Larkin comes from Ford Motor Company where she was the Chief of Staff to the Chief Technology Officer and Vice-President of Research and Advanced Engineering. In that role, she led Ford’s global university research program, government-funded contracts, research and information services, budget and procurement, and global operations. She represented Ford on USCAR, a tri-member research consortia with General Motors and Stellantis, and USDRIVE, a Department of Energy led consortia with automakers, utility, and energy companies in areas of pre-competitive research including advanced propulsion, advanced storage, fuel cell, materials, among others. Prior to joining Ford, Larkin was the Chief Innovation Officer at the public-private partnership, American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500+ acre real-world test facility for connected and autonomous vehicles where she led ACM’s funding strategy and secured $62M of private investment from strategic global companies. She also was responsible for ACM’s education and workforce strategy and created an academic consortium of 15 universities and colleges. Larkin began her career as a corporate attorney in Toronto, focusing on mergers and acquisitions, eventually making her way to Michigan where she was a transactional attorney for GM’s divestitures prior to standing up Delphi. She has strong commercialization and business development skills, having been retained by the Global Commercialization Group at the University of Texas in Austin where new technologies were evaluated and commercialized using a NASA-based methodology.