Innovation & Entrepreneurship News

SkyDeck, UC Berkeley's accelerator and incubator, is accelerating its own growth. A new venture fund enables SkyDeck to invest $100,000 in the companies in its accelerator, and its accepting a broader and more global range of entrepreneurs, tripling its adviser group and doubling its office size.

Five UC Berkeley faculty innovators have been selected for the Bakar Fellows Program, which supports faculty working to apply scientific discoveries to real-world issues in the fields of engineering, computer science, chemistry and biological and physical sciences.

More than 1,500 abandoned parcels of land lie scattered throughout San Francisco, from unused alleys to vacant parking lots and public easements. The combined area rivals the size of Golden Gate Park.  By integrating the potent tools of digital mapping with digital design technology used in architecture and engineering, Nicholas de Monchaux has created a new way to envision these many unused and underused sites together.

Lin He’s lab uses CRISPR technology to study how different genetic elements in a mouse embryo’s cell nucleus – genes that encode proteins, functional RNAs, and repetitive sequences – interact to assure normal development or trigger cancer.

Jamie Cate is studying stains of yeast that can handle industrial conditions to create a new platform organism for new biofuels and a range of industrial chemicals.

Your cell phone can already find your car and tell you what song the restaurant is playing.  How about an app to screen for eye disease? By coupling the sophisticated imaging capabilities of smart phone cameras with lenses and software for examining the retina, Daniel Fletcher and his students have developed a hand-held, user-friendly version of the optometrist’s ophthalmoscope and are teaming up with clinical collaborators to detect retinal disease caused by diabetes. 

When a car seat heats up on a hot day, it just gets.... hot.  But some materials become totally transformed by the sun’s heat. They undergo a kind of Jekyll and Hyde reversal called a phase change. They turn from insulators to metals. Junqiao Wu is exploiting the most remarkable of these compounds, called vanadium dioxide, to devise ways to cool buildings, winter-proof car engines, and even create novel sunglasses.

Lower back pain is not as common as the common cold. But it’s close. About 80 percent of people suffer back pain sooner or later. 

Ludwig Schoenack is known as “the connector” in UC Berkeley startup circles. It’s an apt nickname the MBA student, who just launched the Haas Startup Squad, a team of matchmakers who help connect Haas students to entrepreneurs at the UC Berkeley incubator, Skydeck.

Alexandre Bayen and PhD student Pulkit Agrawal developed a computer vision-based system to help memory care centers monitor patient falls and to reduce them where possible.

Three faculty members – Tsu-Jae King Liu and Eli Yablonovitch of electrical engineering and computer sciences and Daniel Portnoy of molecular and cell biology and public health – have been named fellows of the National Academy of Inventors.

Researchers have developed a robotic learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before.