research & commercialization advising the institute provides students with a wide range of options to engage with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and startup service providers. these range from one-on-one office hours, provided by entrepreneurship faculty, to large-scale mentoring events featuring dozens of guest mentors, each of whom meets with 8 to 12 student- or alumni-founders in 15-minute “speed dating” style introductions. we held such large-scale events over the past year with revtech ventures, capital factory, and the plano software mafia, among others. resourcing for ventures coming out of ut dallas research labs often involving either advanced subject matter knowledge (like natural sciences), or in-depth expertise (like patent filing or financial statement preparation), we provide individual assistance through curated mentor meetings. these mentors may be either external advisors, who volunteer their time as a way of giving back to the community and/or ut dallas, or in-house university staff, like the specialists with our office of technology commercialization. funding the institute has a range of funding options available for ut dallas-affiliated startups. each one is designed to meet a startup’s needs at its typical, major milestones. for example, programs like cometx and the big idea competition are intended to fund early-stage research and prototyping for validating new products and services. other programs, like our unique startup launch academic offering, provide funding – from $5,000 to $25,000 – in addition to course credit as founders develop their go-to- marketing offering. finally, the ut dallas seed fund is a source of startup funding for ut dallas-affiliated ventures with sales traction, a dedicated team, and an offering that is ready to begin scaling. a unique element of the fund is that the work to identify, evaluate, and recommend ventures for funding is performed by ut dallas students who serve as venture associates in a tightly coupled seed fund support class. making waves: utd seed fund in the most recent year, more than 70 ventures were recruited for evaluation, with seed fund investments of $25,000 each recommended and granted to one startup each in the fall 2017 and spring 2018 cycles. nicole mossman (ms ‘15) founder, everthread cameron desaults (ms ‘15) matthew darner (ba ‘09) founders, collbox