Michael J. Nowak is an experienced executive and healthcare and high-tech investor in small cap public and venture-backed private companies. Michael has most recently served as CEO, President, CFO and Director of a JLABs company, Navan Technologies, Inc., where he closed a significant seed round of financing from institutional and corporate VC investors. He is also Managing Partner of his own consulting and advisory firm and has prior experience with healthcare and life sciences focused investment funds, family offices, as well as boutique investment banks. In addition to that he is General Partner at Rainmakers Private Equity, an independent boutique investment bank.
In the past Michael was a Managing Director and Head of Healthcare Investments for Yorkville Advisors, $B+ AUM multinational hedge fund. Before that he led investments and served on numerous Boards of Directors while a General Partner at leading $B Euro-US venture capital fund TVM Capital. He was also a corporate venture capitalist and business development executive at Xerox PARC and Xerox Venture Labs in Palo Alto, where he was CEO of two spinouts. Furthermore, he was a strategic management consultant and Vice President at McKinsey & Co. in an emerging technology practice, and a Program Manager at the Advanced Technology Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce. At NIST he managed two $100M investment programs in software and digital media technology.
Dr. Nowak earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked as a post-doctoral scientist at Bell Labs (Bellcore), Princeton University, and at the CEA research labs in Saclay and the University of Paris VI (Jussieu, now Sorbonne University), in Paris, France. He received his BA in Physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where he was a College Scholar.
Dr. Clark is Professor, Edward B. LeWinn Chair, and former Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA), as well as a physician-scientist at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System. He has served since 2006 as Assistant Vice President for Clinical Research and Director of the Institute for Integration of Medicine and Science, and is Principal Investigator of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award, now in its third five-year cycle of funding. He also directs the Stevens Foundation Parkinson’s Disease Center of Excellence. He sees patients and teaches on the Infectious Diseases Service at San Antonio’s Audie Murphy VA Medical Center and the University Hospital.
A graduate of Syracuse University and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Clark completed internal medicine and infectious diseases training at Columbia, the University of Washington, and NIH/NIAID. Prior to moving to UTHSCSA in 1994, he served on the faculty of the University of Washington (1973-1977), Boston University (1977-1983), and the University of Iowa (1983-1994), and spent a sabbatical year at the University of Geneva (1990-1991).
Dr. Clark is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, as well as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and a Master of the American College of Physicians. He served as President of the Society for Leukocyte Biology (2016-2017), chaired two Gordon Research Conferences (Phagocytes and NOX Family NADPH Oxidases) and served in senior editorial positions for Journal of Leukocyte Biology, Journal of Immunology, and JAMA, among others. In 2011, he received the UTHSCSA Presidential Distinguished Senior Research Scholar Award.
Focusing his research on mechanisms of inflammation and host defenses against infection, Dr. Clark has published ~170 peer-reviewed articles. He currently studies neuro-inflammation with a goal of developing new therapeutic strategies (small molecules and cell-based gene therapies) to halt progression of neurodegeneration in patients with Parkinson’s disease. His work has been funded by numerous grants from NIH (including R37 MERIT, P01 program projects, R01 projects, and T32 training awards), VA, and foundations. He has been the primary mentor for 8 graduate students, 13 postdoctoral fellows, and 7 junior faculty research career grant awardees.
He holds several US patents and is co-founder of two biotechnology companies. In addition to HemaCure, he previously founded Genkyotex, a Swiss company that is developing small-molecule NADPH oxidase (NOX) inhibitors for clinical use.
