STEM Researcher T O STEM Entrepreneur

ENHANCING ITS SUPPORT of the innovation continuum, the University City Science Center launched a Founders Fellowship designed to aid biotech researchers with advanced STEM degrees as they pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions. The 12-month program offers Fellows hands-on startup experience to transform concepts into a business reality along with a $50,000 stipend.

Ian Dardani, Raquel Hollatz, and Kristina Li represent the first cohort of Fellows of what will become an annual cycle of academic researchers leveraging Science Center resources to launch their startups.

Dardani is combining his engineering and life science training to extract more data from biological samples faster, to accelerate our understanding of disease biology and new therapeutic approaches. Hollatz is developing a food label that monitors perishables for freshness, showing the current state of their shelf life. And Li is engineering new tools to better understand complex cell signaling that occurs in the liver during steatosis and fibrosis to understand how we can better characterize pathways and interactions in physiological settings, and how those interactions go awry in disease.

The first six months of the fellowship are focused on immersive learning with the Fellows embedded within Science Center-supported startup teams for hands-on experience. Dur ing the second six months, Fellows apply that experience to advance their startup ideas, exploring investment opportunities and developing a path to market. In addition to leveraging Science Center expertise and a network of industry leaders, Fellows also gain access to lab space at CIC Philadelphia, a sponsor of the program.

In January 2023, the Science Center began recruiting its second cohort of Fellows.