Dr. Regina Valluzzi has an unusually varied experience of the workplace.  She has deep experience as a technical and business leader, entrepreneur, communicator, educator and consultant. After receiving dual B.S. degrees from MIT in Materials Science and in Humanities, she spent several years as an Industrial Researcher at Akzo Chemicals, now Akzo-Nobel. She was active in a number of emerging areas of molecular structure modeling and polymer process engineering.  Though still very early in her career, she helped manage the company’s major Academic collaboration and technology transfer interest in the US, as well as developing collaborative relationships with other institutions.  During her Ph.D. at University of Massachusetts, Amherst she developed processes and materials using polymers and biopolymers to create complex nanostructures in materials.  She was an informal mentor to a number of junior students, training them in technology and also how to represent themselves as job-seekers. Her postdoctoral work at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell with Prof. Sukant Tripathy, led her to simple “green” scalable approaches for biopolymeric nanomaterials fabrication.  While on the faculty at Tufts University in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Dr. Valluzzi also developed several new approaches to creating nanostructured materials, and provided support to students and faculty collaborators working on several projects in nanomaterials.  She developed, planned and built multi-use multi-departmental laboratory facilities that seamlessly integrated training, applications development, laboratory demonstrations, and research capabilities. 

Dr. Valluzzi is an inventor and coinventor of a number of patents, author of dozens of peer reviewed technical papers and an accomplished public speaker and communicator of science innovation processes.  She founded a VC funded start-up, ENS, in 2003 to commercialize her inventions.  During her tenure as Chief Scientific Officer, she was the point person for all external communications.  She coordinated Business and Applications Development in addition to managing the R&D and Engineering programs at ENS.  Her additional experience includes “solopreneurship” in the creative fields, small business experience and consulting.  For the past several years her focus has been on Science communications and on mentoring other Start-up founders.