IDE x CORE Entrepreneurship in Hard Tech: A Conversation with Alumni Founders
2026-04-14 17:30 - 19:30 UTC
Join Columbia Engineering and CORE for a candid look at building a hard-tech startup before the pitch decks and headlines. Hear from young Columbia founders about ideation, finding mentors and co-founders, testing early ideas, and navigating the early stages of a tech venture as Columbia students. The talk will feature Vignesh Karthik and Valentina Marini Fichera, and will be moderated by Katherine Brown, SEAS ’28.
This event will include Q&A, networking and mentorship opportunities, and dinner will be provided.
When: April 14, 2026, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Where: Columbia Engineering, Mudd Building, Carleton Commons

RSVP

AI with a Soul: Guardrails, Access, and the Future of Healthcare
2026-04-17 09:00 - 14:00
Friday, April 17th
9:00 AM – 2:00 PM

The Forum at Columbia University
601 W. 125th Street, NYC

The 2026 HPM Healthcare Conference will focus on AI and humanity, exploring how artificial intelligence can advance healthcare while preserving equity, trust, and human-centered care. Through a keynote and morning panel, we will examine what AI can do and how it should be responsibly implemented in public health, health systems, and communities.

The Keynote Address will be given by Renée Cummings.

The Morning Panel will feature Divya Pathak, Deepesh Chandra, and Dr. Remle Newton-Dame. Moderated by Professor Thalia Porteny.

A lunch reception will follow, featuring a poster showcase that highlights the work of current Columbia Public Health students.
Register Here

Lecture Series in AI: Byron Cook, PhD, VP/Distinguished Scientist, Amazon-AWS
2026-04-17 10:30 - 12:00
Schedule:
10:30-11:00am Check-in
11:00-12:00pm Lecture
Advance registration required for both Columbia non-affiliates and Columbia affiliates.
About the Speaker
Byron Cook is a vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and a professor at the University College London (UCL). He is well-known for his work on automatic methods for proving program term ination and the Terminator termination prover, showcasing that automatic termination proving was impossible. He contributed to Microsoft’s SLAM and Static Driver Verifier. Bryan Cook revived automatic program verification research in various ways and founded Amazon’s Automated Reasoning Group (ARG). He has received multiple awards for his research contributions, notably the Roger Needham Award and the distinction of Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
About the Lecture
“Neurosymbolic AI at AWS”
This talk will discuss work at AWS to bring the power of agentic/generative AI with the safety and correctness of formal reasoning.
Campus Access
In accordance with the University’s current visitor guidelines, all non-Columbia guests will receive a QR code within a few hours of the event date. The code will be sent to you via email from CU Guest Access and must be presented for campus entry, along with a government-issued ID.
Accessibility
Columbia University makes every effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend an event at Columbia University, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or access@columbia.edu.
Photography/Videography
Columbia Engineering reserves the right to capture and use images (including video, photo, audio) of student participants at this event in its current or future marketing materials. These materials include but are not limited to: social media, digital and/or print posters, email and web-based materials. By attending and participating in this event, you are consenting to having your image captured for these purposes. If you have concerns about your likeness being used, please reach out to engineeringcommunications@columbia.edu and we will accommodate your request.

CVC Presents: 2026 NYC Venture Community Monthly Networking Happy Hours (April, FinTech)
2026-04-21 18:00 - 19:00
Tuesday, April 21 | 6 PM EST
Penny Farthing, 103 3rd Avenue, NYC, NY 10003
Columbia Venture Community is pleased to invite you to a Networking and Social Event in support of our NYC venture community! Come out and join us for drinks and socializing with the goal of meeting and supporting the many entrepreneurs and investors in our community. This event is open to all. We look forward to seeing you there!
RSVP

Funding Opportunity: Ignition Grants 2026
2026-04-30
Ignition grants assist Columbia University engineering students in launching new businesses, social and not-for-profit ventures. Ignition grants support the initial stages of early venture development from formation, IP protection, and incubation to building prototypes and creating proofs of concept. Teams that have won the Technology Challenge or received Ignition Grants in the past will not be eligible. Applicants must have a current SEAS student on the team to apply. Teams who applied to Startup Columbia Round 2 in the Tech Challenge are welcome to update their applications before resubmitting.
Deadline: Friday, April 30
APPLY HERE

Deadline: Columbia Build Lab Application
2026-05-10
Columbia Build Lab (CBL) matches Columbia students pursuing Computer Science (or related degrees) with CBS student-founders of an early-stage startup. Engineers in the Build Lab program gain experience working to solve real-world challenges with teams of peers and CBS founders. This is an excellent opportunity for any engineering or computer science student looking to gain valuable experience this Fall! Submit your application to the Spring 2026 cohort before May 10th!

