John Whelan

John has a PhD in Physics and worked as a software developer and business analyst in Davy stockbrokers and Daiwa Securities in Tokyo. Founder of three tech start-ups two of which raised 7 figure venture capital rounds. One of these Alatto traded for 9 years. More recently a consultant to Vodafone Ireland and since 2008 has been a Technology Transfer Case Manager at Trinity College, Dublin responsible for the commercialisation of ICT research. While in Trinity he set up and ran Trinity College's start-up accelerator LaunchBox, and became Executive Director of Blackstone LaunchPad at Trinity College, Dublin. Also, he designed and secured European funding to implement Trinity's Connected Health accelerator “Validator “and a Europe-wide Tech Transfer training programme. Adjunct Lecturer in NUI Galway where he teaches the Innovation and Technology Transfer module as part of Masters in Technology management. Most recently as a part of his role in Trinity, he has set up and managed Trinity's Open Source Programme Office. The mission of this office is to promote and support the principles of open source, and open data in knowledge transfer and industry engagement for TCD researchers.