The top 25: Julie Goonewardene, CIO, UT Horizon Fund

For someone who regards herself as statistically unemployable as a first-generation American woman who did not study at an Ivy League university, Julie Goonewardene has achieved far more than simply finding any sort of job.

While she modestly puts her opportunities for success down to good mentoring, Goonewardene, now chief innovation officer (CIO) and human resources (HR) officer at University of Texas (UT) System over the past four years has quickly helped reshape the innovation mission across the system’s eight academic and six healthcare institutions.

As CIO she has used a “new methodology to identify, test and evaluate programs with the potential to create meaningful and financially sustainable value, incorporating private sector practices where appropriate while respecting the mission and traditions of an enduring public asset”.

Adding the HR post in June gave her greater responsibility to create the conditions for the next generations’ successes “by applying innovation to human resources and talent to anticipate and address the needs of the current and future workforce for UT System and Texas employers”.

The UT Connects Talent platform has been described as a Monster meets Match mash-up to enable entrepreneurial companies to find staff and the different campuses – eight of the 14 have been joined up so far – to help their students. Goonewardene said: “Austin is different from El Paso and by building the largest university mentor network [in Connects Talent] we can provide face-to-face and software for virtual mentoring. It is a cost-effective and technology-based solution.”

Goonewardene had originally joined the system in September 2014 as associate vice-chancellor for innovation and strategic investment and as managing director the UT Horizon Fund. Since the start of 2015, she has restructured its focus to providing follow-on funding rather than lead funding of pre-seed stage spinouts from UT System.

Having quickly exited a third of the initial portfolio, Horizon’s portfolio now includes 19 active portfolio companies and active commitments worth $50m, of which $20m has been invested. Deals include Accordion, Admittance Technologies, Aeglea Biotherapeutics, Alafair Biosciences, Apollo Endosurgery, Astrocyte Pharmaceuticals, Cardiovate, Cerebri, Decisio, DNAtrix Therapeutics, Emit, Fiberio, Latakoo, LungTherapeutics, Lynx Labs, M87, MicroTransponder, MolecularMatch, PLX, Rapamycin and GenXCom.

Goonewardene is board observer for Cerebri, LungTherapeutics, and GenXComm.

Some of these spinouts are showing promising signs. Alafair has a technology invented by engineers at UT Austin with the potential to change tendon repair healing after surgery by reducing scar tissue, increasing mobility and helping patients get back to their normal activities faster.

Goonewardene was able to move relatively quickly given her prior experience as an entrepreneur and university venture investor. Before UT System, she was president at the Centre for Technology Commercialisation to monetise University of Kansas intellectual property-based assets.

Earlier, she had conceptualised, raised and managed Purdue’s first venture fund after overseeing as CEO the acquisition of her software company, Cantilever Technologies, in 2004.

Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, she was in consultancy and advocacy remains a powerful part of her skills having stepped down as an innovation adviser to the US government’s Department of Commerce only in May last year.