The Rice Innovation Fellows is a year-long program to support graduate students and post-docs from
Engineering and the Natural Sciences in exploring the commercialization of their research.
Run by the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (Lilie) in partnership with the Ken Kennedy Institute, the Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering and the Smalley-Curl Institute, the Innovation Fellows focus on accelerating the next generation of engineer and scientist led startups through education,
equity free funding, and personalized mentorship to position them for real world impact.
Meet the Cohort!
Alfredo Costilla-Reyes, Computer Science postdoc research associate ’23
Costilla-Reyes’ cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, AutoML, is already one of the most popular open-source machine learning codebases in the world. Now he’s bringing AI to manufacturing to improve defect detection on production lines in factories of the future.
Bo Wang, Chemical Engineering Ph.D. ’23
Wang has discovered novel chemical compounds that can destroy PFAS, the toxic chemicals found in all our bodies, brains and babies due to plastics in our water supply.
Rawand Rasheed, Mechanical Engineering, Ph.D. ’23
Rasheed’s filtration and water capture technology can help buildings reduce energy consumption and cooling towers operate in a more cost-effective way.
Rosa Selenia Guerra Resendez, Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. ’24
Resendez’s research uses epigenomic editing to re-energize exhausted immune cells, supercharging the body’s immune system and removing a bottleneck in cancer and other CAR-T therapeutics.
Wei Meng, Civil & Environmental Engineering Ph.D. ’22
Meng’s research utilizes carbon nanotubes to create a “second skin” for buildings, airplanes and other infrastructure that easily allows engineers to measure and track structural health and integrity, preventing failure before it turns deadly.
Neethu Pottackal, Materials and NanoEngineering Ph.D. ’24
Pottackal’s research creates novel coatings for fruits and vegetables that slow decay, cutting into the massive problem of food waste. Inspired by her own allergies, Pottackal has created coatings that are organic and edible for some of the largest produce categories.
Nicolas Marquez Peraca, Physics Ph.D. ’23
Marquez Peraca is exploring the power of carbon nanotubes to transform how batteries for electric vehicles and consumer electronics can manage heat, vastly improving their performance in cold environments.
Mei-Li Laracuente, Bioengineering Ph.D. ’23
Laracuente brings together her background as a medical doctor and Ph.D. to develop a novel drug-delivery platform that can precisely control the dosage release, removing one of the major patient pain points — daily medication adherence — in treating diseases from cancer to HIV and mental health disorders.
James Lee, Systems, Synthetic & Physical Biology Ph.D. ’22
Lee’s research can help revolutionize the early research and development process for
life science and pharma companies, using computer vision-enabled microscopes to
analyze thousands of cells and other biological products at once, cutting off years of
development time and speeding them to market.
