officer of Cureveda and chief operating officer of GrayBug. She also has served as a formal and informal advisor to many other start-ups.
Previously, Wyskiel was a managing director at Maverick Capital Ltd., a long-short equity hedge fund with more than $12 billion under management. She established there a record of successful investing in public and private health care companies. She also has worked as a health care and medical technology stock analyst at T. Rowe Price.
Wyskiel earned an MBA from New York University in 1996 after graduating from Williams College in 1994. She has joined Johns Hopkins in a transitional role before succeeding Melissaratos in January.
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