spring highlights & summer opportunities

In an evaluation of Berkeley’s STEM CareerX program from January 2022 to May 2024, 86% of participating students reported a substantial acquisition of knowledge about different careers in STEM and 77% of students reported an improved understanding of the connection between their academic studies and workplace applications. The program enabled 413 Berkeley High School (BHS) student-visits and 39 educator-visits to 22 Berkeley companies over 5 semesters. Over 90% of the participating students were from underrepresented communities in STEM, with a high participation rate from the BHS National Society of Black Engineers Jr. club, Biotechnology Academy, and Hispanic Engineering and Science club, among others.

STEM CareerX tours are made possible by a partnership between Cal State East Bay’s Institute for STEM Education, the City of Berkeley Office of Economic Development, Berkeley Startup Cluster, Berkeley High School Career Technical Education (CTE), Wareham Development and Bayer.

Contact OED if your company would like to host a tour during the 2024-25 school year.

TOMORROW, Thursday, June 6, 12:00-1:15 pm
Zoom

Take the heavy lifting of sales off your plate by setting up automated email sequences that promote your offers for you.

Join the Berkeley Chamber for this workshop with copywriter, Mimi Zhou, PhD, that will cover different kinds of email sales sequences all businesses can use, the strategy behind creating an email sequence, and the elements that every email geared for conversions should have. Walk away understanding how to strategize and create your next email sequence to bring sales in for you this summer!

Register now on Zoom. 

Thursday, June 20, 5:00-7:00 pm
Minuteman Press, 1101 Fifth St., Berkeley

Join the Berkeley Chamber at Minuteman Press for a cool, fun & inspiring event to unwind after your long workday. Mingle with other members of the business community while enjoying refreshing beverages and delicious food.

Register to attend here.

Want to lessen your company or lab's environmental impact?  The City of Berkeley, in partnership with the California Green Business Network, offers free assistance to local businesses to help improve environmental performance by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy efficiency, conserving water, and diverting solid waste from the landfill.

Register on the Green Business Network website to be contacted regarding next steps.

University of California, Berkeley is moving forward with a new 145,000 SQFT Bakar ClimatEnginuity Hub incubator on the west side of campus that will provide resources and support to entrepreneurs in renewable energy and climate technology.

Read more on Berkeley News.

Caribou Biosciences, a CRISPR genome-editing biopharmaceutical company, announced in April that it received clearance of its Investigational New Drug application from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for CB-010, an allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy, to help patients with lupus. Updated clinical data presented this month also indicates that a single dose of CB-010, a readily available, off-the-shelf CAR-T cell therapy has the potential to rival the safety, efficacy, and durability of other approved cell therapies.

Their director of platform discovery, Paul Donohoue, a co-inventor of Caribou's chRNDA genome-editing technology, was also selected as one of this year's San Francisco Business Times Bay Area 40 under 40.

Learn more from Caribou's press releases.

Berkeley startup Millie has partnered Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, California to offer hybrid maternal care, to extend its patient care outside of the maternity wards and into more modern settings.

Read more on MedCity News.

Berkeley startup Pow.bio is engineering microbes to produce pretty much anything. Their CEO Shannon Hall says they run a fermentation process more like an assembly line than a series of cookie batches which can drive “multi-fold increases in productivity” and enable firms to cut costs by using smaller, more efficient bioreactors to achieve the same output.

Read more on AFN.