Research Park Events

View Full Calendar

Startup Café with Zeba Parkar: An Entrepreneurial Journey

Event Type
Conference/Workshop
Sponsor
EnterpriseWorks, Research Park
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Nov 18, 2020   12:00 - 1:00 pm  
Speaker
Zeba Parkar
Contact
Cathy McArthur
E-Mail
mcarthur@illinois.edu
Views
183

Join us on Wednesday, November 18 from 12-1PM to hear from Zeba Parkar on her entrepreneurial journey. Entrepreneurship comes in all shapes and sizes – and is a journey full of contradictions. It has soaring highs and rock bottom lows, you gain self-awareness tempered by imposter syndrome, you get full control but the market controls you. All this eventually leads you to maximizing your potential.

The talk will attempt to delve into learnings from Zeba's personal decade long experience as a student entrepreneur, a side hustler while working full-time in the corporate world and now a full-time entrepreneur with a side project. This is a personal memoir of Zeba's struggles of keeping ideas afloat, inner struggles of money vs vision, and how to get up after being punched into the face quite often. 

 

Register here.

 

Speaker bio: Zeba Parkar is a material scientist, an inventor, and a serial entrepreneur with a passion for creating innovative products.  She is currently working on creating shoes based on the shape of the foot solely from a few pictures of your feet.

 

Zeba has a PhD in material science from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign.  Her PhD work culminated in the founding of ATSP innovations.  While at Illinois, she also came up with Milkshield, concept for preservation of milk without refrigeration and was one of the finalists for the Lemelson Student Prize 2011.  After receiving her PhD, Zeba worked as a scientist at the 3M Corporate Laboratory for over six years. She is author of more than six peer reviewed articles and book chapters and inventor on over twenty granted and pending patent applications.  She recently founded Kontoors, a startup that is bringing machine vision and AI to the footwear industry.  

While science is her passion, she is a self-proclaimed hobby-hopper.  She loves gardening, making terrariums, photography, traveling and hiking/backpacking in nature.  She recently co-created plantswapper (www.plantswapper.com) to help plant enthusiasts share and trade their plants. She is also a mom of two elementary aged kids who love experimenting with the world around them. Her newest favorite toy is the laser cutter at the community makerspace.

If you have questions, or need accommodations for this event, please contact Cathy McArthur at mcarthur@illinois.edu.

link for robots only