CVC-NY Presents: Incubation Night (May 14, 2026)
2026-05-14 19:00 - 21:00
Details: If you have ideas with a potentially viable business model or just want to hear what people are working on, join the Columbia Venture Community at our Quarterly CVC Incubation Night! This event puts entrepreneurs, “idea people,” and connectors in a room to engage in intense, non-stop collaboration on how to start and grow a venture.
RSVP

Founded in 2006, Columbia Venture Community (CVC) is a private, global network of more than 7,500 Columbia University alumni, students, and staff who are interested in all aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Join the Community Here

CVC Presents: 2026 NYC Venture Community Monthly Networking Happy Hours (May, AI)
2026-05-19 18:00 - 19:00
Columbia Venture Community is pleased to invite you to a Networking and Social Event in support of our NYC venture community! Come out and join us for drinks and socializing with the goal of meeting and supporting the many entrepreneurs and investors in our community. This event is open to all. We look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP TBA

Bridging Innovation and Entrepreneurship
2026-06-02 13:00 - 17:00
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

Columbia Venture Community & Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Alumni Association Presents “The Future of Healthcare: Innovation, Access, and Value”
2026-06-03 18:00 - 20:00
Columbia Venture Community & Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Alumni Association Presents “The Future of Healthcare: Innovation, Access, and Value”
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 | 6:00 – 8:00 PM ET
Thomson Reuters, Times Square, New York, NY
NEXT WEEK!
Join Columbia Venture Community & Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Alumni Association for a NYC TECH WEEK panel event, “The Future of Healthcare: Innovation, Access, and Value.”
This conversation brings together leaders across healthcare, venture, and innovation to explore how the health tech landscape is evolving — and what it takes to drive meaningful innovation while improving access and delivering value at scale.
This is also a great opportunity to bring together the Columbia University community and the broader NYC venture ecosystem — students, alumni, clinicians, operators, and investors who are actively building and thinking deeply about the future of healthcare.
Our panelists will share perspectives from the payor, founder, and investor lenses, exploring how the health tech landscape is evolving and what it takes to drive meaningful innovation while improving access and delivering value at scale.
We’re excited to welcome speakers from Columbia University, Harvard Business School, and across the NYC venture ecosystem, including:

Jaime Morrison (Director of Affordability, Oscar Health)
Elise King (Managing Director, Go Red for Women Venture Fund, American Heart Association Ventures)
Alice Zhang (Co-Founder & CEO, Anise Health)

with Carlos Cuevas (Founder & Principal, Safety-Net Health Advisors, LLC) as moderator.
If you’re a founder, investor, clinician, or operator interested in where healthcare is headed, we’d love to see you there!

CVC Presents: 2026 NYC Venture Community Monthly Networking Happy Hours (June, Crypto and Web3)
2026-06-16 18:00 - 19:00

CTV Innovation-to-Impact Series: Bring Your Innovations to Life: Design, Prototyping, and Manufacturing with Synectic
2026-06-25 12:00 - 14:00
Please join Columbia Technology Ventures for the next session in the CTV Innovation-to-Impact Series: Bring Your Innovations to Life: Design, Prototyping, and Manufacturing with Synectic. This practical in-person workshop is designed for Columbia innovators who are thinking about how to move from a research idea toward a prototype, product design, testing plan, and eventual manufacturing path.
Led by Synectic, a full-service product development company with deep experience helping startups, inventors, and companies move from concept to production, the session will offer real-world guidance on product development fundamentals, prototyping, Product Development Specifications, testing protocols, documentation, and production readiness.
Columbia Business School, Kravis Hall, Room 880
Thursday, June 25, 2026
12:00–2:00 PM ET
RSVP

CVC NYC Pitch Night - June 25, 2026 (Deadline for founders to participate - May 29!)
2026-06-25 18:00 - 20:00
CVC NYC Pitch Night is one of our biggest annual events, bringing together early-stage Columbia-affiliated founders, investors, operators, and builders for an evening of live pitches, feedback, and networking.
Date and Time: Thursday, June 25, 2026 at 6:00 PM ET
Location: DLA Piper, 1251 6th Ave, New York, NY
For founders: We’re inviting early-stage Columbia-affiliated founders to apply to pitch in front of 100+ alumni investors and operators. Selected founders will receive live feedback, visibility in the NYC ecosystem, and direct access to the Columbia startup community.
Application deadline: May 29, 2026
Apply here: https://forms.gle/3pAPr98V2mcGwtjv6
For attendees: Early bird tickets are live: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/13th-annual-columbia-venture-community-pitch-night-nyc-tickets-1988733837443

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.

August 2026 Recording: Introduction to the Columbia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
2026-08-01
An introduction to the Campbell Center, what it offers, and the constellation of entrepreneurship nodes available to Columbia students around campus. Also hear from students from Columbia graduate and undergrad schools discuss what their startup journey looked like on campus.

