Natalia Bishop
Director of Entrepreneurship
A multiple-time founder, Natalia Bishop has made a career at the intersection of social impact and business success. She is the founder of Story, a local entrepreneurial hub and coworking space focused on helping traditionally marginalized founders and remote workers get the resources they need to succeed. She's launched and scaled an edtech SaaS startup, attended Stanford University's VC Unlocked in alignment with her mission to bring access to capital for historically marginalized founders scaling health equity solutions for their communities, and brings her background as a General Partner in a VC fund to her role. She has served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Amplify Louisville and Board Member for the Wild Accelerator, and has mentored and inspired hundreds of founders, potential founders, and students.
Gabriell Gassaway
Director of Research Core
gabriell.gassaway@louisville.edu
Having been at the front-lines of public health as a program implementor, educator, community organizer, and executive strategist, Ms. Gassaway has worked at the intersection of research and practice. She has spent time at both the state and local levels of public health work, including serving as Chief of Staff to the Louisville Director of Public Health during the city’s nationally recognized response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Ms. Gassaway’s experience as a researcher and practitioner, in addition to her own research on the intersection of health, housing, and the environment, enables her to structure data and research proposals that are applicable across multiple sectors. She is also a part-time dog trainer.
Tim McClain
Director of Administration
timothy.mcclain@louisville.edu
A seasoned project manager with more than 20 years of analysis, operational, and project management experience with Fortune 100 companies. Tim has overseen the successful roll-out of several multi-million-dollar initiatives, focusing on aligning the reporting needs of division executives with the workflow constraints of front-line workers. The result is measurable operational and customer experience improvements. In addition, he has leveraged his data analysis acumen to develop performance metrics and automated evaluation systems in various professional contexts. For the Health Equity Innovation Hub, Tim acts as a bridge to convert the vision of each Hub director into operational processes. Additionally, he leads an administrative staff that attends to the work needs of the whole Hub.
Ben Reno-Weber
Deputy Director
A Louisville native, Ben started his career with the World Bank’s global microfinance unit, focused on creating greater access to capital among marginalized communities, particularly in the Balkans and former Soviet Union. He earned an MBA and MPA from Harvard’s Business and Kennedy School and joined the Boston Consulting Group in 2009, where he focused on corporate culture and change management. On his return to Kentucky, he has founded and run multiple social enterprises and raised more than $2M in angel and seed stage investment. As Director of the Microsoft funded Future of Work Initiative, he worked to build skills in the data-economy workforce, with a particular focus on marginalized communities and health.
Monica Wendel
Hub Director
A nationally recognized thought leader in structural and social determinants of health and health equity, Wendel has overseen more than $20 million in research grants across multiple disciplines that have engaged communities and translated research into real-world impact. She was recruited to UofL in 2014 to build a community-engaged, policy-relevant health equity research portfolio. Wendel’s team has catalyzed a major shift in the national research agenda regarding youth violence, emphasizing racial justice as an upstream prevention strategy. Wendel has a 20-year track record of building high-performing teams that bring together people from diverse backgrounds to achieve sustainable impact across multiple sectors. Specific to the Health Equity Innovation Hub team, Wendel contributes her vision for advancing health equity, engaging across multiple disciplines and community sectors, her attention to satisfying differing needs of different constituencies, and her willingness to try strategies that have not been tried before.