Professor Catherine Blake was selected from faculty across the University of Illinois System to participate in the 2026 cohort of the University of Illinois Faculty Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. The program seeks to foster a vibrant university entrepreneurial ecosystem by supporting faculty innovators in realizing the commercial and/or social impact of their research and scholarship.
Members of the cohort will attend four sessions in the fall that introduce participants to the vast array of entrepreneurship resources and programs available throughout the university ecosystem. The program, which is a partnership between the Discovery Partners Institute and the Gies College of Business, is housed in the Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship at Gies.
Blake, who holds a joint appointment as a health innovation professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, studies evidence synthesis in an effort to bring automated tools closer to a human expert's weighing of information from multiple sources. She served as principal investigator on the National Science Foundation's Midwest Big Data Hub project that received the 2025 Synergy Award from the Chicago Council on Science and Technology.
"I am very excited to join the FELP community of scholars who are exploring how to transition innovations beyond the walls of the academy and into the real world," Blake said. "For example, it is easy to think that data is just lying around, but we know from the Midwest Big Data Hub project that data is not uniformly distributed. We must work together to identify and balance competing evidence that have various levels of relevance and quality."
Blake also serves as a scientific advisor to Jungle Biotech, a startup founded by Jaemin Yang (Informatics PhD '26) that brings transparency and rigor to drug development decisions in research and public policy settings.