BME 6086-020 / BADM 5894-011 / MGMT 5895-012
Biomedical Entrepreneurship Course

Graduate courses act as Honors courses, with Honors credit awarded for a grade of B- or higher. 

This Biomedical Entrepreneurship course is designed to train future life science entrepreneurs, and focuses on entrepreneurship in the medical device and biopharmaceutical space.  It is based on the premise that entrepreneurship is a critical mechanism to bring new technologies to market that will benefit society.  Moreover, entrepreneurship is particularly critical in the medical device industry, where product life cycles are typically very short and a firm’s innovativeness dictates competitive advantage. Biopharmaceutical startups face particular challenges given long development cycles.

Teams will be coached by industry experts who address fundamental topics in biomedical entrepreneurship.  Students will gain experience that will help them be entrepreneurs in startups or with established firms.  Projects will be presented to external experts and teams will be considered for subsequent awards/funding.

This course is designed for graduate students or very advanced undergraduates.  It represents a multi-disciplinary effort between the Schools of Engineering, Business, Medicine, Pharmacy, and Liberal Arts and Sciences and will be co-taught by expert faculty from these schools.  Interdisciplinary teams will tackle real clinical needs to offer technical solutions and business models that might enable future commercialization.

The course is cross-listed in the Schools of Engineering (BME 6086-020) and Business (BADM 5894-011 and MGMT 5895-012).  The course will be held Wednesdays, 3:00-6:00 p.m. at the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (CCEI) space in downtown Hartford (100 Constitution Plaza) – a central location for students in Storrs, Hartford, and Farmington.

Apply for a permission number on the CCEI website.

Graduate courses act as Honors courses, with Honors credit awarded for a grade of B- or higher. 

This brand new course is designed to grow the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators in the InsurTech space. Students will be provided with training specific to the needs of a rapidly changing insurance industry, as well as opportunities to assist both startups and established companies test and implement new technologies that will fuel growth through innovation. This course is open to all graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in all schools/colleges.

Course Overview:

• Increase the understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation within the InsurTech space.
• Compare and contrast insurance and InsurTech models.
• Evaluate how InsurTech companies are being supported and financed to develop and test their business models.
• Understanding of next generation cybersecurity exposures with InsurTech, including legal, regulatory, compliance and other insurance related issues.
• Assess case studies and hear from industry experts on the support and disruption of the industry.

The InsurTech Initiative is provided through a grant from CTNext and coordinated by the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UConn and the University of Hartford.

Apply for a permission number on the CCEI website.

SOCI 6805: Advanced Topics in Political Sociology
Readings in Human Rights

Instructor: Bandana Purkayastha

Graduate courses act as Honors courses, with Honors credit awarded for a grade of B- or higher. 

This course will offer a critical sociological perspective on human rights, with a specific emphasis on power, inequalities and people’s struggles to claim and access political, civil, economic, social and cultural human rights. We will pay attention to multiple actors–states, corporations, INGOs, NGOs, and activists–that are involved in shaping the terrain of human rights. Moving away from the dominant emphasis on scholarly work produced in the Global North, we will pay significant attention to the scholarship from the Global South. While I will add one or two other topics as/if these emerge as significant issues over the next few months, the current readings emphasize the following overlapping themes: violence (including routinized violence against minority groups, women and sexual minorities), local and global racisms, displacements and new tools of governance (focusing on migration and migrants, including those in camps and detention centers), control over and access to land and water resources (situating these discussions within larger questions related to environment, climate change and rights to science), cultural rights in an era of populism (including a focus on religions), and, questions of economic rights (including what is included and excluded under Sustainable Development Goals, and questions of human dignity in an era of precarity).

Students will develop a country-focused portfolio on a selected topic or develop a publishable quality paper on human rights.

Contact Dr. Purkayastha for a permission number to enroll.