Lisa Dhar, PhD
Associate Vice President of Innovation and New Ventures
847-491-2225
lisa.dhar@northwestern.edu
Lisa Dhar oversees Northwestern's Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO)which includes The Garage and The Querrey InQbation Lab. Previously at INVO, she was the Director of New Business Ventures and the Interim Executive Director of the Querrey InQbation Lab. In addition to her work at INVO, she has taught in the McCormick School of Engineering and Kellogg School of Management.
Prior to joining Northwestern in 2016, Dhar held various leadership roles in the Office of Technology Management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign starting in 2009. Prior to joining technology transfer, she was co-founder and vice president of media development for InPhase Technologies, a Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies startup that raised more than $90 million in total funding. There, she led a team of chemical engineers, chemists and optical engineers to commercialize high-performance recording media for holographic data storage. Dhar has been awarded nearly a dozen patents, has coedited a book on holographic data storage and has authored or coauthored more than 25 journal articles.
Dhar earned her BS in Chemistry from University of Chicago and her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.