Our fellows come from
Overview
Our 2-month program to help researchers and engineers transition into roles in startups and venture capital.
The Leonis Capital Research Fellowship is a bridge for brilliant researchers and engineers to transition into roles in the startup and VC world. It is designed to help technical minds understand how startups and VC work while helping them leverage their research skills to identify startup opportunities. It contains five modules that closely mirror our team's research-driven investment process.
Our process
Turning talented researchers into talented VCs
We design a selective program to help the best and brightest researchers learn about startups and VC investing.
3.4%
acceptance rate
5 years
average research experience
3-5 fellows
target cohort size
75%
aspiring founders & VCs
The program is ideal for students in advanced degree programs (PhD or Masters) in technical fields like computer science, mathematics, or physics. It can be particularly helpful for aspiring founders with research or engineering backgrounds. It can also work well for software engineers and technical product managers with an interest in research, startups and VC. But above all, we seek candidates with a strong entrepreneurial drive and intellectual curiosity.
The fellows
Meet our research fellows
Small, tight-knit cohorts with big missions.
Cohort of 2024
Hassan Jahanandish, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Medical School • 2024
Postdoctoral research focuses on multimodal AI and medical imaging. Former founder of medical AI startup.
Wendi Ding
Former Researcher at IBM • 2024
Former researcher at Microsoft and IBM. Masters in Human Computer Interaction from UMichigan. Bachelor’s in CS from Peking University.
Karna Mendonca
Incoming CS Ph.D. at Northeastern University • 2024
Former LLM researcher at Meta-BAIR Commons. Bachelor’s in Math and CS from UC Berkeley.
Nikta Khani
Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University • 2024
Former product researcher at Zhipu AI. Former Assistant Director at the Atlantic Council and researcher at the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee.
