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Patricia Lorenz has a BA from Yale University. She acquired an MBA (New York University) and became a Certified Public Accountant while working as an auditor in New York City for Peat, Marwick (now part of KPMG) and as an international banker with Bankers Trust (acquired by Deutsche Bank). She came to Canada as a loan officer in the Corporate Real Estate Department of the Bank of Montreal. She then spent 3 years in the tax department of Thorne Riddell (now part of KPMG), becoming a Chartered Accountant in Ontario with a focus on corporate reorganizations and US taxation, until she was hired by a client.
With that client she helped turn around a US foodservice company operating east of the Mississippi (subsequently sold to Sara Lee), acted as a SVP of a distribution company traded on the New York Stock Exchange with operations in both the US and Canada, managed a USDA regulated fresh salad company serving New York City, and acted as General Manager of a small trade book publisher. She joined Oracle Corporation as the Director of Finance for its Americas Division (North and South America except the US) and subsequently had strategic (all planning and support functions) and operating responsibility (for the tech support line of business) in Canada.
Her next role was as a CFO for a large Canadian retailer and then as VP Finance of the Addiction Research Foundation, where she first started to work with patents. During this latter time she helped fund her spouse's first startup, which became the first Canadian biotech to go public on Nasdaq. She then became a consultant for financial system implementations and costing systems as well as to small angel groups, performing due diligence and stepping in on behalf of investors when necessary. Of the 7 angel and seed investments in which she and her spouse participated in the 1990's, all but one made money.
Having become very interested in research and biotechnology she then earned a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine and a lesser degree in horticulture from the University of Guelph. For 5 years she ran the technology licencing office at the University of Guelph, a university that outperformed its peers in commercialization. In that role she was a co-author of grants in excess of $6 million to establish a multi-institutional tech transfer network in SW Ontario to cross-train interns within it.
Currently she is president of an investment management company focused on innovative and fast growing public companies and, in addition to serving on the NACO and NAO-O boards, also serves on the Research Management Committee for AllerGen (a National Centre of Excellence for investigating the relationships among allergies and asthma, genes and the environment).
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