Jorge Cortell
Senior International Innovation Fellow
Jorge is the Founder and Executive Director of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard in Tokyo.
He is also the Senior Advisor, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Harvard Innovation Laboratories, serving all 13 Harvard University schools, and instructor at several Harvard Medical School Executive Education programs; a Founding Partner (GP) at Unveil Pharma, board member at Lysando (pharmaceutical company world leader in antimicrobial proteins) and AugMend Health (VR for mental health), Harvard College Fund President's Associate, and Harvard HealthLab Accelerator Mentor for the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
A former Venture Partner and current investor at NLC, Europe's largest Healthtech Venture Builder (120+ health tech ventures), Jorge helped build in his portfolio 7 of them: FlashPathology, Pryfiber, Matermend, PathBrite, GenoTell, WaveFront Microscopy, and OmicSystems. Previously, as a serial entrepreneur, Jorge founded 6 startups, including a bootstrapped unicorn (5 exits and one shut down) in 3 countries and 5 industries: ManuMission, Gløbal Communications and Marketing, OneZero Software, MusicQuarium, InnoMedix, and Kanteron Systems. He has been a professional basketball player, member of the European Commission Expert Group on Venture Philanthropy and Social Investments, and UBS' Industry Leaders Network.
His innovations in healthcare technology, deployed in 15 countries to treat 80 million patients, include inventing the first open-source and model-independent AI application platform in healthcare (2019); designing and developing a multimodal platform for the rapid diagnosis, intervention scenarios, and resource planning for pandemics (introduced days after Covid19 was declared a pandemic in 2019); inventing the first precision medicine software platform (2014); designing the first vendor-neutral digital pathology dicomizer (2012); and developing the first commercially available augmented reality system for surgery (in 2008).
As an educator, he has delivered keynote talks at events like HIMSS, RSNA, World Longevity Forum, and BioAsia, guest lectures at institutions like Oxford, MIT, and Stanford, while having taught Innovation for years at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the Open University of Catalonia. At Harvard, Jorge serves as facilitator in a number of workshops and executive education classes.
First generation college student, he graduated from the University of Oxford (Computer Science), MIT (Entrepreneurship Development Program), and the University of Valencia (postgraduate in Clinical Genomics), receiving innovation and academic awards from: NASA, HIMSS, IBM, Digital Pathology Association, Frost & Sullivan, and the Wall Street Journal.