Andrei M. Manoliu

Andrei M. Manoliu, PhD, JD is an expert in structuring complex licensing, commercial and strategic deals, forming, financing and staffing high-tech and Internet ventures. He is the Managing Director of GrowthPlans LLC (founded in 2000), an independent business and financial consulting firm for emerging growth companies where he co-founded several medical device and drug discovery start-ups. Prior to founding GrowthPlans, Dr. Manoliu served as an attorney with Cooley LLP, recently appointed as a senior partner. At Cooley, he specialized in business and securities matters, leading client teams in private and public offering transactions, mergers and acquisitions and strategic technology transactions. Cooley LLP is an international law firm that represents 35% of the US companies on the Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club list; its attorneys worked on 140 life sciences corporate partnering and licensing deals since 2000 with an aggregate value of $38 billion. Since 2012, Cooley participated in over 1,000 M&A transactions for an aggregate value of $340 billion and is considered the number 1 law firm for tech and life sciences IPOs and the number 1 law firm in Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Among Dr. Manoliu’s other activities and positions, he served as the acting Chief Executive Officer of Nanomix, Inc., a company focusing on the development of applications for novel materials and nanostructures and a leader in the development of mobile point-of-care diagnostics. He has served on the Board of Directors or Board of Advisors of several private and public companies, where he has contributed his considerable expertise in the formation and financing of such businesses as well as in the structuring of complex licensing, commercial and strategic arrangements, within the United States and internationally. He studied physics at the University of Bucharest, Romania, and received an MA (1975) and a PhD (1979) in solid-state physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He then completed his legal studies at Stanford Law School, where he was awarded a J.D. in 1982 and elected to the Order of the Coif, the national law graduate honor society.