Innovation Zone

Margaret Kocherga, Founder & CEO of MARGIK, shares how a career-threatening injury altered her career path

Joanne Zhang, Co-Founder, Phytoption LLC, sees an urgent market for an effective oral form of a COVID-19 drug. She also shares Phytoption’s progress developing a drug that could mitigate the SARS-CoV-2 virus

Kwadwo Owusu-Ofori, the Founder and CEO of Satori Food Project, Inc., shares the back-story on how his company’s product, “Twi Pods” - anxiety-relieving coffee and hot cocoa pods for Keurig coffee brewers – came to be. His story is particularly interesting from the perspective of what Kwadwo learned about product development

Marjorie Radlo-Zandi, Impact Investor, Consultant and Board Member, QSM Diagnostics, stresses the importance of planning for ‘one’s next act’, how young scientists can connect with socially-conscious investors, and how her poodle, Sabrina, contributed to her involvement with Torigen Pharmaceuticals

Four leaders from Culture Biosciences explain how their company enables you to design, monitor and analyze high-throughput bioreactor experiments without a bioreactor lab

Fatma Kaplan, CEO and CSO at Pheronym, has created the first company to use nematode pheromones to control agricultural pests. Read more about this fascinating field, and her vision for the future

Four young entrepreneurs from ClearMask explain how a ‘dehumanizing’ surgery experienced by one of them in 2015 led to the sales in 2020 of nearly 13 million transparent surgical and non-medical masks.

Brimstone Energy co-founders Cody Finke and Hugo Leandri focus on the challenges and opportunities confronting the ‘hardware cleantech’ startup, and their plans to address them

Christina Boville, Co-Founder and CEO of Aralez Bio explains how the company uses engineered enzymes to make valuable chemical products and to expand the scope of products that can be produced bio-renewably

Ryan Pearson, Co-Founder and CEO of Cypris Materials, Inc., a company whose vision is to reinvent humans’ relationship with color, shares some of the key issues the company is focused on in its early years

Chemistry-related entrepreneurs, investors, tech transfer organizations, and large companies looking for a way to connect with one another have it: The 1,700 member ACS Innovation Hub LinkedIn Group. Cal Trepagnier, Program Specialist, ACS Industry Member Programs, explains the many ways you will benefit from joining the group.

Judy Giordan, former executive at International Flavors and Fragrances, PepsiCo, and Henkel - now focused on seed and early stage STEM aligned start-ups – explains how the pursuit of innovation differs in big companies vs. start-ups, and what prompted her and others to create the Chemical Angel Network

H. N. Cheng, Diane Grob Schmidt and Jim Skinner share news about two upcoming webinars directed at chemistry-related entrepreneurs: “Starting a Company: Do You Need a Business Plan?” And, “Starting a Company: Where Do You Get Funding?”

Brenna Teigler tells us about Activate – a nonprofit organization that partners with funders and leading research institutions to support the Activate Fellowship, a new path for entrepreneurial scientists and engineers to transform their discoveries into world-changing technologies

The co-founders of Ecovia Renewables tell us how they create biopolymers for agricultural, personal care, and industrial applications