Biographies

Our team, our expertise


TIG is distinguished from other advisory firms by the blend of talents and relationships of its founders, principals, and associates.

Kelvin Chu, PhD

Kelvin Chu, Ph.D.

President and Chief Operating Officer

Kelvin Chu, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, joined The Implementation Group in 2015 after serving as an NSF program officer for three years. Kelvin has significant experience with research development, program building, and administration of research capacity-building programs, in both academia and at the federal level. He brings expertise in evaluation and assessment, private sector initiatives, and cyberinfrastructure initiatives. Kelvin has worked to support faculty pursuing extramurally-supported research by helping principal investigators and transdisciplinary teams of researcher faculty in their pursuit of funding. He has a deep familiarity with evaluation, assessment, and post-award management for research projects. As a former faculty member, research administrator, and program officer, Kelvin has first-hand knowledge of and experience in growing and supporting a research enterprise as well as practical knowledge of campus-based efforts to encourage faculty scholarship and extramural research funding. Since coming to TIG, Kelvin has helped universities bring in more than $150 million in small, medium, and large-scale awards. He served as a Program Officer at NSF in the Office Integrative Activities. At NSF, he managed projects worth $137 million in the physical, life, mathematical, and social sciences. Prior to this, Kelvin served as Senior Associate Director of a state-wide research initiative in Vermont, building research capacity and education infrastructure. As a faculty member, he received over $44 million to run large NSF- and NIH-funded centers. He was Senior Associate Project Director for the Vermont Genetics Network, a large-scale, multi-university NIH award. In addition, he was a member of the Executive Committee for the Northeast Cyberinfrastructure Consortium, a consortium of five states in the North East that collaborated on building regional cyberinfrastructure. Kelvin holds a Sc.B. in Physics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab.

Portrait Placeholder

Andrea R. Boldon

Vice President

Andrea brings 20 years of proposal development, review, refinement and production services to TIG clients. Andrea provides strategy and tactical support; internal proposal reviews; color teaming; virtual and on-site debriefs as well as proposal management and coordination services, including proposal templating, compliance tracking, direct editing and proofing. She previously served as a Press Assistant with the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. Over the last decade, Andrea has worked with a host of principal investigators to develop and secure small-, medium, and large-scale awards from the major federal agencies and private foundations.

2011110 0462M Mc Innis 2

Heather McInnis, Ph.D.

Vice President

Heather provides guidance and leadership in strategic research planning, program assessment and evaluation, and peer review systems design. She joined T.I.G. in the fall of 2020 after almost a decade of service to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – the world’s largest general scientific society – where she served as Associate Director of the Research Competitiveness Program (RCP). At T.I.G., Heather leverages her interdisciplinary science training and research development experience to assist universities, research coalitions, and program leaders advance STEM initiatives and build research excellence and capacity. A focus of her work is the design and implementation of independent, qualitative assessments of research infrastructure, institutional strategies and policies, and programmatic activities and impacts. Heather has led over 40 external reviews of large-scale, trans-disciplinary, federally funded STEM programs worth more than $600 million, and provided assessments of institutional research capacity to universities and government ministries in the U.S. and abroad to inform planning, portfolio development, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement. Heather has deep knowledge of peer review principles and essential strategies for developing grant policies, proposal review processes, and decision-making procedures. She has designed peer review processes for universities, tech-based economic development organizations, and international funding agencies, and mobilized scientific and technical experts to review thousands of research proposals ranging in topic from regenerative medicine to high-energy physics. Heather’s commitment to building research capacity stems from her interdisciplinary training (climate change science, paleoenvironmental archaeology, zooarchaeology) and experience conducting international field research projects. Heather obtained her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Oregon, and an M.S. in Quaternary Studies from the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. Prior to joining AAAS, she taught undergraduate science courses at DePaul University. Her independent archaeological research documented evidence of some of the earliest prehistoric coastal sites known in the Americas. The results were published in the journal Science (Science 281: 1830-1832).

Spelly Photo 2B

Shaaretha Pelly, Ph.D.

