The Entrepreneurship Center is staffed with passionate innovators and entrepreneurs who support students, faculty, staff, alumni, partners, sponsors, and other participants in the Trinity Innovation ecosystem.
Danny Briere, Ruane Family Executive Director
The inaugural director of the center is Danny Briere, who brings to this role more than four decades of experience as an inventor and entrepreneur. He has started multiple successful firms—including TeleChoice, which focuses on leading-edge, high-impact technologies—and he has served as a consultant to more than 200 start-ups. Briere has a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Duke University, where he majored in public policy and economics. He served on the board of Duke University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship initiative for a decade. His experiences span multiple industries, including telecom, internet technology, aerospace, alternative energy, health and medical, social networking, education tech, and youth-oriented non-profits. He holds 21 patents with several more pending.
At the policy level, Briere has supported innovation ecosystems in partnership with universities, companies, and government, including in Connecticut. He was the CEO and co-founder of Startup Connecticut, a statewide initiative to help start-ups drive job creation, which ultimately morphed into CTNext. Briere has successfully worked to promote innovation among young people, including as a longstanding board member of Connecticut’s Invention Convention and as chief entrepreneurship officer at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. He also is the co-author of more than 15 books and more than 1,000 articles in telecommunications, computer networking, and other topics.
Dr. Ewa Syta, Faculty Lead
Dr. Ewa Syta, an associate professor of computer science, received her Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University. Prior to joining Yale, she earned her B.S. and M.S. in computer science and cryptology from Military University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests lie in computer security and distributed systems. The long-term objective of her research is to bring cutting-edge cryptographic techniques to real-world applications to shape tomorrow’s digital world. She has been working on effective identity management methods, stronger anonymous communication technologies, practical privacy-preserving authentication protocols, unbiasable distributed randomness protocols, ways to keep Internet authorities honest and accountable, and most recently, on blockchain technologies, and provable security for real-world protocols. Her current research work is funded by the NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Medium Collaborative Award: “Applied Cryptographic Protocols with Provably Secure Foundation”.
Maria Dyane, Associate Director of Strategy and Student Development
Maria is a strategic leader and educator who designs and drives initiatives that connect career development, innovation, and entrepreneurship to meaningful student and institutional growth. With a background in strategy, management consulting, and public policy, Maria brings an analytical and global lens to leadership and program design – bridging sectors to transform ideas into frameworks and vision into measurable impact.
Known as a thoughtful weaver of people, purpose, and possibility, Maria integrates design thinking, data-informed strategy, and cross-cultural insight to build environments where learning is intentional, collaboration is authentic, and impact is lasting. At Trinity College, Maria shapes and executes strategies that help students design purposeful lives, strengthen partnerships, and advance innovation across the college and beyond.
Reid Lewis, Entrepreneur in Residence
Reid helps students develop their innovations and turn them into startup companies following the Lean Startup Method first introduced at Stanford University and now taught nation-wide by the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps. His real-world experience as an entrepreneur provides invaluable context to Trinity College students who are just starting their journeys and helps the students expand their innovative and entrepreneurial mindset, career experience, and professional networks.
Reid has founded, led, and sold several technology companies including Group Logic and Proxidyne and advised many more allowing him to advise from a position of experience.
Reid earned a B.S. in computer science with a second major in economics and a concentration in mathematics in 1984 from Duke University.
Rick Cleary, Entrepreneur in Residence
Rick Cleary ’85 is an entrepreneur with 30 years’ experience in high growth, turnaround and start-up companies in the US and SEA. He co-founded specialty finance company CYS which he IPO’d on the NYSE, and served as COO. Before CYS, he started Iron Mountain’s (NYSE:IRM) digital archive business, and ran Thomson Reuters’ First Call operations in SEA. After graduating from Trinity, Rick was at Xerox and DLJ.
Rick has a B.A. from Trinity and an M.B.A. from Cornell in Entrepreneurial Finance, where he was an adjunct professor. He served on Trinity’s Board of Fellows, as a trustee of the University of Virginia Architecture School, and the Concord Conservatory of Music.
Kenneth Kousen, Visiting Professor of the Practice in Computer Science and Associate Director for STEM Initiatives in the Entrepreneurship Center
In addition to teaching AI and Software Design courses for the Computer Science department, Ken supervises student projects through the Entrepreneurship Center on topics related to agentic coding and applications of AI to practical problems in industry. He also develops and delivers AI training programs for working professionals, helping bridge the gap between academic research and real-world implementations.
Evan Field, Marketing and Operations Support Specialist and Innovation Hub Manager
Evan M. Field is the Marketing and Operations Support Specialist at the Trinity Entrepreneurship Center, where he supports programming, outreach, and communications. He also manages the Innovation Center in Downtown Hartford, creating a dynamic space for student collaboration and community programming.
