Pam Marrone

  • Business Partner
  • Founder and CEO, Marrone Bio Innovations
Marrone Bio Innovations (MBI) is co-sponsoring the 2020 Big Bang! Business Competition’s First Place Award, given to the top innovation across all categories. Pam Marrone founded MBI in 2006 to discover and develop effective and environmentally responsible, biologically based products for pest management and plant health. In August 2013 she led the company IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Andy (Che-An) Wu

  • EQUIP Alumnus
Andy (Che-An) Wu graduated with a B.S. in computer science. Andy’s career goal is to become a tech-entrepreneur and make a huge difference in this world. He is always looking for opportunities to become a better programmer and to make connections with other passionate individuals. Wu’s interests include software engineering, app development and artificial intelligence. Today he is a software engineer at Zscaler.

Can Artificial Intelligence Create Jobs?

Founded by Lisa Illes, PHIXED SYSTEMS is featured on the UC Davis Curiosity Gap Blog, excerpted from a story in Forbes exploring how artificial intelligence can create jobs. 2020 Big Bang! award winner PHIXED SYSTEMS is an advanced analytics platform technology for bio-manufacturing. Read the articles: UC Davis > Forbes >

Celebrating International Women’s Day

This International Women’s Day, we are celebrating the smart, engaged, innovative students and post-docs in our Business Development and Keller Pathway Fellowship programs.

Read how their research will better our world:

Entrepreneurial Ambitions + Passion = Success

Conference ignites student entrepreneurs

The 9th annual Ignite Conference (March 6–9, 2019) brought entrepreneurial students from multiple disciplines and universities together with business professionals and startup founders in an intensive four-day conference at UC Davis.

Translating Passion and Mission into Purpose and Accomplishments

Blog Post by Diane Dou, Ph.D. Candidate and 2018/17 Business Development Fellow

Ignite is an exciting annual program that is brought to life through a partnership between UC Davis and Rice University. The Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship collaborated to bring me and 74 other graduate students of diverse backgrounds to the frontlines in Silicon Valley.

Big Bang! Connect. Learn. Compete.

The Big Bang! Business Competition provides a forum for innovators to collaborate, develop and test business ideas. Leadership Skills

Even if you don't want to become an entrepreneur, participating in the Big Bang! competition and our Ideas into Action workshop series will give you powerful leadership skills to help you succeed in whatever career path you chose.

You'll learn to:

Thinking Outside the Box

UC Davis Newsroom

Professor Andrew Hargadon, champion of the Building the Entrepreneurial Mindset Big Idea, shares why this program is important for students. The UC Davis initiative is about helping students learn what they want to do and how they can explore and test their ideas—while learning from others and building things that have never been built before.