Leadership
Elizabeth Hagerman, Ph.D.
Chief Innovation Officer, UW Health; Executive Director, Isthmus Project
Elizabeth M. Hagerman, Ph.D., currently serves as Chief Innovation Officer for UW Health and Executive Director of UW Health’s Isthmus Project, an innovation initiative in partnership with the UW School of Medicine. Elizabeth is responsible for operations of the Isthmus Project, which provides a place for UW Health clinicians, staff, School of Medicine and Public Health faculty and others to seek support for their ideas and projects that aim to achieve better health outcomes or to solve problems facing UW Health patients, providers and the health system. Isthmus Project also seeks to work with outside entities or entrepreneurs with innovations that could benefit the health system.
Elizabeth’s experience includes a series of industry and academic roles focused on biotechnology, product development and commercialization as well as collaborations between industry and academia. She was most recently the Chief Innovation and Strategy officer at Conexus Indiana, whose mission is to lead innovative collaborations among industry, academic and public partners. Prior to that, Elizabeth served as Vice President of Rose-Hulman Ventures, a leading university model for offering prototyping and product development services to companies while providing engineering internships to undergraduate students. Elizabeth began her career at Baxter Healthcare in the regenerative medicine business with roles in R&D, business development and medical affairs.
Hagerman earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and both master’s and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of California-Los Angeles.
Christopher Konop, Ph.D.
Innovation and Commercialization Specialist
Christopher Konop, Ph.D. currently serves as the Innovation and Commercialization Specialist for UW Health’s Isthmus Project. Christopher worked as a Life Science Consultant for Charles River Associates and bioStrategies Group in Chicago, IL. Christopher has experience in commercial strategy, product development, forecasting, and market research for global pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostic, and investor clients. Prior to his time in management consulting, Christopher served as the Executive Director (and co-founder), of WiSolve Consulting Group, a non-profit that trained STEM graduate student and postdoctoral research consultants in business and entrepreneurship while also supporting bio-healthcare ventures with commercialization consulting services. Christopher earned his Ph.D. in Zoology / Neuroscience and his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.