Entrepreneurial Lead — Adviser Labs, Vanderbilt University
At Vanderbilt University, I served as the Entrepreneurial Lead for Adviser Labs, where I worked at the intersection of research commercialization, customer discovery, and technology entrepreneurship. My role focused on helping translate an academic research idea into a viable startup through structured market validation, stakeholder engagement, and business model development.
As part of this journey, I led the team through both the Regional and National NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps) programs. The NSF I-Corps program is a highly competitive entrepreneurial training initiative supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation that helps researchers and scientists commercialize deep-tech innovations through intensive customer discovery and evidence-based business validation. The program emphasizes understanding real-world customer needs, testing market assumptions, and building scalable business models around research-driven technologies.
During the program, I conducted over 134 customer discovery interviews with stakeholders across academia, industry, healthcare, and technology sectors. These conversations played a critical role in refining our value proposition, validating market pain points, identifying customer segments, and shaping the overall commercialization strategy for the technology.
Through this process, we iteratively validated and refined the business model, moving the project from an early-stage research concept toward a scalable venture opportunity. The work eventually contributed to the formation of the company, which later went on to raise up to $1 million in funding to further develop and commercialize the technology.
This experience gave me deep exposure to the U.S. entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem, including venture creation, innovation strategy, customer-centric product development, investor communication, and research commercialization pathways. It also taught me how to bridge the gap between academic innovation and real-world market adoption while working within multidisciplinary teams of researchers, entrepreneurs, mentors, and industry experts.