With support from the Rothberg Catalyzer program, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) offered grants of up to $1,000 this semester to kickstart student teams who are developing innovative hardware or AI solutions to healthcare issues.

The word “future” flashed on-screen in bold, blue font, shortly followed by the words “urgency,” “justice,” and “responsibility.” Next appeared seemingly disparate phrases such as “water access,” “urban resilience,” “existential threat” — and even a string of animal emojis.

Tsai CITY’s Student Innovation Fund and Student Event Fund offer grants of up to $500 to help students realize ideas of all kinds. This semester’s funding recipients included event organizers, musicians, artists, researchers, club leaders, startup founders, and more from across Yale’s campus. Over the past month, we spoke with students behind four projects to learn more.

Students by day and home cooks or aspiring entrepreneurs by night, the Intensive’s participants came to the program’s kickoff with their own recipes and ideas.

Donning a jet-black virtual-reality headset, holding a joystick in each hand, Bobby Berry, the resident Innovation Fellow at Tsai CITY and the Center for Collaborative Arts & Media (CCAM), looked equal parts futuristic and ridiculous in the CCAM’s motion capture studio on a Saturday afternoon.

“There’s a lot of doom and gloom, but what I want to pitch to you is action.” Ben Soltoff, an innovation fellow at Tsai CITY and the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, kicked off fall 2019’s Yale Pitch Slam by encouraging the audience to take a stand against climate change.