According to a recent news release sent to Government Technology, the new three-year program, dubbed the Venture Science Doctorate (VSD), aims to equip students with skills to launch their own science and technology companies, collaborate with researchers to build tech tools, and articulate and pitch their ideas to investors.
Thane Campbell, Deep Science Ventures’ associate for doctoral training, said the program hopes to produce at least 1,000 science entrepreneurs a year from diverse backgrounds, with particular emphasis on training women and people of color who are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)-related fields.
“From country to country, we find that the critical bottleneck for science commercialization is talent, and this goes right back to education. On the one hand, doctorates are not designed to generate new science companies in deep tech. Less than 2 percent of U.S. Ph.D. students patent their research findings as new products or services,” he wrote in an email to Government Technology, citing data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. “On the other hand, systemic barriers to gender, racial and regional inclusion keep talented people out of scientific training and ultimately away from founding deep tech companies. We need an innovative and inclusive alternative for high-value job creation at the regional scale.”
According to the program’s website, candidates will spend their first year familiarizing themselves with a specific STEM industry to identify challenges and opportunities for tech solutions in their respective fields. Through a process called “scoping,” the site said, candidates will identify potential solutions for real-world problems, take online courses on experimental design and work as visiting researchers to further develop their hypotheses. Viewing entrepreneurship as a mode of learning, the site said, the program is designed to produce the next generation of innovative tech leaders.
Toward the end of the program, Campbell said, Deep Science Ventures will help candidates recruit co-founders and pitch to investors. Rather than spending their entire time in one lab, students will go through a matchmaking process in their first year to connect with two or more labs across the globe for collaborative research.
“Scientific leaders who create companies often gain the tech development, tech scaleup and tech financing skills needed to meet these challenges — skills that conventional scientific training overlooks but that are crucial to the success of future U.S. industrial policies,” Campbell wrote. “Today, we desperately need to address national and global challenges in climate and health. This will take all of us, so we need to remove barriers to inclusion from STEM Ph.D. training, across genders and races.”
According to Campbell, the Venture Science Doctorate and its goals were first conceptualized as part of a policy proposal urging U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to incentivize applied research to create new technology products in sectors like clean energy. The program also comes amid plans in the U.S. to establish an “ARPA-Ed,” or Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education — modeled after the Pentagon’s research and development branch Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Campbell said the program is supported through a research network that includes the Mayo Clinic, Cornell University and U.K. higher ed institutions such as Imperial College London, University College London, Kings College London, the University of Edinburgh, the James Hutton Institute, Henry Royce Institute and the National Physical Laboratory, among other partners. As of this week, he added that the program has already received hundreds of applications from over 30 countries including the U.S. since its formal launch in February.
Deep Science Ventures Venture Partner Claire Thorne, a former director of innovation at the University of Surrey and a co-CEO of Tech She Can, said that the VSD will be the “first Ph.D. program to make venture creation and inclusivity its dual mission.”
“We’re reimagining the definition of ‘scientist’ — creating a dedicated pathway and global learning environment for ’venture scientists’ — whilst significantly increasing inclusivity and access to higher education,” she said in an emailed statement. “Our vision is to give the world’s most diverse and entrepreneurial scientists the freedom, networks and investment to solve the world’s hardest problems.”
Campbell said the program’s courses are set to begin in September. Applications and more information are available here.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story identified Deep Science Ventures as a startup accelerator with an online degree program. The story now describes the organization as a venture capital firm, as it recruits scientists and founders before they've started a company, and its degree program as only partially online, or hybrid.
