Are you a Duke student working on a startup, building a technology, or exploring an idea you want to keep moving forward? The Christensen Center is hosting Founders Fridays, a monthly, open mentoring session for student founders during the Spring 2026 semester.
Duke University has received $11 million from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, a private family foundation based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on educating engineers for the most pressing challenges of today. The award brings the foundation’s total support for the program to more than $30 million.
The January 2026 Christensen Family Center for Innovation (CFCI) newsletter celebrates the recent accomplishments of Duke Product Lab teams, highlighting final project demos from Fall 2025 that produced innovative solutions ranging from mobile apps and AI tools to hardware prototypes; and highlights recent student innovators’ stories.
Oluwadarasimi (Dara) Ajiboye, Class of 2028, is a Computer Science major with an Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate who discovered his passion for product management early at Duke and has since built end-to-end PM experience through Product Lab, Code+, and coursework. Now a CFCI Fellow, Dara is excited to give back as a mentor and leader while continuing to grow as a product manager and educator within the Product Lab community.
Student-led startup pursues award-winning treatment for patients with disruptions to their autonomic body processes.
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.
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.