Batool Akhtar-Zaidi, PhD

Director of Corporate Relations and Strategic Projects

Batool is a Ph.D. software scientist and business development professional with nearly a decade of experience closing large-scale academia/industry partnerships, which she has done working for both academia and industry through empowering business and science teams to collaborate seamlessly - always towards the ultimate goal of sustainably improving funding through incremental, metrics-driven improvements in the processes that support deal-flow. 

She has served as a trusted leader by both academia and industry to help commercialize promising science forward to improve health, including for Tempus – a $10 Bn private precision medicine tech company; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; other top 100 Universities that hired her startup, Science First, for matchmaking to industry partners; and in her present role as Director of Corporate Relations for Case Western Reserve University, where she broadly supports efforts to increase industry funding and impact across all 8 schools.