Today, Accelerate Long Island’s Board of Directors announced Brookhaven Town Supervisor Mark Lesko as the first Executive Director of Accelerate Long Island. Lesko will start in mid- September 2012.
Accelerate Long Island is a groundbreaking regional collaboration between the Long Island Association, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Canrock Ventures, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, CA Technologies, Ernst & Young, Farrell Fritz, Hofstra University, North Shore-LIJ Health System, the Rauch Foundation and Stony Brook University to commercialize the region’s research innovations. Long Island’s world class research institutions collectively conduct over $1 billion in research annually and Accelerate Long Island will work to commercialize that research into start-up companies and high-tech jobs to transform Long Island’s economy.
Mark Lesko spearheaded with the development of Accelerate Long Island as Brookhaven Town Supervisor in 2010 and it became a regional effort under the auspices of the Long Island Association. Accelerate Long Island was created as a non-for-profit organization, was named a “transformative project” in 2011 by the Long Island Regional Economic Development Council and received a $500,000 grant to start a seed fund for early stage companies. This seed fund is matched by $750,000 from the Long Island Emerging Technologies Fund, a partnership of venture capitalists seeking to invest in early stage companies on Long Island.