Booth’s Next Frontiers

“We are working so hard for criminal justice reform within the law, but we have this powerful low-hanging fruit that can be addressed by technology,” says Mbekeani—from appeals to requests for legal help. “We can advocate, protect, enforce, and provide transparency just by using the technology we have. Why aren’t we leveraging that?”

It was this question that led Mbekeani to found Period, a digital platform that gives incarcerated people access to legal assistance as well as advocacy for innocence and post-conviction appeals. The digital platform is paid for by lawyers and other external stakeholders, and is completely free for incarcerated people.

When she first thought of the startup, she was deep into another project, a dating app she’d founded and created, and was wary of wasting the time and money she’d invested in it by pivoting to something new. But mentor Phil Schwarz, ’08, the former CMO of Tinder, urged her that it was better to take the chance early than sink more money into the current project and regret it later on.

“I don’t want pride to prevent my pivot,” Mbekeani recalls thinking at the time. Not long after, Schwarz coached her for her Booth interview, after she decided to pursue her MBA to help her launch Period.

Mbekeani found Booth difficult at first—but the community has been there for her every step of the way. Staff members reached out to check up on her in the first few weeks of class. Michael Alter, clinical professor of entrepreneurship, let her use Period as a group project in his Entrepreneurial Selling course, with her fellow students jumping in to give her honest feedback. And in the New Venture Challenge course, she found help and resources at every turn, from putting together her first-ever financial projection spreadsheet (“my greatest accomplishment after giving birth”) to getting invaluable advice from the judges during the pitch process.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” Mbekeani says. “I’ve always had confidence. But our potential is so limitless, and sometimes you just need to be in a community that reminds you of that.”

By understanding how people think and operate, algorithms could help us defeat bias instead of empowering it, Davenport suggests. “If we can connect the science of people with computer science, we can build algorithms that help us connect with each other or do the things we deep down want to do, rather than just make simple assumptions,” he says. 

As a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Davenport is on his way to finding a professorship. But he doesn’t see academia as a space solely of theory and data analysis. His ideas are meant to have concrete impact.

“I see research as a means to an end,” says Davenport. “The endgame is changing how people think, changing how institutions operate.” For example, in most real-life applications of algorithms, Davenport explains, one person is making a decision about another person. An algorithmic aid gives the decision-maker a prediction—for example, in the next 30 days, is the subject likely to have a heart attack? Or is the subject likely to pay back a loan? 

“We have a lot of evidence that those predictions are better than predictions humans make usually,” says Davenport. “But at the end of the day, the human is still the one making the choice. Trying to figure out how and when people will follow the prediction versus relying on their own intuitions can be the difference between total optimization and biased usage.”

He hopes that his research can unlock ideas on how to best adjust for the way human decision-making happens, and help institutions figure out when to dial in or dial down their interference. 

The three alumni work with Innovafeed, which takes the larvae of the black soldier fly—Hermetia illucens—and farms them. The larvae have a strong nutritional profile and a short life span, plus they thrive living in a confined environment, making it easy to scale production. Innovafeed can then process the insects into proteins and oils to be used as feed ingredients for pigs, chickens, and fish, as well as in pet food—Innovafeed recently partnered with Arch, a hypoallergenic pet food company cofounded by Evening MBA student Gabriel Huertas del Pino.

There’s nothing unusual about this solution. Chickens and fish, for example, eat insects as a significant part of their natural diet. “This is a return to insects’ natural role in the food chain,” explains Madison, who is director of North American business development at Innovafeed. 

The company is also able to make organic fertilizer from insect excrement, potentially replacing or cutting into the traditional, carbon-intensive fertilizer business, which in turn makes Innovafeed’s process zero waste.

“Upcycling and circularity”—both processes by which a product or service is renewed or regenerated rather than wasted—“are starting to become trend buzzwords in innovation, and Innovafeed is doing that,” says Griffis, “but in a way that’s incredibly scalable.”

Innovafeed’s first facilities were established in France, but its newest production plant is being built in Decatur, Illinois, thanks in part to the contributions of these three alumni.

As managing director at ADM Ventures, the venture-capital arm of Archer Daniels Midland Company, one of the world’s biggest agribusiness companies, Griffis helped to facilitate a partnership in November 2020 so Innovafeed’s plant could be built alongside ADM’s corn mill, one of the world’s largest. 

“Insect protein is kind of out there for a lot of people,” says Griffis. “But I think it’s really important to know the quality of the people around this company. It was started by McKinsey consultants. Some of the largest multinational companies in the world and some of the largest sovereign wealth funds are invested in this business.” 

During his time at Booth, Griffis had been a co-chair, along with Biggar, of the FEAD club, Booth’s food, environment, agribusiness, and development student group, and they’d kept in touch. Now he told Biggar about Innovafeed. 

Biggar works at Chicago-based Grow Forward, a family office that has a history in food and ag investing. He saw the upside in Innovafeed’s potential to utilize waste products from the ethanol industry to create a higher value protein. 

After speaking with Griffis about Innovafeed’s model and expansion, Biggar and Grow Forward created a group that could participate in Innovafeed’s Series D, which would ultimately raise $250 million. 

Innovafeed was looking for someone to lead the commercial front for their North American expansion. Biggar and Griffis, recently graduated, talked to Madison, whom they knew from Booth. He’s been with Innovafeed ever since.

“I was searching for a new role in the food space with a company that was mission oriented, and here I am,” says Madison. “It shows the power of the Booth network.”

“In our early studies, we’ve turned a common chemotherapy agent into a targeted oncology drug. If we can establish this, then it could significantly improve the way we provide cancer treatments,” says Anh Nguyen, ’11, CEO at Alnair Therapeutics. Nguyen is a physician-scientist and seasoned biotechnology executive who initially came to the oncology startup as a mentor through the Compass Deep Tech Accelerator at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 

Alnair has made waves in the Booth network. Led by Xiaoyang Wu, associate professor of cancer research and stem cell biology at the University of Chicago, the startup received $175,000 in fall 2022 from the George Shultz Innovation Fund, managed by the Polsky Center. And then it turned its sights to the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge.

Ryan Meyers, ’23, had worked with Dr. Wu before and was looking forward to an easy last quarter before graduation at Booth. But when Alnair asked him to lead the student team in the NVC, he was in. “I would follow Dr. Wu anywhere,” Meyers laughs. 

He helped the team build out a presentation-ready pitch deck, work through market discovery, and refine the story into one that both honored the science and was immediately tangible to investors.

“Reworking or designing a new cancer drug with our technology may enable better treatments and ultimately buy more time—maybe years—for patients with cancer,” he says. “We could make a significant impact on the patient journey.” A primary goal of Alnair’s pitch was getting that story across to investors.

And the pitch went well. In spring 2023, Alnair won the 27th annual NVC, walking away with $585,000 in investment, including the $205,000 Rattan L. Khosa, ’79, First-Place Prize. The team also came away with a “network of champions,” says Meyers—from early-round judges who returned to invest to business leaders and alumni they met through professors, who have also contributed invaluable advice and support.

“It’s been just blindingly fast how we’ve been able to scale and move into a de-risked pathway toward commercialization,” says Nguyen. “That is the magic of UChicago.”