Jon is the University of Iowa’s first Chief Innovation Officer. His responsibilities include economic development efforts such as UI Ventures, protostudios, UI Research Park, MADE, and TRI. His focus is on developing a foundation built around 3 pillars to support faculty and staff entrepreneurial and commercialization activity: a concierge service to connect and coordinate resources, greater access to funding sources for entrepreneurs and business expertise to support addressing unmet needs in fields across campus. Two targeted strategic areas of focus in alignment with State of Iowa initiatives are Medtech and Edtech. Jon has more than 20 years experience as an executive in the healthcare industry. Most recently, Jon worked for iRhythm Technologies, a company that develops digital bio-sensing technology and cloud-based data analytics to diagnose heart arrhythmias. He joined the San Francisco–based iRhythm in 2007. Birthed from Stanford University’s renowned Byers Center for Bio Design technology incubator, Jon joined the start up when it had three employees. He retired from iRhythm in 2017 after helping build it into a 600-employee company with roughly $100 million in annual revenue, after having created and executed the reimbursement strategy that was pivotal to the firm’s successful IPO in 2016.

Through her role with UI Ventures, Jordan provides support services for faculty spinout companies and contributes to building the startup ecosystem in Iowa City, IA. She assists the companies with business strategy, building a team, securing funding, and working with the university. Jordan also conceived and leads the Iowa MADE program to spur innovation through commercialization of faculty developed medical device products directly out of the university. Prior to joining UI Ventures, Jordan co-founded medical device startup Cardiovate and served as President and CTO.  Cardiovate developed a vascular graft to replace diseased blood vessels with a graft that promoted new tissue formation to replace the diseased vessel. Jordan received a BS in Biomedical Engineering from NC State University and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Texas at San Antonio.