http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/29/this-emory-student-won-100k-and-hes-donating-it-all/
"Junior Rostam Zafari won the Cyrus Prize, an award that honors young Iranian entrepreneurs, in 2015. Its first recipient was Dropbox cofounder Arash Ferdowsi.
Zafari received the prize for his work on Rapid Ebola Detection Strips (REDS), a portable test strip kit that aims to quickly determine whether or not a person has contracted Ebola. The Cyrus Prize helps recipients like Zafari build their businesses, but since Zafari already has funding for his startup, he saw a way to give the money even more impact: funding education for students to create their own startups."
@BiffBrown : Me and another alumni friend wondered if this project went anywhere. So glad to see it did! Also, if you read his story, it highlights how grades can be over-rated in terms of aptitude for a subject or passion for it. Grades often measure levels of obedience. However, what is cool is that this emerged from a challenged from Dr. Spell’s class! Apparently one of her take home quizzes asked students for ways to address that issue. That year she pretty much did her first theme based year apparently and Ebola was it. The past 2 years, I think Zika virus has been the theme. Always nice to know that there are instructors left at research universities that do encourage creativity. Emory still has some of them. Back in the day, it apparently used to be the honors classes (the project lab mentioned in the article below was a part of the honors offerings which existed before 2009 or so. Chemistry had an honors intro. course, biology had one, and honors physiology, genetics, and like a couple more. I think to mitigate the absence of such special options, biology gone toward “inquiry based labs” at the intro. level for better or worse. Beyond that, only ecology and microbiology meet this requirement to any extent. Chemistry has some interesting developments in analytical and physical and NBB has the neurophysiology lab) driving the entrepreneurial tendencies in STEM at Emory:http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2012/spring/features/solazyme.html . Solazyme is such an example (really cool! Harrison Dillon actually did his PhD at the University of Utah’s biosciences program which I have chosen to attend! This I didn’t know until I started looking at alum).
Now-a-days Emory has many lone wolves that foster this interest in research and creative thinking. Folks like Dr. Spell, Eisen, Weinert, Soria, David Lynn (via the freshman or senior ORDER seminar) and quite a few NBB instructors (like this list, mainly the lecturers). They either make their class more inquiry based, design activities and problems that are more open ended, or give students much more exposure to research (Eisen, Weinert, and the NBB faculty I refer to often requiring lots of reading and presentation of primary literature or even writing of NSF or NIH style research proposals).
Either way, seems the entrepreneurial thing really has momentum at Emory and has had it for maybe like the last 5 years. Another example of how it does not appear super shiny on paper, but many awesome things are happening on the inside for those who want to be a part of these types of things.
@bernie Is Emory creating structure for undergraduates and graduate students to convert technology into start ups? Perhaps through the business school?
I think the business school has its organizations ( http://news.emory.edu/stories/2016/11/er_goizueta_start_me/campus.html)that promotes entrepreneurship along with a class that I know is specifically related to social entrepreneurship. Emory has this, but I have to wonder how active it is given how out of date this website is:http://entrepreneurship.emory.edu/
And there is this: http://eevm.org/
But I do not know how up to date it is.
So, fragmented structures I guess.
When my son matriculated three years ago the freshman dorms had themes. The theme of his dorm was “social entrepreneurship”.
@bernie12
@AsleepAtTheWheel
I was thinking more along the lines of how a place like Stanford manages to create a start up culture by leveraging its student developed technology with its business school student body and the local venture capital/finance community.
Does Emory have something like that going on? I wonder because the Ebola testing innovator managed to get funding for his startup based on the Ebola detection technology he developed even while still a student. That implies some level of connection to the business and finance communities that a freshman biology major would not have on his own without some level of university support and connection.
I’m sure Emory business school students develop start ups all the time. I remember reading about this guy who developed the low carb/high protein pasta and turned it into a business:
http://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/12/emorywire_banza/campus.html
But is there a developed pipeline for those Emory students interested in launching their own tech or biotech startups?
@BiffBrown : Yes. from what I remember the student developing the Ebola kit had some sort of connections at Emory (maybe familial) that allowed the work to be done (assisted and hosted in a lab). As for that sort of apparatus. I don’t think so. I do not imagine that as something that will easily become a part of Emory’s infrastructure though perhaps it should. Stanford doesn’t merely “encourage”, it is also in the prime location for it and has an engineering school. Entrepreneurial endeavors are typically not reasons students come to Emory but have been a reason students go to Stanford for decades now hence the institutionalization of it there. One should think of Stanford as more similar to MIT and perhaps some STEM universities than HYP. Seems like most other non-STEM universities (mainly private, public schools that are strongholds for Tech innovation have gone towards administrative and more centralized apparatuses as well), at the undergraduate level, have efforts that are almost purely student driven (and not really driven by the administration).
At Emory, this could be something that the admins do not pay as much attention to because it doesn’t fit neatly into the a) Big 3 pre-professional slant at Emory (also common at other elite privates) which it has almost over-served to the point it is kind of held hostage to that constituent in STEM (how the chemistry changes passed in light of that, I have no clue. Guess STEM faculty were just “over it”) or/and b) efforts to re-orient toward a more liberal arts intensive undergraduate experience.
Administrative efforts for fostering or managing tech innovation will likely be limited to the research infrastructure at Emory for quite a while unless there is a sudden shift in student demands or interests among those who actually matriculate.