Maryann Feldman is the Jeffery S. Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Business Economics at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Prior to joining Rotman, Dr. Feldman held the position of Policy Director for Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and prior to that she was a research scientist at the Institute on Policy Studies at the University. Dr. Feldman is on the Advisory Panel for the U.S. National Science Foundation's Program on Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science and Technology. Her research and teaching interests focus on the areas of innovation, the commercialization of academic research and the factors that promote technological change and economic growth. A large part of Dr. Feldman's work concerns the geography of innovation – investigating the reasons why innovation clusters spatially and the mechanisms that support and sustain industrial clusters.