Dr. Sharon Flank has devoted her career to commercializing advanced technologies, including search engines and media applications, along with innovating in additive manufacturing, intellectual property protection, quality management, and nanoprinting applications. She has a decade of experience creating AI solutions on the emerging technologies team at a defense contractor, followed by entrepreneurial experience and research collaborations.  At DataStrategy Consulting, Dr. Flank provides strategic guidance in knowledge management.

Dr. Flank worked with defense contractor SRA (now General Dynamics) to spin out its first technologies and create companies acquired by AOL (Navisoft), CA (Assentor), Chicago Tribune (Picture Network International) and then Kodak, Getty Images, and OpenText (eMotion, where, as Chief Technology Officer, she led a team of 44 engineers).

 She has authored numerous journal articles, including refereed publications in several unrelated fields, on natural language processing, image search, anti-counterfeiting, medication errors, and 3D printing, and contributed to emerging standards in additive manufacturing for ASTM and ANSI.  Dr. Flank teaches Innovation Strategy in the MTech program at the University of Maryland.  She received her A.B. from Cornell and her Ph.D. from Harvard.  She holds eleven patents, with several more pending, and has authored over 50 papers and presentations on the implementation of complex technologies.