The following is an excerpt from “Students, Start-Ups, and Biorenewability,” written by Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) Chicago writer Mitch Jacoby in the Oct. 28, 2013, edition of Chemical & Engineering News.
Shivani Garg had never planned on launching a biotech start-up company, at least not until recently. Like other biochemistry graduate students, she spent her days thinking about the experiments she needed to do for her thesis research—not intellectual property, patent portfolios, and venture capital.
The same was true for chemist Jennifer J. Lee. But all of that changed for both women, who are five-plus years into their graduate careers at Iowa State University, when they took an entrepreneurship course in their third and fourth year, respectively, that exposed them to the nuts and bolts of launching a start-up company. Now they’ve both been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug…