Tory Burch and Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna are teaming up to help women scientists
Tory Burch has helped thousands of women entrepreneurs through her eponymous foundation and its education programs, but very few recipients of her coveted one-year business fellowship have founded biotech or science-based companies. Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and cofounder of genomics technology company Caribou Biosciences, says “being a brilliant scientist doesn’t automatically make someone a brilliant business person.”
That helps explain why Burch and Doudna have teamed up to create the Tory Burch Fellowship at the Innovative Genomics Institute, a one-year program to support a female founder leading a business in genomics. Burch and Doudna spoke exclusively with Fast Company about the fellowship and its first recipient, Nabiha Saklayen, cofounder of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Cellino.
Saklayen will receive $10,000 for business education, up to $50,000 in research supplies, and access to other Tory Burch fellows as well as the Innovative Genomics Institute‘s network of scientists. The institute is a nonprofit, academic research organization founded by Doudna with an aim of applying research to real-world problems.
