Shaw Innovation Explorers Program
A UNH Entrepreneurship Center Student Fellows Program
Please note applications for 2022 - 2023 are now closed.
Applications for 2023-24 will open in the spring of 2023.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
About the Explorers Program
The Shaw Innovation Explorers (“Explorers”) Program is an innovative student fellowship designed for proven creative and innovative UNH sophomores to gain a 360-degree understanding of innovation through hands-on, high-impact experiences. The vision is to have a breadth of introductions and engagements with pioneering leaders in areas that include art, music, technology, science/marine, theater, municipalities, and New Hampshire and New England native industries. A training workshop provides the basics of innovation and start-up development.
Student Scholarship
Each student selected to participate will receive a $3,500 scholarship to support their education at UNH.
Innovation Explorer Speaker Series
The Shaw Innovation Explorer Speaker Series will introduce both the Explorers group and the larger university and Seacoast communities to high-profile innovators and pioneers in their fields of expertise. This pioneer will take stage with David Shaw for an insightful and thoughtful conversation. In addition, a “Round-Table” session with the pioneer speaker and the Explorers will provide highly personalized conversation and interactions.
Are you an Explorer?
Are you creative and innovative? Want to be part of what is already becoming known as a top program to get in to? Are you ready to roll your sleeves up and dive into a full world of creative and innovative events and activities? Apply to the Shaw Innovation Explorers Program!
OPEN TO ALL UNH DURHAM RISING SOPHOMORES. All college and all majors welcome.
Philanthropic Support
The Shaw Innovation Explorers Program is possible due to the generous support of David E. Shaw '73, CEO Black Point Group, John Shaw, CEO of Itaconix (a company built on technology licensed from UNH), and the Shaw family.
Important Information about the Explorers Program
About David Shaw and Black Point Group
David has founded or co-founded numerous business and social ventures. He serves as the CEO of Black Point Group, a private investment company and family office focused on healthcare and other opportunity areas where the principals seek to create exceptional value through proactive investment management via extensive industry experience.
David abandoned other career plans and plunged into the adventurous and fulfilling world of tech entrepreneurship by founding IDEXX Laboratories in 1983 and served as CEO and Chair until 2002. IDEXX is a publicly-traded leading animal health diagnostics company with revenues of $2B. David co-founded Vets First Choice in 2010 and serves as Chair. Vets First Choice will be a publicly-traded $4B animal publicly-traded software services and specialty pharma company via a transaction scheduled to close later this year. He is also the founding CEO and Chair of Ikaria Holdings, a human pharmaceutical company.
Inspired by entrepreneurship and the game changing science of our times, he has now helped build more than a dozen science-based organizations that generate billions of dollars of annual value to benefit their stakeholders and communities, including Maine.
David served as chair of The Jackson Laboratory (ME), Treasurer of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and Trustee of the National Parks Foundation, among others. Among his notable work is a leadership role in the US National Park Centennial and in protecting the Earth’s high seas for conservation, via the Sargasso Sea Alliance and the ongoing Aspen High Seas Initiative. He has received numerous national and international awards for his social and business entrepreneurship.
David graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1973. He was inducted into the UNH Alumni Entrepreneur Hall of Fame in 2018.
About John Shaw