Far too many research projects with commercial potential stall on the threshold of viability because graduate student innovators graduate and leave the University.
The University of Tennessee Research Foundation’s Entrepreneurial Fellowship Program seeks to retain talented individuals in the region and invigorate the innovation ecosystem through work on projects that lead to deep tech startups.
Created out of the Venture Launch Program, the Entrepreneurial Fellow Program aims to train outstanding recent graduate students with scholarly and technical expertise for careers focused on innovation, technology development, commercialization, and entrepreneurship.
UTRF provides fellows with stipends to advance their technologies and they receive business mentorship from the Executives-in-Residence (EIR) Program,” said UTRF President Maha Krishnamurthy. “Critically, fellows will focus solely on developing a minimum viable product during this fellowship.”
Earlier this year, UTRF hired its first Entrepreneurial Fellow, Tanner Hobson, a recent UTK graduate with a Ph.D. in computer science. Hobson applied for the program after his advisor, Jian Huang, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor, wanted him to make his technology ready for licensing.
This work is so different than the academic world. We’re seeking the intersection of innovation and commercial viability,” said Hobson. “It’s been great having the support from UTRF to understand how to develop a product based on my Ph.D. work.”
Over the next few months, Hobson will solely focus on developing a minimum viable product – an artificial intelligence-based system to make big data in Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) highly usable to hospitals, nonprofits, and grant-giving foundations to improve health equity. The system will let users ask or pose questions in natural language and respond to AI-driven predictions and visualizations of the result.
Data analysis is a hard problem, especially for nonprofits, because they don’t have the money to hire a full-time data analyst,” said Hobson. “I’m using AI to help people understand data and make big data usable by non-experts. We want to make data science accessible.”
Huang is happy Hobson is the first hire for the Entrepreneurial Fellow program, which will allow for a potential startup to conceptualize innovation cycles faster than going through traditional channels.
With Hobson being the first in the Entrepreneurial Fellow program, we are very excited to be part of this new journey and love the opportunity to help shape it, specifically to help set examples of how university research can become technology that impacts the world,” said Huang.
At the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund Award Ceremony on February 21, Huang was one of five UT researchers whose technology was awarded $50,000 to support their growth. Huang will use these funds to support Tanner’s role and development work.
So much innovation is happening at the University of Tennessee. We want to keep brilliant individuals and entrepreneurs in the region. Programs like the Entrepreneurial Fellow Program and Accelerate Fund allow us to do just that,” said the University of Tennessee President Randy Boyd. “Congratulations to Dr. Tanner Hobson on being the first Entrepreneurial Fellow Program at the University of Tennessee Research Foundation.”