Tammy Hsu: Stories from 10 Years of the Bakar Fellows Program
By: Niki Borghei
From the Bakar Fellows Program’s 10th anniversary series
The growing world of entrepreneurship, particularly in biotech, means that what was once rare for graduate students and postdocs is now much more accessible. In 2017, Innovation Fellows were introduced to the Bakar Fellows Program to help these researchers in faculty labs commercialize their projects. Innovation Fellows can be funded directly from a Faculty Fellow Spark Award or Bakar Prize, and they participate in Bakar Fellows workshops and networking events to provide support in their growing careers. Dr. Tammy Hsu, who joined the Bakar community as a graduate student and is now CSO and co-founder of Huue, is one of these Innovation Fellows.
“In undergrad, I trained as a bioengineer and worked on engineering microbes and using biology to make a positive impact on the planet,” said Dr. Hsu, “This is how I approached my doctorate work in grad school when I joined John Dueber’s synthetic biology lab at UC Berkeley. John, who is a Bakar Fellow, had a project starting in the lab looking at a new way to dye textiles using biosynthesized indigo. This indigo dyeing strategy required fewer chemicals to synthesize the dye, and it didn’t require as many harsh chemical additives during the coloring process. In my Ph.D. work, I looked at how plants naturally synthesize indigo and mirrored those processes in microbes, designing microbes to produce color molecules the way plants and organisms make it.”
“As I was conducting research for the project, I learned more about the sustainability challenges in fashion, and that industry-standard indigo is made using chemicals harmful to people, and our planet. There was also interest from the denim industry even when the project was in early stages, which validated the market need for the technology. When I was nearing the end of my graduate studies, I applied for Berkeley’s Bakar Innovation Fellows Program, and it was a great jumping off point for my entry into entrepreneurship.”
Dr. Hsu shared that the Bakar Innovation Fellows Program was instrumental in helping her make the transition from academia to entrepreneurship. As a graduate student, the goals and mindset of academic projects are often different from those of startups, and the program helped prepare her for life outside the academic sphere. The Bakar Fellows Program introduced her to the variety of resources available as a Berkeley founder, from incubator space to accelerator programs to IP resources in the university ecosystem. She also found it helpful to meet other like-minded founders who were in a similar stage of startup growth as she was.
Just like our Innovation Fellows, Huue is just getting started. While their first focus is the indigo blue for fashion’s most polluting wardrobe item, denim, the potential and impact of this technology extends through not just other categories, like food and cosmetics, but also other colors of the rainbow.
“Since we spun the technology out of Berkeley, we’ve been focused on setting our process up for scalability. We are proud to have raised $14.6 million in funding that will help Huue grow and service additional denim brands at scale. Our focus in the next year will be to scale up our process to meet industrial levels of production, so we can meet the demands of our commercial denim partners.”
While Dr. Hsu looks forward to the growth of her company, she is also excited about the success of her Bakar Fellow colleagues. “I am excited for the Bakar Fellows Program to help future cohorts of entrepreneurs transition their ideas from academia into startups making a difference. There is so much innovation and cutting-edge research happening at Berkeley, and it’s really inspiring to see projects come out through the Bakar Fellows Program and become real products in the world.”
