Al Hawkins has broad expertise in developing new biomedical companies based on technologies licensed identified from universities, hospitals and federal labs. He has spent his career at the intersection of academic institutions and start-up companies in the life sciences as an entrepreneur, fund manager, and university tech transfer officer. Mr.. Hawkins was most recently CEO-in-Residence at BioEnterprise, where he launched and helped secure funding for two spin-out companies from academic institutions. Prior to BioEnterprise, Mr. Hawkins was the Director of New Ventures at Boston University, where he managed spin-out companies from the institution’s $400 million annual research budget. There, he managed the $40 million BU Venture Fund and also led BU’s Launch Award program which made convertible note investments in BU spin-outs. He also managed the BU Photonics Center Incubator and launched the Kindle Mentorship Program which served over 50 seed stage companies. Formerly, Mr. Hawkins was a Technology Licensing Associate at Yale University and co-founder of Madison, Wisconsin-based Agave Group Venture Consulting, which developed strategy and raised funding for university life science spin-outs and conducted due diligence for early stage investors evaluating these opportunities. He led over 60 seed stage projects as a principal in Agave Group, helping raise over $50M and also co-founded TFX Bioscience, a therapeutics company that was based on technologies licensed from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota. Mr. Hawkins received his BA in Economics from Emory University, an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MS from the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Enterprise Program. He serves as a frequent SBIR grant reviewer for NIH and in 2012, was awarded the Young Entrepreneur Initiative Fellowship from the French government
