Dr. Heiden was recently a member of the European Commission Expert Group on Standard Essential Patents. Dr. Heiden is the co-founder of the Berkeley Deep Tech Innovation Lab, the Dynamic Competition Initiative, ICM Global, and Increasing Diversity in Innovation. Over the past fifteen years, Dr. Heiden has also managed over 150 innovation projects with industry, university research institutes, healthcare providers, and start-up ventures.

Dr. Heiden holds degrees in engineering, technology management, and economics, and his research is at the interdisciplinary interface of economics, law, and innovation, in particular, intellectual property, innovation economics, and competition policy in knowledge-intensive sectors. Before turning his focus to the fields of innovation strategy and policy, Dr. Heiden played professional basketball in a number of European countries. This is why he is so tall.

Matthew is on the faculty at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership at UC Berkeley and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Deep Tech Innovation Lab at the Tusher Strategic Initiative for Technology Leadership at the Institute for Business Innovation, at the Haas School of Business.

He has mentored and taught hundreds of graduate students from Berkeley Law, Haas School of Business, and the Fung Institute on real-world technology commercialization projects in collaboration with startups, corporate innovation departments, and research labs including Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Matthew has been selected every year since 2011 by his peers as one of the IAM 300: The World’s Leading IP Strategists.

Wayne has served as an adjunct professor at four law schools over the last 20 years—teaching patent law,  patent litigation, copyright law, PTAB practice, and NIL licensing. He has served as an advisor on Federal Court local-rule committees and as faculty for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. And most recently, he served as a Fulbright Specialist focused on developing frameworks for AI regulation in developing economies.

She then joined the founding team of an enterprise SaaS company, Post Communications, which was acquired by Netcentives within two years for $380 million. After advising and serving in interim leadership roles for sustainability startups, which she helped sell to major companies, including the US Green Business Council and SolarCity, she co-founded a marketing technology company, Overstat, which was purchased by Tealeaf Technology (now IBM). Leah serves on the Boards of Cumplo.com, an SMB lending platform, and NameCoach, an AI- based name pronunciation and personalization platform. Leah is also an executive coach and a Lecturer for UC Berkeley’s Engineering School and DeepTech Innovation Lab. Leah’s involvement in Higher Education began in 2012 as the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Leah has specialized in commercializing new technology and set up external education partnerships for Autodesk. While serving as Partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures, she made investments aligned with each corporate investor’s strategic priorities and helped set up innovation collaborations. Leah holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA and Certificate of Public Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, an M.Sc. in Entrepreneurship and Business Design, and a Ph.D. in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Intellectual Capital Management. Dr. Ström’s research analyzes how knowledge is created, transferred, and disseminated in various types of knowledge networks—spanning university-industry engineering collaborations, mergers and acquisitions of knowledge-intensive firms, and the emergence and growth of deep tech ventures.

Prior to his Berkeley appointment, Chang spent a decade as Founder and CEO of INTELLLEX, pioneering AI-driven knowledge management solutions for the legal industry. He currently also serves as a Frontier Research Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI). His work bridges cutting-edge technological innovation with practical commercial applications and responsible governance frameworks.

Previously, she was part of the founding team that launched the iGEM Indian League across the Indian subcontinent, building its communications strategy and launching her undergraduate institution’s first bioengineering research club to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. At TIDE (Together in Development and Education), she designed and ran pilot programs for teacher training, spearheaded the internship program, and supported the enterprise development team.
Early in her career, she worked across science education, biotech research, and deep tech startups, developing skills in research translation, stakeholder engagement, and go-to-market strategy. Kavisha holds a Master of Engineering in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Technology in Bioengineering from MIT ADT University, Pune, India.