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.
"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.