Our Team

Nila Bhakuni serves Baptist Health South Florida as assistant vice president for Innovation. Ms. Bhakuni served as director of Technology Transfer at Dartmouth College, where she instituted a new intellectual property policy, increased startups and provided technology transfer services to Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital.

Prior to that, Ms. Bhakuni served as the director of Technology Transfer at Rice University for 10 years, growing the office and serving as interim director of Sponsored Research and building and leading an industrial contracts team. She had progressive responsibility at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon in technology transfer.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Ms. Bhakuni spent 10 years working in several different areas at Alcoa's Technical Center. She received an Alcoa Merit Award for Team Performance for a joint venture team with Kobe, a Japanese steel company.

Ms. Bhakuni has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Akron, a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio State University and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.

Joseph Jankowski, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized commercialization leader, specializing in early-stage biomedical opportunity assessment, commercial licensing and corporate financing and structuring. Dr. Jankowski is active in corporate-level governance, having served as a founding or current board member and trustee for a myriad of entrepreneurial enterprises, including Arteriocyte, BioEnterprise Corporation, JumpStart, Polgenix and RoadPrintz. He has contributed leadership to multi-party innovation programs that include the Case Coulter Translational Research Partnership, NIH CTSA Key Functions Committee and the Philips Global Advanced Imaging Innovation Center.

In 2013, Dr. Jankowski was appointed as Case Western Reserve University’s first chief innovation officer. In this capacity, he is a leader of, and contributor to, innovation occurring throughout the university. He focuses on graduate education, teaching entrepreneurial arts to multidisciplinary teams at the university’s schools of business, engineering and law. In 2018, Dr. Jankowski co-founded the Pathway in Health Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Case School of Medicine to prepare medical students for career-long innovative contributions. Prior to this position, he was the leader of the university’s technology transfer and commercialization activities. Under his direction for nearly a decade, the tech transfer function evaluated nearly 2,000 invention disclosures, enacted more than 300 commercial licenses and option agreements and established 35 spin-off enterprises.

Dr. Jankowski is a committed advisor to Henry Ford Innovations and was a member of the inaugural Cleveland Clinic Innovations program, which he joined after serving as a technology analyst at Battelle Memorial Institute. He holds a doctorate degree in Chemistry from SUNY ESF, an MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management and dual bachelor’s degrees in Chemical Process and Environmental Engineering Technologies from the University of Dayton.

Brittany Shaffer is president at FirstLink Research and Analytics, overseeing company strategy and project execution. She has more than a decade of experience managing and executing hundreds of analysis projects for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), multiple foreign governments, medical research centers, universities and other clients. Her work has focused on assessing the business cases for technology transfer and transition, program and project management, strategic planning for new programs and business opportunities, capability gap identification and validation, and requirements development.

Specific highlights of her experience include:

• Leading, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), the Program Management Office (PMO) of the International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation (IFAFRI) and its associated analyses.
• Overseeing a team that has facilitated more than 250 technology transfer agreements and returned more than $10 million to clients through technology transfer agreement fees and cost avoidance metrics.
• Developing and overseeing thousands of business-case analyses for multiple clients across diverse technical areas.

Ms. Shaffer has taught market analysis at the undergraduate level and prior to joining FirstLink, worked at GE Transportation in International Fleet Program Management, where she served as a liaison between GE engineers and international customers to identify requirements and implement fixes in the field. Ms. Shaffer holds an MBA from Penn State University and graduated summa cum laude from Mercyhurst University with a bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing and Chemistry. She also completed the Entrepreneurial Fellowship Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Walter DeForest is a senior partner in the firm of DeForest Koscelnik Yokitis & Berardinelli.  Previously he was a partner at Reed Smith Shaw & McClay.

Mr. DeForest has served as legal counsel for more than 700 licensing arrangements in the technology area, including both out-license and in-license arrangements, covering a wide range of technologies, as diverse as:  hospital equipment tracking systems, heart valve replacement protocols, exosomes, patient care protocols, cardio sensors, medical devices, stem cells, animal models, artificial intelligence; green chemistry; electronic data storage; biotechnology; atom transfer radical polymerization; fuel cells; computer assisted surgery; distance learning; and the 360-degree, spin-effect television camera operation technology for the 2001 Super Bowl, as well as various data licenses.  Mr. DeForest wrote and negotiated one of the first commercial licenses for the Internet.

Mr. DeForest is involved in complex transactional work and litigation for organizations relating to collaborations and other business relationships, many involving academic and commercial consortia, and he has extensive experience in the business aspects of intellectual property matters.  He has been lead counsel in the spin-off, formation and structure of a wide range of technology-based start-up companies and the formation and qualification for tax exempt status of IRC §501(c)(3) corporations, particularly in the technology area.  Mr. DeForest regularly represents buyers, sellers, licensors and licensees in the acquisition of technology, know-how and other intellectual property.  In addition, Mr. DeForest counsels for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in the decision-making process regarding the protection, utilization and marketing of their intellectual property and in commercial litigation of intellectual property disputes. Mr. DeForest also coordinates with patent prosecution counsel.

Mr. DeForest has represented research institutions for more than thirty years and has had extensive experience with federal research contracts and in compliance with federal regulations.  He has worked successfully with NASA and other governmental agencies on various sponsored research agreements.  One major innovative project with NASA involved working with NASA (on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University) to build the National Robotics Engineering Consortium which combined NASA funding with commercial funding to build the National Robotics Engineering Consortium in a then economically disadvantaged section of Pittsburgh which has now become a robust source of field robotics inventions and is attracting commercial companies to the area.  A second innovative project with NASA involved negotiating the legal structure under which Carnegie Mellon University became the first participant in the NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley.  He has negotiated consortia and collaborations for other institutions involving for profit and not for profit organizations in the technology development space.

Mr. DeForest obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh and his law degree from Harvard Law School.

Daeanne Alvarez Cruz serves Baptist Health South Florida as administrative assistant for Baptist Health Innovations.

Daeanne first joined Baptist Health South Florida in 2018 after gaining experience with medical records, including billing and coding. As a patient financial representative, she worked closely with patients to provide compassionate care and assist with navigating their healthcare insurance coverage.

Daeanne then served as legal assistant for a property insurance law firm in the South Florida area. In addition to managing a multi-faceted and substantial caseload for several attorneys, Daeanne developed organizational systems to scale the business during a period of major growth, and cultivated her expertise in civil litigation and court processes.

Daeanne graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice from Florida International University Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs.