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 ’96, M’98, Director of Community Relations and Strategic Partnerships
Carlos Espinosa is the director of community relations and 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 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 in 1996 and then an M.A. in Public Policy in 1998 from Trinity College.
See What Carlos Built at Trinfo
Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Faculty Lead
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is an award-winning historian. She is the author of Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World, which won the André Simon Award, and two other books. She was named one of the “Future 50 Under 40” of the global wine industry by the WSET and ISWC in 2019. She teaches the popular The World History of Modern Wine for EdX.org. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Queen’s University Belfast, a B.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University, and a Level 3 Award in Wine from the WSET. She has taught at the University of Cambridge, the University of Exeter, and the American University of Paris. An American raised in London, she lives in Connecticut, USA and is a professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Trinity College.
Dr. Ewa Syta, Faculty Lead (on leave)
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”.
Joe Catrino, Design Lead
Joe Catrino leads a team of highly dedicated professionals within the Trinity College Career & Life Design Center. Joe’s expertise includes his focus on design thinking, having been trained at Stanford in life design and design thinking work. In this, he encourages individuals to be innovative in their ability to problem-solve, especially as it relates to planning and executing personal and professional life goals. Through his teaching and knowledge of the “design thinking” framework, Joe has been instrumental in transforming the way students think and problem-solve their career goals.
Joe has over 20 years of experience in higher education, in various capacities including admissions, enrollment, marketing, and career development, at institutions such as Quinnipiac University, Yale University, and the University of Hartford. Since Joe joined Trinity in 2015, he has strategically collaborated with colleagues across campus to identify and implement creative and forward-thinking programs and initiatives that address evolving employment and education trends, such as connecting the liberal arts to real-world success, and fully supporting the College’s mission. Joe serves as an agent of change and continues to represent Trinity in a progressive way by sharing his passion for design thinking, personal branding, and preparing students for the future of work, through his presenting at various conferences across the U.S., in addition to instructing a first-year seminar, a J-term course, a computer science course on prototyping, and delivering lectures for various college courses across campus.
Joe holds an MBA from Quinnipiac University, an M.A. in communication from the University of Hartford, and a B.A. in history and communications/public relations from Marist College. Joe is pursuing a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems & Workforce Development at Mississippi State University.
Reid Lewis, Entrepreneur 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 B.S. in computer science with a second major in economics and a concentration in mathematics in 1984 from Duke University.
Rick Cleary, Entrepreneur 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.
