Nigel Stokes BA BEc
Chairman

Nigel Stokes’s connection with technology start-ups began in 1985 as a founding shareholder and Director of Continental Venture Capital. This interest developed as a CSIRO Board Member and as a Director of Gene Shears (a CSIRO spin-ff in the area of catalytic ribozymes). His other work covers public finance with the Commonwealth and NSW Treasuries and corporate finances with Bankers Trust Australia, focusing on privatisation of government-owned financial institutions.

Brigitte Smith
Director

Brigitte Smith co-founded GBS Venture Partners in 1996 with 10 years experience in business strategy and hands-on management of start-up company operations. Before joining GBS she worked with high-tech start-up companies in Australia and the US in fundraising and business development roles. She also spent several years at Bain & Company, a strategic management consulting firm. Brigitte is on the board of GBS portfolio companies Dynamic Hearing, Kalobios Inc, Neuromonics, Proacta Inc, and Cortical. 
 
Brigitte earned her Bachelor of Chemical Engineering with honours from the University of Melbourne, her Master of Business Administration with honours from the Harvard Business School and her Master of International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, USA. Brigitte is a Fellow of The Australian Institute of Company Directors and an adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Business School, where she teaches Entrepreneurial Finance. 

Prof Eric Morand
Director

Eric is also a Professor of Medicine, Monash University, based at the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases at Monash Medical Centre. He is an acknowledged expert in MIF research and in glucocorticoid-regulated proteins, and is an author of over 85 papers in peer-reviewed journals in the area of inflammatory diseases. Eric's laboratory first identified the role of MIF in rheumatoid arthritis and SLE, and is a co-founder of Cortical.  His academic research group has won grants from the NIH, National Health and Medical Research Council Australia, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and Arthritis Foundation of Australia. He is also the Deputy Director, Rheumatology Unit, Monash Medical Centre, Melbourne, Australia. As such he acts as a specialist physician in Rheumatology over 17 years.