Elizabeth Hagerman, Ph.D

Elizabeth M. Hagerman, Ph.D., currently serves as Chief Innovation Officer for UW Health and Executive Director of UW Health’s Isthmus Project, an innovation initiative in partnership with the UW School of Medicine. Elizabeth is responsible for operations of the Isthmus Project, which provides a place for UW Health clinicians, staff, School of Medicine and Public Health faculty and others to seek commercialization support for their ideas and projects that aim to achieve better health outcomes or to solve problems facing UW Health patients, providers and the health system. Isthmus Project provides early venture funding as well as business mentorship to support commercialization of these ideas and also seeks to work with outside entities or entrepreneurs with innovations that could benefit the health system.

Elizabeth’s experience includes a series of industry and academic roles focused on biotechnology, product development and commercialization as well as collaborations between industry and academia. She was most recently the Chief Innovation and Strategy officer at Conexus Indiana, whose mission is to lead innovative collaborations among industry, academic and public partners. Prior to that, Elizabeth served as Vice President of Rose-Hulman Ventures, a leading university model for offering prototyping and product development services to companies while providing engineering internships to undergraduate students. Elizabeth began her career at Baxter Healthcare in the regenerative medicine business with roles in R&D, business development and medical affairs.

Hagerman earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and both master’s and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of California-Los Angeles.