Debbie Hart, founding President and CEO of BioNJ, is dedicated to the mission and work of BioNJ of ensuring a robust life sciences ecosystem in New Jersey. She worked alongside New Jersey’s biotechnology industry leaders to establish BioNJ in 1994 and has been pursuing this passion ever since.
She has been active on the boards and committees of numerous government and academic institutions over her career. She was appointed by Governor Christie and Lt. Governor Guadagno to the Council on Innovation and is a member of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s (EDA) Technology Advisory Board as well as the Institute for Life Science Entrepreneurship. Debbie has served on the transition teams of several governors, as Chair of EDA’s Commercialization Center for Innovative Technologies and appointed by two Governors to serve on the New Jersey Israel Commission for her work in economic development.
A strong advocate for advancing education, Debbie has served as a board member of the Rutgers University Blanche and Irwin Lerner Center for the Study of Pharmaceutical Management at Rutgers University Business School, the Advisory Board of the College of Science and Mathematics at Montclair University, the Rothman Institute of Entrepreneurship at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Silberman College of Business and the Science Advisory Board at Rider University as well as the advisory boards for the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s (NJIT) Biomedical Engineering Program, Monmouth University’s School of Science, Technology and Engineering and as a Director of the Liberty Science Center’s Women’s Leadership Council.
Debbie served on the advisory board that guided the establishment of the nationally recognized Monmouth County Biotechnology High School and as a member of the New Jersey Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) Advisory Board. Debbie has been named as a NJBIZ New Jersey’s Best 50 Women in Business honoree. In March 2014 in commemoration of Women’s History Month, Debbie was nominated by Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt and honored by the New Jersey General Assembly as a Woman Advancing Science. In May 2014, Debbie was named as one of 50 people to PolitickerNJ’s Health Care Power List of 2014.
Most recently, Debbie was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in Biotechnology by Scientific American Worldview; as one of HudsonMod Magazine’s 2015 list of Women in Power along with Diane Von Furstenberg, Ivanka Trump, Sandra E. Peterson, Sheri McCoy and Nina Mitchell Wells; one of New Jersey’s top CEOs by COMMERCE Magazine; one of New Jersey’s 2015 Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs & Business Owners by Leading Women Entrepreneurs and for the fifth time in 2017 to the NJBIZ Power 100, a listing of the 100 most influential people in New Jersey business.