About the Speaker

Andrea Belz is the inaugural Vice Dean of Transformative Initiatives at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering (USC Viterbi), where she is a Research Director in Computational Systems and Technologies at the Information Science Institute and a Professor of Practice in Industrial and Systems Engineering. She specializes in engineering policy and technology strategy and serves as Director of Translational Strategy of the California Defense Ready Electronics and Microdevices Superhub (California DREAMS), and Director of the Center for Research in Space Technologies (CREST). She also serves as a Senior Advisor at the Aerospace Corporation. At USC Prof. Belz founded the Management of Innovation, Entrepreneurial Research, and Venture Analysis (MINERVA) research group to explore federal interventions in deep technology startups and, more recently, the labor market in deep-tech industries, including the semiconductor and defense sectors.

Previously she served as Division Director at the United States National Science Foundation, where she oversaw the agency's principal applied research activities and $350 M in annual appropriations, funding a total of 1,000 startups. Earlier she served as the inaugural Vice Dean of Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship at USC Viterbi. She spent ten years in the Mission Systems Concepts Division at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory while consulting to venture capital firms, startups, and innovative organizations such as Avery Dennison, BP, Caltech, the US National Academy of Engineering, Occidental Petroleum, and UCLA. A long-time member of the Pasadena Angels investment group, she represented them on the Board of Caltech laser spinoff Ondax for eight years, until its successful acquisition by Coherent (NASD:COHR). She holds a PhD in physics from Caltech and a BS in physics from the University of Maryland at College Park. She currently serves as President of the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management (TEMS) Society.