Legal Essentials For Founders with Michael Douglas
2026-04-09 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | JCC 170, 177 College Avenue, Medford, MA, 02155, United States
We’re pleased to welcome Michael Douglas, Partner at Gennari Aronson, LLP and a trusted advisor to founders, growth‑stage companies, and investors. A Tufts graduate with a B.A. in Psychology; Michael went on to earn his J.D. from Boston College Law School before building a career in corporate and transactional law. With deep experience in mergers and acquisitions, securities, and venture financing, he brings a practical, founder‑focused perspective to the legal challenges of starting and scaling a business. Our fireside chat will explore his path from Tufts to corporate attorney and the legal insights every entrepreneur should understand.
This is an Inside the Classroom event hosted by Professor Moneer Azzam, who teaches ENT101 Entrepreneurship and Business Planning at Tufts University.

Fireside Chat with Mike Curry, Co-founder, Life After Prison
2026-04-16 15:00 - 16:15 | MA
Join us for a fireside chat with Mike Curry, Co-founder and Executive Director, Life After Prison.
Mike Curry, a native of the Dorchester section of Boston, has always had a natural talent for writing. He is the author of the compelling “3 Pounds of Pressure” series, which vividly portrays life growing up in the inner-city of Boston.
In addition to his writing career, Mike is also a dedicated business mentor and coach. He thrives off of organizing, strategic planning and executing. However, his true passion lies in helping individuals who have been incarcerated to rebuild their lives and reintegrate into society. He firmly believes in providing support and guidance to returning citizens, allowing them to regain their footing and create a brighter future.
This is an Inside the Classroom event hosted by Professor Moneer Azzam at Tufts, who teaches ENT100 Entrepreneurship and Business Planning.

Innovation Month: Hybrid Event - From PhD to Founder: Building (and Selling) a Startup
2026-09-29 17:30 - 19:30 | JCC 1st floor, 177 College Avenue, Medford, MA, 02155, United States
From lab bench to boardroom: what does it actually take to build (and sell) a biotech company? Join us for a fireside chat with Kristina Fontanez, PhD — a two-time founder who scaled her last startup, Fluent BioSciences, from 2 to 40+ employees, raised $19M+, and led it to an $85M acquisition by Illumina. Now she’s building Adept Scientific, an AI platform tackling a problem she saw firsthand: life science labs have no real-time visibility into how their products actually perform.
The conversation will be moderated by Idicula Mathew, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Derby Entrepreneurship Center and Cofounder & CEO of Hera Health Solutions, a biotechnology company specializing in the research, development, and commercialization of a proprietary nanotechnology-enabled platform for transforming existing therapeutics into more effective and long-acting therapies.
Whether you’re curious about science, startups, or the leap between academia and industry, come hear how Kristina turned a research gap into a growing company — and bring your questions.
Pizza served at 5:30pm, talk starts at 6:00pm.
About Kristina Fontanez
Adept Scientific is led by founder and CEO Kristina Fontanez, PhD (Princeton AB, Harvard PhD, MIT postdoc). Kristina co-founded Fluent BioSciences, scaling the team from 2 to 40+ employees, launching 7 commercial products, and raising $19M+ in funding. She played a pivotal leadership role in securing the company’s $85M acquisition by Illumina in 2024. Throughout her tenure at Fluent and later as Senior Director at Illumina, Kristina identified a systemic gap: life science companies lacked real-time visibility into product performance in customer labs. Support was anecdotal, field engineers didn’t scale, and product teams flew blind. This firsthand operator experience, spanning R&D, commercialization, manufacturer economics, and post-acquisition integration is exactly why she’s building Adept: an AI-powered platform designed to provide the “Google Maps” for lab workflows, finally closing the visibility gap in life sciences.
This Innovation Month event is jointly hosted by Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research and Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts.
Learn more about the Auster Center: austercenter.tufts.edu
Learn more about the Derby Entrepreneurship Center: derbyecenter.tufts.edu.
