Course Description

What if your next class could change lives? This 16-week immersive course is part of the ENSURE Program – Equitable Neurotech Solutions for Underserved Regions Everywhere, a one-of-a-kind opportunity for students passionate about making a positive social impact through entrepreneurship and technology innovation. You’ll collaborate with local schools and mental health organizations to design tech solutions, like engaging apps, to improve the behavioral health of grade-school youths who are at risk and underserved. The course will challenge you to think and act like a social entrepreneur, balancing a heart set for social change with a mindset for scalable innovation.

The course blends entrepreneurial skills, methods, and approaches with social impact, giving students the tools to innovate and empathize with the challenges faced by vulnerable populations. By the end of the course, you’ll have created a portfolio-ready prototype. This course is your chance to lead social change while developing critical thinking skills often demanded in real-world practice.

Supported by the expertise and resources of the Neurotech Collider Lab at Berkeley, participants are immersed in an environment that combines technology, business acumen, and a deep understanding of cognitive and behavioral science to forge impactful solutions.

By the end, you will have helped tackle pressing mental health issues and come away with a fully developed portfolio—from ideation to prototype—highly regarded in the tech and healthcare industries. This course is about real-world impact, entrepreneurial growth, and making a difference.

About Challenge Labs

Challenge Labs are 4 unit courses for students of all academic backgrounds who seek a rigorous, interactive, team-based, and hands-on learning experience in entrepreneurship and technology. These courses use a unique pedagogy, The Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, that involves the use of games, industry guest speakers, team exercises, videos and labs to cover the early part of the startup lifecycle. In these highly experiential courses, students form start-up teams to create technology solutions or services to address a broadly-defined problem posed by an industry partner or social challenge.


Relevant News

Collaboration with Brain Capital Alliance

UC Berkeley's Neurotech Collider Lab is collaborating with the Brain Capital Initiative to accelerate the development of neurotechnology solutions that can improve brain health and well-being.

Instructor

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Gail Gannon

Director of Neurotech Collider Lab

Gail Christine Gannon is the CEO of Ensanté Tech for Good Advisors, a social enterprise advisory for tech startups, and a faculty member at the University of California Berkeley, Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. In Spring 2022 she taught a successful Challenge Lab titled “Unleashing Innovation to Solve Global Health Challenges”. This course was instrumental in helping students build a portfolio to increase their employability in the health tech space and for their applications to graduate and medical school. Gail has and continues to mentor startups all over the world and serves as a health tech industry opinion leader and lecturer for students at UCSF Lean Launch, Stanford SPARK, and Harvard HealthLab. She also is asked to give lectures and bespoke interactive workshops to International Business Schools on Entrepreneurship. Gail is instrumental in helping companies build to scale and to successful acquisition.