Carol Rabke joined the DOE SBIR/STTR Programs Office in July 2021 as a Technology to Market (T2M) advisor. In this role, she is focused on improving partnering of SBIR/STTR applicants and awardees providing resources to help them build the necessary relationships at each step of the development path. The goal is to improve both research and commercialization outcomes. To that end, her primary objective is to develop an SBIR/STTR partnering platform for DOE applicants/awardees (release anticipated in July 2023) and to organize virtual networking sessions and workshops on topics of interest for active DOE Phase II awardees. She also maintains several pages on partnering resources on the DOE SBIR website.
Prior to joining DOE, Carol spent over twenty years working in the SBIR/STTR community as a commercialization service provider while employed by Dawnbreaker. During this time, she worked with hundreds of SBIR/STTR funded small businesses - the bulk of which were NSF-funded or DOE-funded. She served as the program manager of Dawnbreaker’s Phase I commercialization programs for both NSF and DOE and played a key role in developing the Virtual Strategic Partner Introduction (VSPI®) Series that facilitated virtual introductions between small businesses and perspective partners from industry and the investment communities.
Carol has a Ph.D. in physical/analytical chemistry from the University of Utah where she built several scanning tunneling microscopes and an atomic force microscope for biological applications. She has authored several peer reviewed publications including articles in Science and Langmuir.