Pratt School of Engineering News

"Joining the Christensen Family Center for Innovation’s Accelerator Program was one of the most exciting parts of my PhD journey. I’ve always loved research, but I’ve also felt a little frustrated that so much great work ends up confined to journal articles instead of being put to use in the real world. That’s actually why I joined the Chilkoti Lab at Duke—because their translational research has a strong track record of spinning out real startups. By the time I reached the final year of my PhD, I was eager to see if my own research could take that path too. The Accelerator seemed like the perfect way to learn how to bridge the gap between the lab and the marketplace."

Christensen Center Product Lab Fellow Jessie Chan combines her passion for psychology, technology, and collaboration to create meaningful solutions, drawing on experiences from Duke’s Product Lab and industry internships to mentor peers and help grow Duke’s culture of product innovation.

One of the Christensen Center's program companies, inSoma Bio (Durham, NC) has been selected as a finalist for the 2025 MedTech Innovator Value Award. Being recognized among such strong global peers is a testament to InSoma Bio’s mission of “We Make Fat Amazing”, their innovative approach in the med-tech space, and the hard work of the founding team and everyone supporting them. The Value Award recognizes outstanding value propositions in healthcare—a spotlight they are more than ready for.

Hundreds of Duke community members and collaborators from across the Triangle came together on November 11th for the seventh annual Invented at Duke – a celebration of the university’s innovation ecosystem and the breakthroughs progressing toward deployment beyond the lab. Throughout the evening, there was a clear sense that the technologies emerging from Duke today are poised to redefine how we treat disease, build new tools, and tackle some of the world’s toughest problems.

Meet Christensen Center Product Lab Fellow Andrew Dawson, a graduate student in Engineering Management. Andrew combines his passion for technology, empathy, and community to create meaningful products, building on his experience with startups and now helping shape Duke’s growing Product Lab community for the next generation of product leaders.

Christensen Center Product Lab Fellow Tatum Wall (’26), an Economics major and student-athlete, brings her passion for teamwork and leadership to product management, where collaboration and strategy meet to create meaningful solutions. From her first Product Management course at Duke to an internship at Amazon Web Services and now mentoring student teams in the inaugural Product Lab cohort, Tatum exemplifies how CFCI empowers students to turn curiosity and collaboration into real-world impact.

Christensen Center Product Lab Fellow Nicole Nie (’27) is an Economics major with a passion for connecting ideas across disciplines through product management. Inspired by the role of PMs as “conductors of the orchestra,” Nicole has grown from a curious first-year student in Product Management 1 to a teaching assistant and now a Product Lab Fellow, helping shape the future of Duke’s emerging product innovation community.

Duke student-founded startup Students Who Sit is bridging the gap between students and faculty by connecting families with trusted babysitters. Students Who Sit is a recipient of Duke CFCI's GoBig Award, a program that supports tech-enabled new products and services that have the potential to create transformative, positive impact—made possible through the generosity of the Baquerizo Family. Students Who Sit also participated in CFCI Product Lab's first Product Management 2 cohort.

Students tackled community-centered design challenges, engaged in service projects and connected to socially conscious engineering education efforts. Launched in 2023, the Clark Scholars Program Network helps train the next generation of engineers by making engineering education more accessible. It brings together exceptional undergraduate scholars and leaders from 11 engineering institutions to confront society’s key challenges with a multidisciplinary, socially-conscious and entrepreneurial approach. Program participants take engineering and business classes, participate in community service and attend seminars and events with leaders in the field.

Railinc and Duke University’s Christensen Family Center for Innovation (CFCI) announced a new collaboration to explore practical innovations that advance freight rail safety and efficiency. The initiative will harness Duke’s Product Lab, a student-led program where teams co-create solutions in rapid sprints with industry partners to deliver prototypes that have both immediate impact and long-term potential.

This year marks an exciting new chapter for CFCI as we expand opportunities for collaboration, leadership, and innovation. Through closer partnerships with industry sponsors in Product Lab, the launch of a new Business Leadership course co-taught with Mike Salvino, and the introduction of a student-led structure for the Clark Scholars program, we're empowering our community in fresh and meaningful ways.

Intensive program gives service members the tools to pitch, prototype and scale defense innovations that address real battlefield needs while earning credit toward a graduate engineering certificate or master’s degree.