Dr. Kurtz is a founding member of the SBIR Development Center at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he serves as Program Director and Team Leader.  In his current role, he manages a portfolio of SBIR/STTR awards and coordinates activities in the areas of drug development, clinical diagnostics and other cancer-related technologies.  In 2009, Dr. Kurtz led the development of NCI’s Phase IIB Bridge award program, an initiative designed to incentivize partnerships between SBIR/STTR awardees and third-party investors, in order to accelerate the commercialization of technologies seeded with federal funding.  In 2014, Dr. Kurtz played a leading role in establishing the Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) at NIH Pilot Program, an intensive entrepreneurship training course that teaches NIH-funded SBIR/STTR awardees to use a hypothesis-driven method of customer discovery in order to develop a repeatable and sustainable business model.  Before coming to the NCI, Dr. Kurtz worked in industry developing high-throughput bioanalytical assays to support pharmacokinetic studies for the biopharmaceutical sector.  Dr. Kurtz received a BS in Chemistry from The University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.  He also holds an MIT Sloan Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation.