Data Science Intern, Venture Operations

Portal Innovations

Mentors 

Steve Lehmann Director, Venture Operations
Yuan Zhang, PhD Director, Scientific Operations

Company Overview

Portal Innovations is a venture development engine focused on early stage life science enterprises. Launched in Chicago in 2020, we deliver a crafted mix of management expertise, funding, and fully-equipped lab space to turn biotech breakthroughs into businesses. We are strategically expanding our team as we prepare to open our second Chicago location in Q2, 2022 and look to grow our footprint across the Central U.S.

Internship Description

Portal Innovations is seeking a graduate-level data sciences intern to assist us with a semester-long data classification and predictive modeling project. Portal’s goal is to utilize our proprietary data to create a best-in-class “metaknowledge index” that can be used to discover meaningful patterns in biotech innovation and identify faculty members most likely to produce game changing innovations.

The goal of this internship is two-fold: (1) For the intern: provide an opportunity to apply what they are learning to real world data and generate models that will be used in an exciting venture capital context. (2) For Portal: advance our metaknowledge index from “alpha” to “beta” by incorporating more advanced statistical techniques and models.

The intern will:

• Advise Portal leaders on which methodologies are most applicable to Portal’s datasets (and which are not).
• Design, train, and validate data models to predict “innovation” amongst university faculty.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with and proven ability to design, train, and validate advanced data analytics models (e.g. Bayesian trees, NLP, text classification, deep learning).
• Experience with at least one commercial data analytics toolkit (e.g. Tensorflow, SPSS Modeler, AWS or Google AI kit).

Expectations

• Commit ~10 hours per week for independent due diligence.
• Attend weekly meetings with the Portal team.
• Investigate emerging biotechnologies using a combination of public and proprietary (e.g. GlobalData, Pitchbook) data sources.
• Clearly articulate findings, develop a perspective, and create and defend investment theses.
• One quarter minimum commitment with the option to continue to two or more quarters.