The Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellows program at Cornell, formerly known as the BioEntrepreneurship Initiative, is an entrepreneurship initiative funded by Empire State Development (ESD) and is offered by the SC Johnson College of Business. The program aims to cultivate the next generation life science startup leaders. In addition to partial funding from ESD, the program also receives support from Sanofi and Entrepreneurship at Cornell. The program provides business students, graduate research students, and postdocs with an interest in health, pharma, med tech biotech, veterinary tech, molecular bioscience, and agritech from across Cornell’s colleges an opportunity to immerse themselves in the practice of technology-based startup creation. Participants receive the entrepreneurial training, mindset, and judgment to launch their own startup or become the next set of leaders working in the growing life science technology economy.
The program is built around a workshop course, “NBA 5175, Life Science Entrepreneurship in Practice,” that uses participants’ research skills and dissertation topics as the source material for the development of business hypotheses. Cross-disciplinary teams that include the researcher will develop “entrepreneurial judgement” as they decide how to best test their hypotheses and thereby de-risk their potential business models. Experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and faculty provide constructive feedback on participant learnings and project priorities on a regular basis. This course is exclusively offered to students in this program, and runs from September to April with six workshop sessions held on weekends, alternating between Ithaca and NYC.
As part of the program, in addition to completing the “NBA 5175, Life Science Entrepreneurship in Practice,” participants are asked to complement the workshop course with other relevant coursework from across Cornell and its tri-institutional partners. Additional information about the complementary coursework can be reviewed on the program structure page. Encompassing all necessary coursework, the program generally takes 2-3 semesters to complete. Students who complete all coursework may also receive a certificate from the SC Johnson Graduate School of Management.
Who can apply?
The Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellows program admits PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows, as well as business students in equal numbers, in order for all participants to form project teams upon enrollment in the program course “NBA 5175 Life Science Entrepreneurship in Practice.”
PhD candidates in the program are restricted to those in the 3rd year and higher conducting graduate level research on a topic related to health, pharma, med tech biotech, veterinary tech, molecular bioscience, and agritech or similar. Postdoctoral fellows in the same research areas are also welcome to participate. Research participants can be from across Cornell’s Ithaca and NYC campuses, as well as from Cornell’s Tri-Institutional partners (Memorial Sloan Kettering and The Rockefeller University).
MBA students are restricted to residential (Ithaca) MBAs in the final year of their degree, and EMBA/MS in Healthcare Leadership MBAs in the final year of their degree. MHA students based in Ithaca and dual-degree MD-MBA students based at Cornell Tech are also welcome to apply. Applications are now open for the 2025-2026 cohort.