Entrepreneurship at Columbia - Welcome
2026-08-04 10:30 - 11:30
Please join us on ZOOM on Tuesday, August 4, 10:30-11:30am for an orientation and panel that will give an overview of the entrepreneurship ecosystem at Columbia, events and resources that are available around the university, and a chance to hear and ask questions about the student experience in this space.

ZOOM LINK

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.

Tamer Fund for Social Ventures
2026-08-15
The Tamer Fund for Social Ventures (TFSV) provides seed grants to nonprofit, for-profit, and hybrid early-stage Columbia University-affiliated social and environmental ventures. There are two deadlines for applications for the Tamer Fund for Social Ventures: the spring application deadline is March 1 at 11:59 p.m. ET and the fall application deadline is August 15 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Funding will be made available to around seven ventures each year (three to four ventures each cycle).
Questions? Email tamersvfund@gmail.com.

Climate Week at Columbia Engineering
2026-09-22 - 2026-09-25
CLIMATE WEEK AT COLUMBIA ENGINEERING
September 22-25, 2026
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 | 10:30 AM – 2:00 PM
Columbia Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy (LCSE) Symposium: Sustainable Energy, Resource, and Environmental Solutions
A focused half-day convening bringing together leaders from industry, research, and government to examine how the United States rebuilds secure, end-to-end mineral supply chains and delivers the dependable, affordable energy that domestic manufacturing and energy-intensive industry require. The program centers on two priority discussions shaping national resource and industrial strategy.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 | 2:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Innovation for Climate and Clean Air Progress in the Global South
The twin challenges of air pollution and climate change must be addressed hand in hand, alongside economic development in the Global South. This event will highlight recent innovation in sensing, data science, industry-academic partnerships, and funding strategies that have helped accelerate progress towards cleaner air and sustainable climate.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 | 8:00 AM- 12:00 PM
Gotham Foundry Symposium: Regenerative Materials Across Industries
This annual symposium will convene thought leaders and showcase the four central pillars of Gotham Foundry, from leading-edge regenerative material innovation and translation, workforce training, and industry engagement to democratizing access to the materials innovation ecosystem. Gotham Foundry, established in 2025, is a unique partnership between the city (NYC-EDC), leading community organizations and academic institutions (Genspace, CUNY-ASRC, FIT, and Columbia), and West Harlem and city-wide partners.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 | 12:30 PM – 7:00 PM
CEEC Fall Symposium 2026: Mines and Feedstocks to Grids, Chemicals, and Materials
The energy transition depends on the science and engineering that makes electrochemistry deployable at scale — from mines and feedstocks through grids, chemicals and materials, and back into circulation. The CEEC Fall Symposium gathers CEEC faculty, PhDs, postdocs, and industry practitioners working across this arc. Two afternoon sessions — Electrifying Chemicals and Materials, and The Grid Frontier — pair CEEC faculty keynotes with lightning talks and industry panels focused on the technical and commercial problems that matter most.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 | 1:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Sustainable Energy Catalyst: The Master Minds Roundtables
Join us at Columbia University’s Innovation Hub on September 23rd for an intimate gathering of brilliant minds passionate about engineering the 2050 energy transition. Sixty seats, six roundtables. Dive into focused discussions on the topics shaping the future: Grid Efficiency & Digitalization, Renewable Energy Integration & Storage, Industrial Decarbonization, Transition Finance, the Hydrogen Economy, and Transportation & Building Electrification. Exchange fresh ideas, challenge assumptions, and connect with senior leaders and innovators driving real change across energy, finance, industry, and policy. Part of the ICWS North America Series.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 | 10:30 AM – 2:00 PM
The Rise of Agentic AI: What it Means for Climate Innovation
A LEAP Science and Technology Center-hosted Panel Discussion
Join a dynamic panel of academic and private leaders exploring how agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of modeling complex Earth systems, improving climate predictions, and enabling adaptive decision-making. The conversation will explore both the opportunities and challenges agentic AI presents for accelerating climate solutions. Speakers will include LEAP Director Pierre Gentine, leading expert in the application of machine learning to Earth system science, and Kara Lamb, who works at the forefront of integrating physics-informed machine learning into atmospheric science. The panel will be hybrid, with in-person attendance at the Columbia Engineering Innovation Hub and virtual participation.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 | 2:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Fusion Research Symposium: Optimizing Symmetry in Fusion Plasmas
Join us for a symposium of activities carried out at the Fusion Research Center. Featuring keynote remarks, flash talks, and poster presentations, a range of research will be presented. Reception and lab tours to follow.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 | 8:30 AM – 7:30 PM
2026 IEEE/CCAE Symposium on Advanced Electrification Systems (SAES2026)
The 2026 IEEE/CCAE Symposium on Advanced Electrification Systems (SAES2026) brings together researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers to discuss advances in electrification with a special focus on Energy Storage Systems in 2026. The symposium emphasizes system-level integration, modeling, control, safety, and sustainability across transportation, power grids, and digital infrastructure.
