Interim Director
(608) 515-8398
- Abram Becker is Interim Director at Discovery to Product. As Interim Director, Abram works with the D2P team and campus community to set and implement strategic plans and programs that facilitate the commercialization of faculty, staff, and student innovation while also supporting the regional startup ecosystem. Abram has worked at Discovery to Product since 2016 as a Mentor-in-Residence and Innovation and Commercialization Specialist, supporting faculty, staff and students working to translate their ideas and inventions into innovations that can positively impact society and the world.
- In addition to his time at UW-Madison, Abram has over 20 years of diverse strategic, operational, and financial experience gained from roles working with startups, nonprofits, and industry-leading multinational corporations. As Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Ipsos, a global market research and consulting firm, he worked with teams across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to help healthcare development organizations and pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, diagnostic, and healthcare services companies make data-driven clinical, commercial, and corporate strategy decisions. Before Ipsos, Abram worked in healthcare equity research as a member of an Institutional Investor ranked analyst team at UBS Investment Bank. At UBS, he launched and maintained equity research coverage on a mix of companies commercializing medical devices, diagnostics, prescription therapeutics, and consumer health products. He joined UBS from Bristol-Myers Squibb, where his global and U.S. roles included managing global market research and business intelligence for a pharmaceutical product that achieved $5 billion in annual global sales.
- Abram graduated from Duke University with a BS in Biology and later received an MBA with a Certificate in Health Sector Management from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke. Between his times in North Carolina, he worked in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and in the San Francisco Bay Area at a boutique biopharmaceutical consulting firm, two business information/SaaS (Software as a Service) startups, and a startup provider of IT and consumer information services. During his MBA, Abram was a student consultant to two spinouts from the Duke Medical Center and co-president of the Duke Startup Challenge. During his time at UW–Madison, Abram has also enrolled in graduate coursework in Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), Computer Science, Biostatistics & Medical Informatics, and Population Health Science, first as a special student and then (and currently) as a part-time graduate student.
