Bridging Innovation and Entrepreneurship
2026-06-02 13:00 - 17:00 UTC
Looking for fresh insights from leading researchers during NY Tech Week? Join on June 2 for an afternoon exploring how research, engineering, and entrepreneurship come together to drive innovation.
Hear from Columbia Engineering faculty Elisa Konofagou, Helen H. Lu, and Kostis Kaffes, alongside industry leaders and Lab to Market founders, who will share what it takes to move ideas from discovery to scalable ventures.
This convening brings together leading academics, industry experts, and emerging founders to share insights on translating scientific discovery into real-world impact. From breakthroughs in biomedical engineering and computing to perspectives from industry leaders, the program highlights the pathways that transform ideas into scalable ventures.
This event is hosted by the Hellenic Institute of Advanced Studies in collaboration with Columbia University and the Columbia Global Center Athens.
Registration available through June 1, 2026, 11:59am

APPLICATION DEADLINE: Start Me Up Bootcamp Summer 2026
2026-07-08
The Start Me Up Bootcamp is a virtual program designed to build your startup. The bootcamp introduces participants to customer discovery to assess the commercial potential of their technology through interviews. Teams complete 20 customer interviews, attend online sessions, present findings and determine their next steps.
Teams “get out of the building” to learn from potential customers to determine if they are solving a real-world problem with a sizeable market opportunity. Teams who successfully complete the bootcamp may be eligible to apply for a $50,000 NSF grant to continue customer discovery in the national I-Corps program. In addition to providing entrepreneurial training, the program enables students and researchers to identify new ways to apply research to solve problems across various industries.

How to Stop Living in Fundraising Mode with Steven Zausner, WhiteLabel
2026-08-05 16:00 - 18:00
Happy Hour + Building a Capital Strategy That Lets You Focus on Your Company! Raising capital is an important milestone but it shouldn’t become your full-time job. Join Columbia alumnus Steven Zausner at the Columbia Startup Lab on August 5 for a special startup happy hour and conversation on how founders can build a thoughtful funding strategy that supports long-term growth instead of constant fundraising.
Wednesday, August 5, 4:00 – 6:00pm
Columbia Startup Lab
RSVP

Columbia Engineering Lecture Series in AI: "From Microservices to Analytics and GenAI, Data Streaming Unlocks Everything"
2026-08-11 08:00 - 17:00
RSVP
Data streaming is rapidly emerging as a mainstream platform for integrating data in real time, with Apache Kafka becoming the de facto standard for this architecture. Many event-driven applications have been built on Kafka to enable businesses to respond to real-time events as they unfold. In this talk, I will explain how data streaming not only powers operational applications but also enhances analytics and generative AI by shifting processing closer to the source. I’ll also share our vision for what constitutes a complete and modern data streaming platform.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jun Rao is a co-founder of Confluent, a company that provides a data streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Before Confluent, he was a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn where he led the development of Kafka. Before LinkedIn, Jun Rao was a researcher at IBM’s Almaden research center, where he conducted research on database and distributed systems. Jun Rao is a committer of Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra. Jun Rao obtained his PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2000.
