Welcoming BlueYard’s First Bio Fellows

Earlier this year we announced our Bio and Science Fellowship at BlueYard — it is designed for us to learn from some of the brightest young minds in research and, in return for them, as a guide to the inner workings of the startup ecosystem around science. The program includes engaging with our science founders, deep dives and market maps into programmable biology, advances in AI for protein engineering and next-generation drug discovery platforms — in addition to internal master classes on everything from cap tables to due diligence, and visiting lectures from other investors and ecosystem participants. We believe tomorrow’s industry-defining companies will be built by technologists and scientists, building the interconnected elements that can become the fabric of our future (see our v2 thesis), and we want to empower this next generation of founders and investors.

We had hoped to attract aspiring founders or investors coming from the world of academia and couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome our first four fellows:

Stephanie Avraamides: Stephanie is completing an MPhil in Therapeutic Sciences at the University of Cambridge, an interdisciplinary programme tailored to generate scientific and business leaders in healthcare and therapeutics. Prior to this, her research experiences spanned the fields of cell and gene therapy, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology.

Ines Ullmo: Ines studied a BSc in Biology before she did a year in Business Management at Imperial College Business School. She is now a final year Biomedical PhD candidate at Imperial College London, working on developing NK cell-based immunotherapies for cancer treatment. Her work involves stem cell in vitro differentiation and CRISPR/Cas9 genetic engineering for the generation of off-the-shelf NK cell therapies.

Isabel Zhang: Isabel is a PhD candidate at The Francis Crick Institute in London working at the intersection of epigenetics, stem cell and neurodevelopmental biology. Prior to that, she graduated with an MSc in Molecular Medicine from the University of Heidelberg and Göttingen. Her research focuses on elucidating gene regulatory networks in neural progenitor cells using a range of gene editing and next-generation sequencing technologies.

Nicolas Krink: Nicolas is an independent Novo Nordisk Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the NNF Center for Biosustaiblty of the Danish Technical University after he completed his PhD in Synthetic Microbiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology. Prior, he obtained his BSc in Biology from the University of Freiburg and his MSc in Interdisciplinary Life Sciences from Université Paris Descartes, with research stays at Stanford University and the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Berkeley. His current research focuses on the engineering of microorganisms to produce new-to-nature metabolites.

We look forward to working with them over the next few months as they help expand our efforts in life sciences, synthetic biology and beyond!