Lucas Arzola

Lucas Arzola was born and raised in Puerto Rico. As an entrepreneur, he's passionate about pursuing exciting ideas and working with talented teams to make tangible and positive impact. Arzola is a founder on 2 startups -- biotech company Inserogen and education firm Betaversity -- and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the VentureWell to support his commercialization efforts.

During the last year of his PhD, Arzola was named University Innovation Fellow to help engineering and science students at UC Davis become entrepreneurs. Through this initiative, he founded the Engineering & Technology Entrepreneurship Club (E-TEC) at UC Davis.

A year later, this led to the creation of the Engineering Student Startup Center, an on-campus space that enables UC Davis students to prototype ideas and collaborate on technology ventures, a program for which Arzola serves as the Founding Director. He is also an entrepreneurship educator, teaching Creativity and Entrepreneurship for Engineers, a 3-unit class on startups for engineers at UC Davis.

Arzola holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering with a Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology from UC Davis and a B.Sc. in Industrial Biotechnology from University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. His career goal is to increase creativity and technology commercialization in higher education and biotechnology, particularly among Puerto Ricans and underrepresented minorities in STEM. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, playing sports, and supporting up and coming engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs.