Faculty awarded entrepreneurship funding

Ten faculty members are recipients of 2025 Louis H. Zalaznick Teaching Assistantships, receiving funds of $1,500 to $3,000 to help develop or expand courses, pursue research opportunities or add teaching assistants.

The program, administered by Entrepreneurship at Cornell, was established in 1993 by David W. Zalaznick '76, a Cornell trustee, and his wife, Barbara '76, to honor David's father, Louis. The awards allow faculty affiliated with Entrepreneurship at Cornell to extend their capacity to work with students by providing assistants to help with their courses and/or course development.

Zalaznick award winners and their projects:

• Jorge Colon, professor of practice at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine, will use the funding to support a teaching assistant for his class, Agile Innovation and to help with the Animal Health Hackathon;
• Tom Estad, lecturer in the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration and the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, will use the funds for a teaching assistant for his Communication for Entrepreneurs class;
• Brooke Hollis, lecturer and executive-in-residence for the Sloan Program in Health Administration, will use the funding for teaching assistants for courses on public policy and senior living;
• Matt Marx, faculty director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell, will use the funding to build an AI server to be used for entrepreneurship classes;
• Greg Ray, lecturer at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, will use the funds to support teaching assistants for classes on green technology innovation, life science entrepreneurship and startup actualization;
• Wes Sine, professor of management and organizations at the SC Johnson College of Business, will use the funds to support an academic speaker series on entrepreneurship and innovation;
• Ami Stuart, lecturer at the SC Johnson College of Business, will use the funds to support a teaching assistant for her course on entrepreneurship hackathons;
• Daniel Van Der Vliet,director of the Smith Family Business Institute at the SC Johnson School of Business, will use the funding for a teaching assistant for his course, Leaders in Family Enterprise;
• Chuck Whitehead, professor of business law at Cornell Law School, will hire a research assistant to work on articles related to corporate and capital markets law;
• Rana Zadeh, associate professor of human-centered design in the College of Human Ecology, will use the funds to support teaching assistants for two classes on designing the workplace.