Kauffman Foundation awards researcher entrepreneurial fellowship

Praveen Kumar Vemula, a postdoctoral researcher in the Karp Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is one of 13 researchers to receive the Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurial Postdoctoral Fellowship Award.

Vemula was selected in part for his entrepreneurial vision to take lab research to market and for his recent breakthrough research with Jeffrey Karp, instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, in which they devised on-demand drug delivery vehicles for therapeutic applications.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation established the yearlong program to empower postdoctoral students to take their own discoveries from the lab to the market. Fellows will receive salary and benefits, entrepreneurship education, and mentorship to support their research and equip the fellows to commercialize their scientific discoveries.

Karp, director of the Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials and Stem Cell-Based Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will serve as Vemula’s academic adviser, mentoring him on matters of research and commercialization.