Managing Director, BJC Capital Advisors
Dr. Michael J. Nowak is an experienced healthcare and high-tech institutional investor in small cap public and venture-backed private companies, serial entrepreneur, and licensed investment banker. Michael has most recently served as advisor to a leading early-stage venture capital fund and their portfolio companies, two leading universities on their innovation and commercialization efforts, industry-leading corporations, and California Life Sciences Assoc. FAST program companies. Previously he was CEO and President of a Stanford University spinout and JLABs company focused on non-viral transfection technology for cell and gene therapies where he closed a significant seed round of financing from institutional and corporate VC investors. He is Managing Partner of his own consulting and advisory firm and is Managing Director at BJC Capital, an independent boutique investment bank.
In the past Michael was a Managing Director and Head of Healthcare Investments for Yorkville Advisors, $B+ AUM multinational hedge fund. Before that he led investments and served on numerous Boards of Directors while a General Partner at leading $B Euro-US venture capital fund TVM Capital. He was also a corporate venture capitalist and business development executive at Xerox PARC and Xerox Venture Labs in Palo Alto, where he was CEO of two spinouts. Furthermore, he was a strategic management consultant and Vice President at McKinsey & Co. in an emerging technology practice, and a Program Manager at the Advanced Technology Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce. At NIST he managed two $100M+ investment programs in software and digital media technology.
Dr. Nowak earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked as a post-doctoral scientist at Bell Labs (Bellcore), Princeton University, and at the CEA research labs in Saclay and the University of Paris VI (Jussieu, now Sorbonne University), in Paris, France. He received his BA in Physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where he was a College Scholar.
