SEED students gain startup experience while advancing research

For some students in the Student Experiences in Entrepreneurial Development (SEED) program, the summer offered a front-row seat to entrepreneurship. Kwasi Thornhill and Sid Gudanti stepped directly into the world of a biotech startup, working on projects that blended finance, engineering and science to help position the young company for growth. Others, like Kameron Mitchell and Alyssa Callahan, immersed themselves in faculty research labs, exploring technologies that could one day transform health care.

Thornhill, a finance major, and Gudanti, a computer science and engineering major, interned with DNA Nanobots, a Columbus-based biotech company spun out of the lab of Professor Carlos Castro. The company is developing nonviral gene therapies with the potential to reshape the way certain diseases are treated.

Thornhill applied his finance training to restructure the company’s financial model and update its business plan, giving the leadership team sharper tools to guide strategy and prepare for future fundraising.

“Being able to contribute to something so impactful makes the work easier to believe in,” Thornhill said. “This experience confirmed that I want to stay connected to entrepreneurship—whether that’s building startups or working in venture capital to help other companies grow.”

Gudanti contributed from a different angle, designing a custom electronic lab notebook system that streamlined how the company managed and shared experimental data. By replacing static spreadsheets and PDFs with a dynamic platform, he made day-to-day operations more efficient and supported the team’s scientific progress.

“I enjoyed using my engineering background to make the team’s work more efficient,” Gudanti said. “This experience showed me how computer science can directly support breakthroughs in health care and biotechnology.”

Together, Thornhill and Gudanti demonstrated how students can play pivotal roles in advancing a startup’s momentum—bringing entrepreneurial thinking into finance and technology while working alongside scientists.

That blend of entrepreneurship and science is central to SEED, a collaboration between the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship, the College of Engineering and the STEM Emerging Leaders Fellows program. The initiative gives undergraduate students a research-intensive internship paired with entrepreneurial training early in their career. The program matches students with research-active faculty engaged in technology translation and entrepreneurship and with a strong mentoring track record.

For Kameron Mitchell, a second-year electrical engineering major, the summer was a chance to build skills at the intersection of research and entrepreneurship. In Castro’s DNA origami lab, his team worked on hinge-like DNA structures that could one day serve as smart diagnostic or therapeutic tools. Mitchell focused on attaching molecules to the structures and training a machine learning algorithm to identify them by molecular barcodes.

“I feel like the thing that I learned the most was just to have tenacity and to be able to overcome challenges when they do come your way,” Mitchell said. “Because regardless of whether it’s in entrepreneurship or in research in general, there’s always going to be some sort of conflict. Learning how to persevere through those moments—and believe in what you’re doing, even if no one else does—that’s been the biggest takeaway.”

Mitchell collaborated with Jocelyn Rojas-Ramirez and Juan Valle Nieto, and said he plans to continue working in Castro’s lab during the academic year.

Alyssa Callahan, a third-year biology major on the pre-med track, advanced biomedical research in the lab of Associate Professor Katelyn Swindle-Reilly. Her project focused on developing a targeted drug delivery system for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. She synthesized ZIF-8 nanoparticles, refined their size and tested their ability to deliver chemotherapy directly to tumor sites while sparing healthy tissue.

“Our goal was to create a delivery system that could be injected intravenously and target tumor cells without harming healthy tissue,” Callahan said. “Glioblastoma lacks standardized treatment options, so there’s a significant need for more effective ways to deliver chemotherapy. This project showed me how scientific research can be translated into solutions with real health and market impact.”

At the program’s finale, students presented both their scientific findings and business pitch concepts, highlighting the range of experiences SEED offers—whether working in a lab or a startup, building entrepreneurial skills or advancing new biomedical approaches.

“SEED helps students connect their research to real-world needs,” said Caroline Crisafulli, director of entrepreneurial education at the Keenan Center. “They leave the program with a clearer sense of how their ideas can create value in the lab and beyond.”