Farley Welcomes Four Accomplished Faculty Members
The Farley Center is thrilled to announce the addition of the following faculty members to its team. These individuals bring a wealth of entrepreneurial experience and expertise to the Farley Center, where they will teach new courses and co-teach the popular Principles of Entrepreneurship class this fall.
Michael Saunders
Michael Saunders joins Farley as a co-instructor for the new course ENTREP 395: History of Innovation. With close to three decades of experience in startups, Saunders is a seasoned entrepreneur, operator, and investor. Notably, he founded Campusfood.com, which was acquired by Grubhub in 2011. Currently, Saunders serves as the CEO of Captain, a company leveraging blockchain and other new technologies to disrupt the sports and concert tickets industry. As an Entrepreneur in Residence at The Garage at Northwestern in its early years, he was a valuable mentor to students pursuing their own ventures. Saunders has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Matt Barnard
Co-teaching the new course ENTREP 395: Entrepreneurship in Synthetic Biology is Matt Barnard, cofounder and former CEO and chair of Plenty, an indoor vertical farm company that is a significant player in the agricultural technology sector. He is also a cofounder and CEO of BCD Bioscience and earlier, he was president and COO of Tetra Tech. Barnard has a BA and BM from Northwestern and earned an MS as a Sloan Fellow at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Sophie Davis and Lilliana Robinson
In a collaborative effort, Sophie Davis and Lilliana Robinson will co-teach Principles of Entrepreneurship alongside longtime Farley faculty member Neal Sales-Griffin. Davis iscurrently an analyst at Rising Stars at Techstars, a global network for entrepreneurs. She focuses on investments in underrepresented founders of color in the US. She is also involved in business operations at Atomic and was recognized on Chicago Inno's '25 under 25' list in 2019. She is a graduate of Little Joe Ventures, a Northwestern fellowship program for undergraduates who show exceptional promise in entrepreneurship, and has a BA from Northwestern.
Lilliana Robinson, who will co-teach with Davis and Sales-Griffin, serves asan investment manager at Techstars. She is an alumni mentor at The Garage and previously worked as a software engineer at Captain. Robinson, too, earned a spot on Chicago Inno's '25 under 25' list in 2020 and is a graduate of the Little Joe Ventures fellowship program. She has a BS from Northwestern.