M. Christina Gabriel

Dr. Christina Gabriel is director for Innovation Economy at The Heinz Endowments. Previously she held the position of Vice Provost for Corporate Partnerships and Technology Development at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gabriel arrived at Carnegie Mellon from CASurgica, Inc., a Carnegie Mellon spinoff company focusing on computer-assisted orthopaedic surgery, where she was President and CEO. In earlier university positions, Dr. Gabriel served as Director of Collaborative Initiatives at Carnegie Mellon as well as Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Gabriel spent five years with the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC, and Arlington, VA, most recently serving as Deputy Assistant Director for Engineering, which is the chief operating officer of the Engineering Directorate, an organization of 140 staff members (half PhD-level) which awards over $300 million to universities and small businesses for engineering research and education. In earlier assignments at NSF, Dr. Gabriel served as program director within several engineering research programs, as well as Coordinator for the $50 million university-industry collaborative Engineering Research Centers

program. Dr. Gabriel spent most of the year 1994 at the United States Senate Appropriations Committee, working as one of three majority professional staff members for the Subcommittee on VA, HUD and Independent Agencies, chaired by Senator Barbara Mikulski. This subcommittee was responsible for appropriating about $90 billion annually among 25 federal organizations. Dr. Gabriel was a researcher for six years at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and spent six months in 1990 as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan. She received her masters and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her undergraduate electrical engineering degree from the University of Pittsburgh. She was an AT&T Bell Laboratories GRPW Fellow and a National Merit Scholar (Richard King Mellon Foundation). Her research publications focus on digital optical switching devices and systems exploiting ultrafast optical nonlinearities in fibers and waveguides of glasses, polymers and semiconductors, and she holds three patents. Dr. Gabriel is married and has three children.