Ernest Davis is a Senior Program Officer for VentureWell, supporting capacity-building and services for higher education innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Mr. Davis has three decades of experience in the technology sector and has held several positions in the areas of new product introduction, manufacturing operations, business operations and technology commercialization. Prior to VentureWell, he completed a seven-year term as Innovation Director and Industrial Liaison Officer for an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center headquartered at Rice University. Mr. Davis also served as Rice’s Manager of Business Development & Licensing in the university’s Office of Technology Transfer. Prior to joining Rice University, Davis was COO of Widetronix, Inc., a semiconductor device company that spun out of Cornell University. Davis began his career in early-stage technology development and commercialization at Cornell where, as a Senior Technology Commercialization Manager in the Cornell Center for Technology, Enterprise and Commercialization (CCTEC), he was responsible for a portfolio of intellectual property covering engineering and physical sciences. Prior to his time at CCTEC, Davis was an engineer, business operations manager and new product introduction manager at IBM and he holds B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Management degrees from North Carolina State University. From 2012 to 2020 Davis served on the Board of Directors for Market Matters, Inc., an Ithaca, NY-based non-profit organization focusing on economic and business development on the African continent. In Ithaca, Davis also served as a board member for the Community Dispute Resolution Center.