Vice President

Shaaretha joined TIG in 2022 with over a decade of research development experience both within the U.S. and abroad. She brings expertise in proposal development, design of scientific review schemes, programmatic assessment, portfolio development, and academic research capacity building. Shaaretha received both an NSF STTR and NIH SBIR grant to advance development of a recombinant STING agonist immunotherapy at OncoSTING LLC, where she served as Director of Scientific Affairs. Prior to this, she was the Director of Research at the Nanyang Technological University’s Institute for Health Technologies in Singapore, where she initiated medtech partnerships, oversaw the institute portfolio of programs, mentored faculty through large-scale proposal development, and worked with university leadership to strategically position the institute within the competitive national ecosystem. Shaaretha also spent three years at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Research Competitiveness Program, working with State agencies, universities, and research institutes to build research competitiveness. Here, she served as Project Director for a workshop series for STEM entrepreneurs across Africa, designed scientific review schemes, worked with hundreds of researchers on peer review panels, and conducted proposal development workshops for AAAS. Shaaretha obtained her Ph.D. in Pathobiology from the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, where she first embarked on her research development career as a Science Officer at the Center for Tuberculosis Research.

Eleanor Bowling

Eleanor M. Bowling

Associate Vice President and Director of Business Operations

Eleanor serves in the capacity of Associate Vice President and Director of Business Operations for The Implementation Group. She has been with the firm since 2008 and coordinates TIG’s internal and external review process, securing consultants in multidisciplinary science areas to review and comment on client proposals ranging from small to large-scale. She provides proposal development services, in particular, internal reviews on proposals across all major federal funding agencies. Eleanor also coordinates client capability assessments, strategic planning activities, and gathers intelligence from federal agencies to provide general advice and consultation to TIG clients. Eleanor’s experience draws from working primarily at Vanderbilt University in the fields of education and biomedical research. While at Vanderbilt, Eleanor designed and coordinated professional development summer institutes for Peabody College ranging across the disciplines and professional fields of study. Eleanor’s background also includes managing interdisciplinary Ph.D. and M.D./Ph.D. programs for the biomedical sciences at Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine. Eleanor received her BA in Political Science and Public Administration from Elon University in North Carolina. She is a AAAS Leadership Seminar in Science and Technology Policy Fellow.

Img 7145

Joseph G. Danek, Ph.D.

President Emeritus

Joe Danek serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of TIG. As TIG’s President, Joe provides consulting services to universities, schools and other not-for-profit organizations primarily in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) education and research. He has a broad understanding and extensive experience in developing, implementing, and evaluating STEM education, research programs and demonstration projects across multiple disciplines and agencies. His experience includes: consulting work at TIG over the last 20 years and a 26 year career in the Senior Executive Service (SES) at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and middle school science teaching. Joe is the former Executive Director of the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)/Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Foundation, a not-for-profit organization established by the EPSCoR jurisdictions (comprised of 28 states, DC, and Puerto Rico) to support efforts to enhance their STEM research and education capabilities. He remains a Senior Advisor to the Foundation. Prior to his position at TIG, Joe served in a variety of positions at the NSF. Over his 26 year career he developed and helped launch 16 national programs in STEM research and education that extended from K-12 though faculty/institutional development. As NSF’s Director of the Office of Systemic Reform, he managed an annual budget of over $140 million directed at improving K-12 STEM Education in rural and urban centers across the United States. In addition, he also founded and directed the agency’s EPSCoR Program and chaired the Federal-wide EPSCoR Interagency Coordinating Council. Prior to this, he was the Director, Human Resource Development Division, where he was involved in designing and directing the NSF’s initiatives to increase the participation of minorities, women, and persons with disabilities in STEM careers. Joe also served on several inter-agency senior management teams to broaden participation in science in the U.S. He earned his B.S. degree from Mount St. Mary’s College (Maryland) and his Ph.D. in Science Education from the University of Maryland, College Park.

India Allen 05

India Allen

Vice President
Janet Buckley 08

Janet Buckley

Vice President
Brian Leitner 03

Brian Leitner

Vice President
Brian Robinson 36

Brian Robinson

Vice President and General Counsel

TIG Senior Associates and Network of Disciplinary Experts

TIG’s expertise is complemented by the firm's Senior Associates, several of whom are ex-agency program officials, and disciplinary consultants, including those who have long-standing experience with institutional offices of sponsored research.

TIG's 250+ disciplinary consultants come from every sector and play a critical role in proposal development. Our reviewer confidentiality policy mandates that we keep the identity of our disciplinary consultants anonymous. However, these funded investigators, Center Directors, ex-agency officials come from academia, government, and the private sector, and have a successful 20 year track record of working with TIG to advise faculty teams, conducting pre-reviews of proposals prior to submission, and providing critical feedback and insight to individual researchers and teams to materially strengthen proposals.