CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY’S SWARTZ CENTER FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP ANNOUNCES 2026-2027 INNOVATION COMMERCIALIZATION FELLOWS

The Carnegie Mellon University Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship recently awarded seven Innovation Commercialization Fellowships for 2026-2027. This year’s recipients are:

Bashu Aman, Ph.D. Candidate, Mechanical Engineering
Bashu co-founded Wavon with his Ph.D. advisor, Prof. B. Reeja-Jayan, to commercialize a new approach to electrified ceramic manufacturing.

Shreya Bali, Ph.D. Candidate, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Shreya’s research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and passive sensing, with a focus on helping people navigate complex, high-stakes decisions.

Dhruv Bhattaram, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Dhruv’s research focuses on the development of translatable lung tissue platforms to pioneer the biorobotic and theragnostic space



Julie Downs, Professor of Psychology and Decision Science
Julie research focuses on domains involving risky behavior, including adolescent sexual decision making, choices about food, behaviors relating to trust and privacy online, vaccination, and other settings.

Anurag Ghosh, Ph.D. Candidate, Robotics Institute
Anurag’s research builds intelligent systems for autonomous driving, combining vision foundation models with geometric and physical priors to turn ordinary single-camera videos into 4D driving logs, scaling the data that self-driving vehicles can learn from far beyond today's expensive, heavily instrumented sensor fleets.

Rajdeep (Ron) Sarma, Ph.D. Candidate, Chemistry
Ron and his team are developing a computational chemistry platform to enable molecular simulations at unprecedented scales: 10,000x - 100,000x speed-up compared to conventional methods, without compromising on accuracy.

Jonathan Shulgach, Ph.D. Candidate, Mechanical Engineering
Jonathan is the founder of MyoVerse, a startup developing wearable neuromuscular sensing and analytics technology for rehabilitation, sports performance, and clinical care.

The Innovation Commercialization Fellows Program is a yearlong program aimed at accelerating the process of commercializing university research. The program fosters entrepreneurship among graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research personnel who work directly with faculty investigators to conduct scientific experiments, solve problems and innovate. Fellows are awarded $50K in funding and participate in dedicated workshops and intensive mentoring to pursue their startup idea. Since 2015, the program has awarded 62 fellowships.

About the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship works with its partners to serve the entire Carnegie Mellon University community — departments, colleges, centers, and campuses — and bring promising ideas to the global marketplace. By accelerating research innovations from across CMU, the Swartz Center helps all entrepreneurial students, faculty, staff, and alumni tap into the “innovation ecosystem.” For more information on the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and its programs visit cmu.edu/entrepreneurship.