Chemistry Postdoc and Students Win 1st Place in Stern’s Entrepreneurs Challenge

Chemistry postdoc, David Rooklin (Yingkai Zhang’s lab), and graduate students, Ashley Modell (Paramjit Arora’s lab) and Joseph Katigbak (Yingkai Zhang’s lab), have won 1st place in the Technology Division of NYU’s 2015-2016 $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge, an 8-month venture competition sponsored by Stern’s W.R. Berkley Innovation Lab. A $75,000 award will go to support the team’s startup, Redesign Science, which will specialize in virtual molecular design to target disease-related protein-protein interactions. Evolving directly from recent research within the Zhang and Arora labs, Redesign Science will apply a new molecular modeling platform—AlphaSpace—in strategic industry and academic partnerships to tackle drug design for challenging new therapeutic targets.

The $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge is one of the longest, largest, and most rigorous venture competitions in the world. Some 231 teams comprising more than 800 entrants from 16 schools at NYU competed this year in one of three challenges: Social Venture, New Venture, and Technology Venture. Participating teams undergo 8 months of intensive training opportunities and compete through 4 rounds of judging. In each round, ventures are evaluated by a new panel of external judges comprised of angel investors, entrepreneurs, and industry experts. The winners were announced on May 6.

Read more about the winners from Stern’s official post: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/news-events/200k-entrepreneurs-challenge-final-round

Or learn more about the competition here: 
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/about/departments-centers-initiatives/centers-of-research/w-r-berkley-innovation-lab/entrepreneurs-challenge