He is ex-officio member of the Board of Governors, International Practice Section, Virginia State Bar. He was a participating member of the International Trade Working Group of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. He is on the Board of Directors of The Energy Bar Company and the U.S.-Iraq Business Council. He is Managing Partner of Capital House Merchant Banking and J J & B, an investment partnership. He is President of Capital Baseball, Inc. and was co-owner of the Prince William Cannons Professional Baseball Club from 1991 through 1994.

He is a member of the Board of Directors of The Marrow Foundation, and the Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation (which he founded in 1983), and has served as President of the Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation. He served on the Board of Directors of the National Marrow Donor Program from 1988 through 2000, and was Chairman of its Public Policy Committee and Audit Committee. He is Vice-Chairman of The Institute at Biltmore, which is a leading consultancy on the establishment and operation of non-profit organizations. Dr. Fisher was instrumental in securing passage of the National Organ Transplant Act in 1984, which laid the foundation for solid organ and marrow transplantation in the United States.

Dr. Fisher is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Law, and Who's Who in America. He has authored four books on international trade and investment, including International Trade and Investment: Regulating International Business, co-author with John Barton (Little, Brown & Company), which has been used as the standard casebook on international trade and investment in many law schools in the United States.

Bart is pictured sitting with a giant panda when he met with officials from the Ministry of Forestry and local officials from the Sichuan Province Panda Reserve during a recent visit to China.

Patrick J. Hughes
Founder, President & CEO

Patrick is an entrepreneur who recently sold his interests in an intellectual property portfolio of patents, trademarks and copyrights based upon interactive television sports games to a Fortune 1000 company controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. He has owned and operated Fantasy Sports Properties, Inc. and created Fantasysports.com over the past 17 years that enlisted sponsorships, endorsements or keynotes with the Miller Brewing Company, Fox Sports, Sierra Sports, John Madden, Terry Bradshaw, James Brown, Brett Favre, Mike Shanahan, Cal Ripken, Jr., Grant Hill and Mike Richter.

Patrick started his career in sales and marketing with two Fortune 500 companies, the last with IBM and attained status as the leading senior sales representative for the national sales force for two consecutive years. He then built a successful equipment leasing brokerage business, which he ultimately sold to a Fortune 500 company.

He holds a B. S. Degree in Marketing from the University of Maryland and is on the Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools Marketing Advisory Board. His family has a long history of personal giving as four of his aunts became catholic nuns (two of whom still assist in the operations of the Good Shepherd Center in Baltimore, MD, a residential treatment center which provides individualized, group and family treatment programs for adolescent girls experiencing emotional and behavioral difficulties), his brother is the pastor of St. Gabriel's Church in Washington, DC and his uncle-in-law is the just-retired bishop of the Richmond, VA diocese. Patrick has been a regular blood and aphaeresis donor the past 25 years.

Charles A. Lockard

Corporate Secretary has over 25 years experience building and managing entrepreneurial properties. Since 1990 he has focused on producing and managing events for the information technology market. Prior to 1990, he served as the Chief Financial Officer of a technology systems integrator and an engineering services firm. His event management experience has ranged from small conferences to major trade shows. He both managed existing events as well as created new events in highly competitive markets. From 1990 to 1994, Chuck oversaw Federal Office Systems Expo (FOSE), the largest government technology trade event in the world. With nearly 500 exhibiting companies, 50,000 attendees and a weeklong series of special functions that ranged from high-level executive breakfasts to black tie awards banquet, this annual event was the leading technology event in the government market. In 1994, Chuck acquired a series of 65 small technology events and over the course of three years built the series into over 200 one-day events held across the country. This required producing as many as 5 individual events at different locations in a single week. In 1998, he launched E-Gov, the Electronic Government Conference and Exposition, which quickly became the industry standard event in e-government education and marketing. E-Gov hosted 300 companies featured an annual sold-out conference and generated over $5 million in sponsorship, exhibit and conference revenue. The E-Gov series of events was sold to 101communications, LLC in 2001 where Chuck continued to serve as the General Manager for the event series. He holds a B.S. in Finance from Lehigh University and a J.D. from George Mason University and is a CPA and a past member of the Virginia Bar.

Alicia E. Johnson

Chief communications officer, has over 12 years of healthcare marketing and public relations experience. She has written and produced several national healthcare awareness campaigns for companies such as Merck, Teva Neuroscience and Aventis. In addition, she has produced national public service announcements for non-profit associations such as The National Osteoporosis Foundation, The American Heart Association and The Larry King Cardiac Foundation. Ms. Johnson is also the former Senior Vice President of Marketing of Spotlight Health, the former Director of Marketing of SkilledNursing.com (a B2B/B2C e-commerce site) and she has served as the National Operations Manager for InterDent, Inc., (the nation's largest dental practice management company) where she analyzed, developed and implemented operating procedures for over 200 national offices with $300 million in annualized net revenues under management. In addition, Ms. Johnson created the marketing department for Sharper Vision Centers (formerly known as Pacific EyeNet, Inc.) and spent several years as the Assistant Administrator/Director of Marketing for Echo Park SNF Hospital . Ms. Johnson also serves as a Board Member for LABMED, a non-profit organization that provides funds for injured or ill rescued Labrador Retrievers. Ms. Johnson earned her undergraduate degree in both Public Communications and Visual Communications at Trinity College in Washington , DC , Summa Cum Laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Following graduation she received a full fellowship to UCLA's School of Public Health Masters Program .

Anne Clougherty

Event and volunteer coordinator, has over 22 years of business experience building and managing large scale software integration projects. For the past five years, she has been focusing on a project which consolidates financial information for some of the largest multi-industry media properties in the Radio, Television and Cable marketplaces both in the United States and Canada . Anne graduated from the University of Virginia in 1982 with a degree in Systems Engineering. After graduation, she took a job with IBM in Research Triangle Park , North Carolina and worked several years in an engineering design and development department. In 1987 she moved back to Washington , D.C. where she joined the National Marketing Division of IBM. For the next five years she was in marketing, concentrating on large commercial banks and the Federal Reserve. In 1992, she started her own software firm, Media Systems, Inc., focusing on sales force automation and financial reporting for the Media Industry. In 2000, she and her partners successfully sold their software business and joined the acquiring company, Wicks Broadcast Solutions, Inc. She resides in Northern Virginia with her husband of sixteen years and four active children.