Meet the Team

As Director of Finance and Operations for the Polsky Center, Tim Honaker is responsible for the Center’s financial and administrative support infrastructure.

Tim Honaker joined the UChicagoTech as Chief Operating Officer in September 2003. His responsibilities include managing all aspects of the office’s financial and administrative support infrastructure. In addition he provides support and guidance to the office’s efforts in education technology commercialization.

Tim has spent most of his career as an entrepreneur focused on the use of information technology to streamline business processes. He was the Vice-President and General Manager of a Menasha Corporation start-up division that revolutionized the use of logistics technologies to improve supply chain productivity. The business operates today as National Consolidated Services and is a major supply chain partner to Walgreens Corporation. Earlier he was Senior Vice-President of Operations for a management team that purchased and took private a U.S.-based financial publishing and training subsidiary of Pearson. The business was later sold to the Washington Post for a 30-fold return to the original investors and operates today as Kaplan Professional Schools.

Tim received his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and MBA in Finance from Indiana University and is a Registered Certified Public Accountant in the State of Illinois. He has been an active member of the Association of University Technology Managers, Counsel of Logistics Management, American Association of Publishers, Direct Marketing Association, and Illinois CPA Society.

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Wolfgang Connell works on programmatic partnership opportunities both within and outside the University of Chicago community. This includes the University’s partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Laboratory Corps Program in partnership with Argonne and Fermilab and other programs created to benefit entrepreneurs at the Polsky Center.

Doreen manages the organization’s assets through the development, input, analysis, and continuous improvement of financial systems and reports required to provide accurate financial information to the Polsky Center’s stakeholders, and she ensures adequate controls are maintained to safeguard assets and that financial and human resource-related business processes comply with University of Chicago policies.

Doreen Mitchell joined UChicagoTech as Director of Finance in January 2007. In addition to managing all of the office’s accounting and financial reporting functions and providing financial support to the Polsky Center team, Doreen works closely with the Director of Finance and Operations, as well as with the University’s Comptroller’s and Budget Offices, to ensure seamless integration between the University’s and UChicagoTech’s operations. Further, she oversees the Polsky Center’s Human Resource functions.

Before joining the University, Doreen spent her career working for both for-profit and not-for-profit entities. She was the Controller for The American Dietetic Association and The American Dietetic Association Foundation, a Professional Association of over 70,000 members. She went on to become the Controller for Casa Central, the largest Hispanic social services agency in the Midwest. At Casa, Doreen worked with many different Federal, State and Local Agencies and was responsible for accurate reporting and recording of grant monies. Most recently, she was the Vice-President Controller and Chief Compliance Officer for Ibbotson Associates (now a wholly owned subsidy of Morningstar, Inc.), a leading authority on asset allocation and registered investment advisor with the SEC. In addition to her accounting and financial management responsibilities, she was instrumental in creating and implementing Ibbotson’s SEC mandated compliance policies and procedures.

Doreen received her Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Eastern Illinois University and an MBA in Finance from DePaul University. She is an active member of the Association of University Technology Managers.

Michael Wilson manages the implementation of the processes and technologies that maintain corporate information at the highest levels of accuracy and relevance. This requires migrating related, but disconnected, information from multiple sources into a single, Web-accessible data warehouse. He also develops and maintains the interfaces that allow users to easily access relevant financial, document imaging, and patent prosecution information via a private intranet.

Michael Wilson joined UChicagoTech as the Manager of Data Quality in August 2005. His initial mandate included data migration from legacy applications, as well as coordinating the cleaning of thirty years worth of technology transfer data. This evolved into a responsibility for the quality, retention, and reuse of all of the organization’s operational information, utilizing the latest industry best practices and business process optimization techniques.

Prior to joining the University, Michael cultivated a long history of creating web services to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of business organizations, dating back to the dawn of the public Internet in 1995. He has done HTML coding, graphic design, database design, UNIX and Windows server administration, application programming, E-commerce development and project management for numerous companies.

Most recently, Michael was the Manager of Web Development at Infinity Resources. There, he was responsible for operations and development of several E-commerce web sites, the largest being DeepDiscountDVD.com, and expanded online operations to precipitate a 33% growth rate in sales. Prior to that, Michael served as the Manager of Web Development at NeuStar, Inc. There, he established the Web Services Department during the spin-off from parent company Lockheed Martin, including staffing, technology architecture, and capacity planning.

Michael received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Indiana University in 1997. In 2002, he earned an MBA with concentration in IT management from Indiana University. He then became an Adjunct Professor at Indiana University in 2003, and continues to teach E-commerce at the undergraduate level. Michael is an active board member of LakeNet, a not-for-profit web community firm in Lake County, Indiana.