Christie Canaria

Program Manager, SBIR/STTR

National Cancer Institute (NCI)

Dr. Christie Canaria is a Program Manager in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Development Center at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). She provides programmatic support to small businesses applying to the SBIR and STTR programs and has areas of expertise in biological imaging, biosensors, and nanotechnology. Dr. Canaria is a central figure in planning special center initiatives, conducting outreach activities, and coordinating communications. In 2014, she played a leading role in launching the Innovation Corps (I-Corpsô) at NIH Pilot, a program designed to support training to help project teams at NIH-funded small businesses overcome key obstacles along the path of innovation and commercialization. 

In 2013, Dr. Canaria was awarded the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship and began science policy work in Washington, DC. Previously, she managed an optical microscopy facility at DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as an imaging expert and neurobiologist; she was also a coordinator and imaging expert at the Caltech Biological Imaging Center where she developed advanced, multi-dimensional and time-lapse confocal imaging techniques. Dr. Canaria also worked in industry, expanding and optimizing surface chemistry and imaging processes for genome sequencing technologies. Dr. Canaria earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego.