Victoria Gonzalez

Vicki Gonzalez is a founding member and managing partner of Nidus Investment Partners bringing more than 25 years of executive management experience in the plant and life science market.  She brings the experience of starting businesses from both within large corporations as well as independently, providing unique insight into how to deliver results to Nidus Corporate Partners.

Operating Experience
As an entrepreneur with executive and fund raising experience and an engineer with corporate operational and management experience, Vicki provides the Partnership with deep insight and leadership skills.  Starting as an engineer at DuPont Company (1984-1988), Vicki quickly adopted an intrapreneurial role under a corporate program that provided seed money for new business initiatives.  Her first product, Opti-Safe™, introduced a novel technology, the optical disk, to store medical data.  From DuPont, Vicki earned her MBA at Washington University’s Olin Business School (1988-1990), then joined Monsanto (1990-2001), where she worked in a number of the Company’s chemical plants in manufacturing and engineering roles. Building on this operational experience, she moved into a business role managing the ingredients business for Monsanto’s dental and pharmaceutical markets.  As a Business Director she led a management team buy-out which included contract negotiation, fund raising and sourcing key hires.  Despite Monsanto’s late strategic decision to keep the business, Vicki pursued her commitment to independent start-ups, gaining management experience in several health care and life science start-up companies. She joined Graphic Surgery LLC (2002-2007), a novel healthcares services company that introduced the concept of surgery benefits management.  In her role as COO and later CEO, Vicki , raised $2.0M in capital, created intellectual property strategies, built the management team, guided product development and closed several corporate clients to help launch the product.  Vicki joined the Nidus Center for Scientific Enterprise, as CEO, in 2008 where she has helped nurture the companies in the Center while building the business case for and launching the Nidus Partnership. Her experience at both corporate and start-up companies, gives her key insight in selecting and engaging experienced entrepreneurial talent in building the foundation of the Nidus Partnership.

Vicki was appointed to the board of the Missouri Technology Corporation in 2008 in addition to participating on the board of BioGenerator, St. Louis Science Center, the St. Louis Academy of Science and Missouri Venture Forum.  Vicki also remains active with Washington University.  She has a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M and an M.B.A. degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

Email Contact Information:  vicki@niduspartners.com