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, 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 16 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.
Carlos Espinosa, Director of Community Relations and Strategic Partnerships
Carlos Espinosa is the director of Community Relations & Strategic Partnerships for Trinity’s Entrepreneurship Center and the Office of Community Relations. Carlos is responsible for positioning The Center as a critical stakeholder within Hartford’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem and bridging the assets of Trinity College with Hartford. Carlos works closely with staff to build, manage, and grow relationships with cross-sector stakeholders whose entrepreneurial priorities are consistent with the College’s mission and who enhance the Center’s academic and co-curricular programs through applied learning opportunities that help Trinity College students expand their innovative and entrepreneurial mindset, career experience, and professional networks.
Carlos joined Trinity College in August 2000, as the head of Trinfo.Cafe and has served in many roles representing the school in the community, including representing the College on the boards of Launch[H]artford, Forge City Works, Southside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance (SINA), and the Betty Knox Foundation. Carlos Espinosa received his B.A. in Educational Studies and Sociology (1996) and then an M.A. in Public Policy in 1998 from Trinity College.
See What Carlos Built at Trinfo.Cafe
Nisha Joshee, Program Manager
Nisha Joshee serves as the program manager for the Entrepreneurship Center at Trinity College. Her responsibilities include developing, implementing, and managing innovation and entrepreneurship programs, such as the Innovation Fellowship and Summit Innovation Challenge, as well as other initiatives sponsored by the center. She brings over 20 years of experience in higher education in various capacities including program and project management in institution-wide initiatives, organization leadership, academic department operations, and student affairs. Collaborating with students, faculty, staff, and community, Nisha aims to empower students to bridge liberal arts education with innovation and entrepreneurship, cultivating inclusive opportunities as global leaders.
Nisha holds an M.S. in Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership and a B.S. in Organizational Leadership from Charter Oak State College. She is currently pursuing an M.B.A. at the University of Connecticut.
Contact:
860-297-5322
[email protected]
Trinity’s Entrepreneurship Programs
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”.
Reid Lewis, Entrepreneurs 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 BS in Computer Science with a second major in Economics and a concentration in Mathematics in 1984 from Duke University.
Rick Cleary, Entrepreneurs 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.
