Students, Start-Ups, And Biorenewability

Abstract

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. The two scientists play leading roles in newly founded small companies in the sustainable chemistry sector: Garg serves as president of OmegaChea Biorenewables, which uses enzymatic processing to make custom fatty acids, and Lee serves as research leader for SusTerea Biorenewables, a ...