Judge Panel

Steven Collens is CEO of MATTER, the healthcare technology incubator and innovation center. MATTER opened in February 2015 and nurtures entrepreneurs and innovators building next-generation health IT, medical device, diagnostic and biopharma technologies. MATTER works with more than 200 healthcare technology ventures and the company partners with dozens of industry-leading companies, health systems and universities. Steven is also senior advisor at Pritzker Group Venture Capital.

Prior to assuming his current role, Steven was senior vice president at Pritzker Group, the investment firm led by Tony and J.B. Pritzker. In that capacity, he led the team that created 1871, Chicago’s center for digital startups that now houses more than 400 early-stage companies. He previously worked at Abbott in a variety of domestic and international functions, including product management, policy and public affairs. In 2005, Steven helped found ConstantWellness.com to give patients control over their health data and allow healthcare providers to coordinate care of their patients. Prior to Abbott, Steven served as legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun. Steven holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. He serves on the boards of 1871, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Chicago High School for the Arts, and is a member of ChicagoNEXT, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s council on technology and innovation. He is also a Leadership Greater Chicago fellow and a member of the Economic Club of Chicago and the Commercial Club of Chicago.

Caitlin Donovan is the Global Head of Uber Health. She joins Uber most recently from MyOrthos, an Orthodontic Services Organization, where she served as Chief Operating Officer. Prior to that, Caitlin developed her knack for tackling obstacles to patient care as Chief Operating Officer of Circulation and Executive Vice President of Operations at LogistiCare (now ModivCare), specialty benefit managers in the non-emergency medical transportation space. She also served as the Vice President of Operations at CareCentrix with a focus on home health and post-acute care. Early in her career, she worked in finance as an investor at Bain Capital and as a member of the internal consulting group at Summit Partners. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Harvard University and lives in Dover, Massachusetts with her husband and two boys.

Han Liu directs the MAGICS (Modern Artificial General Intelligible and Computer Systems) lab at Northwestern University. He has been the director of the deep reinforcement learning center at Tencent AI Lab and had been a professor at Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University. He received a joint PhD in Machine Learning and Statistics from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research integrates modern artificial intelligence and computer systems, which exploits AI-enabled massive computational experiments to revolutionize science, engineering and business. Han Liu has received numerous research awards including the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the Alfred P Sloan Fellowship in Mathematics, the IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award, the ASA Noether Young Scholar Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Howard B Wentz Award and the Umesh Gavaskar Memorial Best Dissertation Award. He has served as associate editors for the Journal of American Statistical Association, the Electronic Journal of Statistics, the Technometrics, and the Journal of Portfolio Management.

His primary research interest is modern artificial intelligence, which exploits computation and data as a lens to explore machine intelligence. 

First Quadrant Advisory (FQA) is a boutique strategy consulting firm that serves clients across a range of solutions, including Growth and Market Expansion, M&A, Product Innovation, Operational Transformation, Finance Transformation, Digitalization and Process Improvement. He founded FQA in 2019 and led its growth and within 2 years, earned recognition from Consulting Magazine as one of 20 Best Small Consulting Firms to work for.

Vijay has served as corporate executive at a $40B health insurance company, as well as in consulting leadership roles at Deloitte, IBM and PwC. In these roles, he has helped clients build and deliver strategies to grow revenue by $2B, reduce cost of goods sold by $1B-$3B, led product innovation, developed approaches to leverage emerging technology and business models, helped CFOs, CIOs and COOs maximize the output of their functional areas, developed approaches to making trade-off decisions across product lines and markets, and led sales, distribution and pricing functions.

As a passionate advocate for social impact, Vijay launched a non-profit social impact practice within FQA in 2021 focused on addiction and substance abuse. Vijay has attended Executive Education at the Wharton School, has an MBA in Organizational Strategy from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering. Vijay was named a Top 100 Under-50 Executive Leader by Diversity MBA Magazine. In his spare time, Vijay is an avid golfer and active parent of his middle-school twins.

Wendi Wright, MJ, JD has more than 16 years of experience as a privacy attorney. She has worked in a variety of industries including healthcare, academia, tech, pharma and insurance. Her many leadership roles have included Chief Privacy Officer for Stanford University, Vice President/Chief Privacy and Security Counsel for Allscripts Healthcare, LLC, HIPAA Privacy & Security Officer/Compliance Officer for Abbott, and Attorney/Chief HIPAA Officer for the City of Chicago. Wendi holds both a Master of Jurisprudence and a Juris Doctor from Loyola University School of Law (Chicago), and is CIPP certified for the US and the EU.