The Faculty Entrepreneurial Leadership Program (FELP) is delighted to welcome its fourth cohort of 30 distinguished faculty from a wide variety of departments across all three universities with the University of Illinois System, who will participate in the program’s workshops in the Fall 2026. Designed to help faculty innovators enhance the commercial and social impact of their research, FELP is a selective professional development program that imparts entrepreneurial knowledge and self-efficacy without requiring prior startup experience.
We are grateful to a number of partners from across the University of Illinois who have helped to make this program possible. FELP is housed within the Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship in Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Ninety-three faculty applied for the cohort, and many exceptional faculty applicants could unfortunately not be included in the program (we hope to serve them in future cohorts). We congratulate the following accepted faculty participants and look forward to helping them transform their brilliant ideas into marketable innovations and real-world ventures.
University of Illinois Chicago:
- Sushant Anand, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
- Kejia Cai, Radiology and Biomedical Engineering
- Salman R. Khetani, Biomedical Engineering
- Spyros Kitsiou, Biomedical and Health Informatics
- Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb, Law
- Shafigh Mehraeen, Chemical Engineering
- Nadine Naber, Gender and Women’s Studies
- Debra A. Tonetti, Pharmaceutical Sciences
- Miiri Kotche, Biomedical Engineering
University of Illinois Springfield:
- John L. Ferry, Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:
- Gaurav Bahl, Mechanical Science and Engineering
- Chinmoy Baroi, Illinois Sustainable Technology Center
- Catherine Blake, Information Sciences
- Matías Carrasco Kind, Data Science Research Services
- Sandy Dall’Erba, Agricultural and Consumer Economics
- Brendan A.C. Harley, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
- Benjamin Hooberman, Physics
- Auinash Kalsotra, Biochemistry
- Chu-Young Kim, Biochemistry
- Volodymyr Kindratenko, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
- Praveen Kumar, Civil and Environmental Engineering
- CoCo Ree Lemery, Industrial Design
- Arif Masud, Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Sean P. Mullen, Health and Kinesiology
- Cristian Proistosescu, Climate, Meteorology, and Atmospheric Sciences
- Andre Schleife, Materials Science and Engineering
- Sunoj Shajahan, Agricultural and Biological Engineering
- Karen M. Tabb, Social Work
- Na Wei, Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Kai Zhang, Biochemistry