Phyllis (Phyl) Speser

Dr. Phyllis (Phyl) Speser is a co-founder and CEO of Foresight Science &Technology. Today the company has a staff of over 60 employees and consultants and two offices in the US and office in Oxford England; Santiago, Chile; and Singapore. Phyl has supported commercialization of thousands of technologies across the breadth of science & technology, working for major corporations, SMEs (including SBIR and STTR awardees), universities, government agencies, foundations, research institutes around the globe. Among her activities on behalf of Foresight have been serving as Program Director for SBIR Commercialization Support Programs for USDA, NSF, NIH, DOE, EPA, and the Navy and as Interim Director of the University of Rhode Island Technology Transfer Office. In the 1990s and early years of this century, She was an artificial intelligence researcher, serving as Foresight Principal Investigator on SBIR awards from NSF (Phase I — coherence-based decision aid for commercialization strategy formulation), USDA (Phase I and II — expert system for technology transfer to rural manufacturers), and DoEd (Phase I — internet based science education collaborative work tools for visually impaired students), plus an award from the Office of Naval Research’s Long-Term Scientific Research Program that continued the work begun on the NSF award. All the technology developed under these awards was successfully commercialized. Non-SBIR awards were also received from the SBA (new quantitative method for measuring paperwork burdens in federal procurement), NOAA (assessment methodology for NOAA lab technology transfer), and EPA (models for university-industry collaboration).