Innovation & Entrepreneurship News

How do we incentivize the use of climate-friendly blockchains? Should lawmakers play a key role in creating opportunities for underserved communities via crypto assets and Web3? And what can the crypto asset industry do to ensure wealth-building opportunities are accessible to historically excluded communities?

David Schaffer remembers sitting on his father’s lap as a child, curiously delving into science books and crafting mnemonic phrases that instilled in him the building blocks of biology. Recently, Schaffer was appointed the new executive director of QB3, a UC-systemwide group that supports California entrepreneurship. Schaffer also leads the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub, which will hold 50 new biotechnology startup companies supported by the Bakar Labs incubator, and he directs Berkeley’s Bakar Fellows Program, a funding incubator that accelerates the application of discovery research.

David Schaffer, PhD, a University of California, Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, bioengineering, and molecular and cell biology, has been appointed the next executive director of QB3, the institute announced today.

Plenoxels surpass NeRF in every way — from their speed to their image quality — which may broaden their potential for consumer, industry and scientific applications.

UC Berkeley’s campus community this week celebrated the grand opening of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), the campus’s bold new home for research and innovation. After two years of seismic upgrades and renovations, BBH celebrated its opening this month. Bakar Labs, the facility’s flagship life sciences incubator, has been operational since mid-November, offering space to tenant companies.

Bakar Labs, the flagship life sciences incubator at UC Berkeley’s Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), has formed a partnership with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to provide free lab space and resources to startups that are focused on the application of gene therapy technologies that treat cystic fibrosis.

Professor David Schaffer has been announced as the new Faculty Director of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub and the Bakar Fellows Program effective March 1, 2022.

Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s flagship startup incubator, plans to spread its culture of innovation and entrepreneurship to Europe with the launch of SkyDeck Europe — a new accelerator program based in Milan, Italy.

Four UC Berkeley faculty members, whose technological innovations promise to deliver solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, have been awarded the Bakar Fellows Program 2022 Bakar Prize.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub announced today (Jan. 11) the second cohort of scientists to be named CZ Biohub Investigators, 21 of whom are UC Berkeley faculty members.

Microbiologist Cecilia Martinez-Gomez studies a widespread specie of bacteria that thrives on rare earth elements, also known as rare earth metals or lanthanides. She has engineered one strain of the bacteria to efficiently accumulate a rare earth element known as neodymium from electronics waste and recycle it back to the industry for making batteries, speakers, even jet turbines.

More than 40 million MRI scans are carried out every year in the U.S.  In about one out of three, patients get an infusion containing the metal gadolinium as a contrast agent to improve imaging. Because contrast MRIs sometimes lead to potentially life-threatening complications, the FDA issued a warning against contrast MRIs for patients with kidney disease. Rebecca Abergel studies the chemical biology of metals, with a research focuses on organic molecules that can sequester and eliminate metals in the body, a chemical process known as chelation. She is using her Bakar Fellow support to evaluate the effectiveness of a chelating drug she has developed.