Zoe Quan
Founder, Qingchu Thinking, LLC
Zoe Quan is President of Qingchu Thinking, LLC, which combines strategy, international business, and assessing technologies for their growth potential in order to help companies determine where they are, where they need to be, and what they need to do to get there. She helps them see patterns among seemingly unrelated pieces of information to home in on key issues and translate vision into executable strategies. Her particular interest is in releasing the potential of innovative research. Quan served as Vice President Operations for Fio Corporation; a nanobiotechnology start-up developing a point-of-care rapid diagnostics system. Previously, she led new products and business development as Senior Vice President for Fujitsu Business Communication Systems, a $150 million provider of enterprise network solutions. Quan was also an executive with various communications infrastructure businesses at Lucent Technologies, in global product, market, and corporate development. She started her career in research and development with Bell Laboratories, co-authoring two telecommunications patents. Quan’s work with the biosciences include creating a biotechnology course at the University of Chicago. She has served as a reviewer of SBIR grants for National Cancer Institute study panels. More recently she co-authored proposals to the US Department of Commerce for an innovative framework to accelerate commercialization of university-developed technologies. Quan is a founding board member of Catalyzing Collaboration, which brings industry and academia together to cultivate the life sciences startup community, and is a mentor with Chicago Innovation Mentors, which coaches life sciences researchers to get their ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. Quan holds an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and a PhD in Biophysics and Theoretical Biology from the University of Chicago.