Chicago Biomedical Consortium names UIC grad among incoming fellows

The Chicago Biomedical Consortium has announced its 2023 class of the CBC Entrepreneurial Fellows, which includes a graduate from the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Pharmacy.

The Entrepreneurial Fellows program provides mentorship to bio-entrepreneurial minded junior researchers who will gain real-world experience by helping Chicago’s university researchers, including those at UIC, develop academic science into biomedical applications.

The fellows were recruited through a nationwide search of graduating PhD scientists. Incoming fellow Ahmed Disouky received his PhD from UIC, where he studied the extent of hippocampal neurogenesis in Alzheimer’s disease patients and its impact on their learning and memory. He will join three other fellows as part of this second cohort in the program.

The CBC’s mission is to stimulate collaboration among scientists at UIC, Northwestern University, University of Chicago and other area institutions to accelerate discovery and expand the life sciences ecosystem here.

The Entrepreneurial Fellows receive a full-time, paid, two-year position that offers them professional and career development, as well as a curriculum in early stage drug development and the business of biotech. They will work with a network of industry mentors including venture capitalists, biotech executives, Chicago-area entrepreneurs, member institution tech transfer offices and senior advisers.

This network, combined with guidance from CBC staff, helps the fellows evaluate technologies sourced from commercially promising research projects from the three CBC member universities. The best of these projects will receive up to $250,000 in funding through the CBC Accelerator Award to advance the science.

“UIC is committed to helping our scientists translate their ideas into medicines through our Proof of Concept Awards. The CBC has been a wonderful collaborator by partnering their Environmental Fellows with our faculty to provide guidance, strategic feedback and follow-on funding after the POC awards,” said Joanna Groden, vice chancellor for research at UIC.

The other three fellows are Owen Shelton, a neuroscientist who has studied how the nervous system generates movement; Sonal Rangnekar, a nanomaterials researcher; and Rachel Wallace, an immunoengineer whose expertise lies at the intersection of immunology, materials science and nanotechnology.