KickStart Venture Services awards Innovation Fellowships
CHAPEL HILL – KickStart Venture Services has awarded three graduate students with Innovation Fellowships that will enable them to work for a UNC spin-out company in need of technical and scientific expertise.
The fellowships are part of a campus-wide effort to translate discoveries made in UNC's academic laboratories into applications that can benefit people outside the university setting.
Recipients will receive stipends, as well as mentorship and support services from KickStart Venture Services that include access to market research databases, free Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) consultations, and auditing of business classes. To date, 11 fellows have received funding from KickStart Venture Services.
"The Innovation Fellows programs provides a unique experience for a grad student or post-doc," said Don Rose, PhD, Director of KickStart Venture Services, part of the NC TraCS Institute. "The fellowship gives them to opportunity to both contribute to and learn about launching and building a science-based company."
Garrett Berry is a PhD candidate from the Genetics and Molecular Biology department. Upon graduation, Berry will be joining Stridebio, a UNC biotechnology startup with core competency in engineered viral vectors for gene therapy. There, he will write government grant applications and work on developing the business plan for investors. Berry will also be in charge of developing partnerships with strategic companies interested in the gene therapy industry.
Levin Brown is co-founder of FLEEThealth and a MD/MPH candidate from the UNC School of Medicine and the Harvard University School of Public Health. FLEEThealth is a UNC healthcare IT startup focused on promoting better outcomes and lower costs in healthcare by building open standardsbased infrastructure for real time clinical data. After graduating with his MD/MPH, Brown will lead the company forward with development of their EMR platform.
Stephen Schmidt is the lead engineer of Pulvinar Neuro and a PhD candidate from the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Pulvinar Neuro is a UNC spinout company from the Department of Psychiatry and is aiming to become a leader in the field of high-quality, easy-to-perform, non-invasive brain stimulation research. After graduation, Schmidt will head technical development, manufacturing of the first product, and customer support for the beta test sites.
Originally known as Carolina KickStart, KickStart Venture Services helps to develop and launch startup companies based on UNC intellectual property. It is part of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, home of UNC's Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program. The CTSA program is led by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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