While she was growing up in Los Angeles, Marina Marmolejo ’19 M.P.H. says the problem of homelessness seemed too big to address in a meaningful way. But when she came to New Haven to attend Yale School of Public Health and began working with local homelessness organizations, she saw an opportunity to make a difference.

Each summer, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) offers summer fellowships to student entrepreneurs. Founders from across Yale spend eight weeks working on their ideas and getting a crash course in what it takes to start a successful company.

On Thursday, 14 teams presented their ideas to the Yale community in the Tsai CITY Fall 2019 Accelerator Pitch-off.
The teams had just completed a five-week program to incubate their ideas for businesses, nonprofits, social movements and new technologies.

A first-of-its-kind event will connect technologists, policy experts, students, and others around the globe in a shared effort to build an open source platform for transparent climate accounting — with the goal of tracking progress toward the targets set in the Paris Agreement.

The Yale entrepreneurial community gathered Thursday, November 7, under the leadership of Accelerate Yale, a Yale Alumni Association shared interest group, to launch the Yale Angels initiative at Company in New York City.

Fourteen teams of students are nearing the end of a five-week project development program with the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. Called the accelerator, the initiative helps students develop an early-stage idea into an organization or product and is open to Yale students of all levels.

As the 2018–2019 academic year — Tsai CITY’s second year —wrapped up in May, our team started working on a familiar project: creating our annual report. Annual reports serve many purposes, of course — they’re a key format for communicating an organization’s goals, work, and impact to a broad array of stakeholders.

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.

Tsai CITY’s fall 2019 Accelerator is up and running, helping 14 student teams take their ideas to the next level. The cohort, selected from across Yale’s campus, includes teams working on a wide range of ventures, nonprofits, and other initiatives — students are hard at work prototyping products, launching social movements, finding paths to scale for existing platforms, and more. Over the course of the semester, each team will receive $1000 in grant funding, connections to mentors and expert advice, and insights from a series of workshops and learning modules.