Julia Schaletzky is executive director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases, Drug Discovery Center, at UC Berkeley, which co-founded the Alliance of Global Health and Science several years ago to integrate research at UC Berkeley with Makerere University in Uganda. She is also a lecturer at the HAAS Business School and serves as judge and advisor for the “Big Ideas” program at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, which trains and funds teams of UC Berkeley students who have innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to real social and environmental problems across the globe. In 2022 Schaletzky and collaboration partner Dr. Emmanuel Nasinghe at Makerere University applied for seed funding from the Center for African Studies and Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program(link is external) at UC Berkeley to continue their bioentrepreneurship workshop and mentoring program (“Building Uganda’s Bioentrepreneurship and Innovation Capacity”), as well as create an online global networking portal for graduate students and faculty. The workshop program and online portal provide some much-needed infrastructure to support translational medicine and bridge “the gap between high-quality, high-impact research and commercialization.” This entrepreneurship initiative promotes interdisciplinary collaboration across a multitude of fields, from tech to intellectual property law, biology, public health, nutrition, and digital health and wellness.
December 13, 2023
Berkeley Center for African Studies