Craig Forest, Associate Director for MAKE, has been selected for a “Chair Fellow” position in Entrepreneurship by the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Forest will receive discretionary support of up to $25k per year for two years to develop entrepreneurship modules for undergraduate courses, improve ties between the Woodruff School and ATDC and CREATE-X, and support faculty patents and startups.

“I’m excited be able to focus on improving the entrepreneurial experiences of students in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering through this Chair Fellow appointment,” said Forest.

The Woodruff School established three “Chair Fellow” positions in Excellence in Education and Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with the goal of promoting excellence in teaching and an inclusive and collegial culture where great research ideas beyond the standard-sponsored ones can be realized.

Forest is a Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he also holds program faculty positions in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. He conducts research on miniaturized, high-throughput robotic instrumentation to advance neuroscience and genetic science. Prior to Georgia Tech, he was a research fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He obtained a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in June 2007, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2003, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2001. He is cofounder/organizer of one of the largest undergraduate invention competitions in the US—The InVenture Prize, and founder/organizer of one of the largest student-run makerspaces in the US—The Invention Studio. He was a Fellow in residence at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, WA. Forest was named Engineer of the Year in Education for the state of Georgia in 2013 and was a finalist on the ABC reality TV show "American Inventor.”