UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences has named Dipanjan Pan, Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Huck Chair Professor in Nanomedicine and professor of materials science and engineering and of nuclear engineering, to serve as the Huck’s first director for innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems.
Huck Institutes Director Christina Grozinger said she envisions Pan’s new role as an expert guide, helping faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students with promising research discoveries navigate the landscape of scaling, funding, intellectual property, government regulation and more.
“Dr. Pan bridges the biological sciences, medicine, material science and engineering within his own research portfolio, and thus has a unique ability to evaluate the landscape of entrepreneurship opportunities at Penn State,” said Grozinger, Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology. “He offers deep expertise to taking research from the lab into the real world. This past year, he led the Huck Entrepreneurship Working Group with faculty from multiple colleges, which laid the groundwork for understanding how Huck can support programs in this space.”
It’s not the first foray that Huck has made into encouraging entrepreneurship — the Physiological Adaptations to Stress T32 NIH Training Grant has offered graduate students and postdocs a weeklong annual “Boot Camp for Science Entrepreneurs” for nearly a decade — but it is the first time that the unit has attempted to organize a formalized commercialization pipeline that equips researchers with the necessary resources and expertise to bring their discoveries to market.
“Innovation, excellence and solving real-world problems are at the core of engineering,” said Tonya L. Peeples, Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of the College of Engineering. “Because of this, the College of Engineering has seen many of our faculty, including Dipanjan, not only engineer solutions but also successfully commercialize these solutions in a way that accelerates impact in society. ... I am thrilled to see Dipanjan named to this role, and I know that he will help researchers across the University take the next step in moving their work out of the lab and into the world.”
Recently elected to the National Academy of Inventors, Pan brings a wealth of experience collected from his years spent exploring the translational research-to-commercialization pipeline. He began his career not in academia, but in industry, with what he calls a “brief but formative stint” at GE Global Research. He has since founded or co-founded five companies, each one seeking to fill gaps he found in clinical or research environments.
Through KaloCyte, a pre-clinical biotech company, Pan and his partners have advanced a bioengineered artificial red blood cell platform designed to address life-threatening blood loss in settings where traditional blood is unavailable. Around the same time KaloCyte was launched, he co-founded Innsight Tech, a company developing a disrupting technology for assessing ocular and systemic diseases by objectively measuring biomolecules in human tears. Another startup, Vitruvian Bio, offers cutting-edge, AI-powered HIV diagnostics for early infection detection and daily disease management.
“Across these projects, I’ve learned that successful commercialization is not just about having a breakthrough idea,” Pan said. “It requires building the right ecosystem, aligning with clinical needs, engaging industry early and de-risking technologies at every stage. These experiences are what I hope to bring to Huck, to help faculty translate their innovations into impactful solutions that benefit society.”
Pan emphasized that entrepreneurship facilitates learning, networking and the opportunity to make something new.
“I don’t keep starting companies for the sake of starting them,” Pan said. “I keep doing it because each venture is a chance to turn ideas into impact, build new teams and learn something I didn’t know before. The most important thing for faculty to know is that entrepreneurship requires a different mindset and set of partnerships than academia. They don’t have to do it alone, but they do have to learn to frame their science as a solution, protect their intellectual property, build the right team, and be intentional about balancing academic and entrepreneurial responsibilities.”
Pan earned his doctorate in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology. He conducted postdoctoral studies at the Washington University in St. Louis before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning tenure there in 2017. Pan joined Penn State in 2022.