Mossavar-Rahmani Center announces 2025 Dunlop Undergraduate Thesis Prize winner

The Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government (M-RCBG) at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is pleased to announce the 2025 winner of the John T. Dunlop Undergraduate Thesis Prize in Business and Government.

Krishi Kishore has won for his thesis “Drugs and Deals: Understanding Biopharmaceutical Venture Capital Performance and Behavior.” He is graduating from Harvard College this week with an A.B. in applied mathematics in economics, molecular and cellular biology secondary.

The John T. Dunlop Thesis Prize in Business and Government is awarded to graduating seniors who write the best thesis on a challenging public policy issue at the interface of business and government. The prize carries a $2,000 award.

This year’s winning thesis by Kishore examines how venture capital plays a critical role in funding the production of life sciences innovation and life-saving therapies in young biopharmaceutical companies but many venture capital investors perceive these investments as risky and unattractive. Because biopharmaceutical venture capital performance has been sparsely studied in academic literature, he designed a Monte Carlo simulation for biopharmaceutical investing which reveals that higher returns are correlated with more deals, smaller funds, more co-investing, less deal contributions, and a preference for early-stage and mid-stage investments. Kishore has found that the discrepancy between current biopharmaceutical venture capital strategy and optimal strategy may indicate that venture capital investors can improve their returns by modifying their strategy, encouraging further investment in the sector.

In explaining why the center chose to award the John Dunlop Prize to Kishore this year, John A. Haigh, co-director of M-RCBG, said that “Krishi’s thesis was impressive in its conception and execution. It represents the type of excellent analysis and policy recommendations at the intersection of business and government that we value so highly here at the center.”

***

John T. Dunlop, the Lamont University Professor Emeritus, was a widely respected labor economist who served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973. An adviser to many U.S. presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dunlop was secretary of labor under Gerald Ford,
serving from March 1975 to January 1976. In addition to serving as secretary of labor, Dunlop held many other government posts, including: director of the Cost of Living Council, (1973-’74), chairman of the Construction Industry Stabilization Committee (1993-’95), chair of the Massachusetts Joint Labor-
Management Committee for Municipal Police and Firefighters (1977-2003) and chair of the Commission on Migratory Farm Labor (1984-2003). Dunlop served as the second director of the Center for Business and Government from 1987 to 1991. The center, renamed in 2005 as the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, focuses on policy issues at the intersection of business and government. Dunlop died in 2003.