CMU creates new role for entrepreneurship education ahead of global startup showcase

Power Moves is a recurring series where we chart the comings and goings of talent across the region. Got a new hire, gig or promotion? Email us at [email protected].

The Pittsburgh startup scene is getting ready to show off to the world.

A professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has just been tasked with promoting entrepreneurship to more students as the school preps a major showcase for the region’s startup scene this fall. 

Plus, the new head of engineering at a local startup is ready to tackle the messy realities of AI in the real world.

Here’s the latest roundup of who’s moving up, moving in and moving on in the local ecosystem. 

New CMU role and regional startup week to boost entrepreneurship

As Meredith Meyer Grelli steps into a new role at CMU, the school prepares to make a region-wide push to put Pittsburgh’s startup scene on the map.

Grelli, who already holds several entrepreneurship-focused roles at CMU, takes on a newly created position today: vice provost for entrepreneurship. In this new role, she’ll be tasked with weaving entrepreneurship into the core of CMU’s mission by crafting university-wide academic pathways that make it easier for students to engage in entrepreneurship education.

“We want to make sure all of our students, no matter what they end up doing, have this entrepreneurial skill set,” Grelli told Technical.ly.

Grelli’s appointment coincides with a recent announcement that the school will band together with 15 other local organizations to launch the first StartUP PGH, a weeklong showcase from Sept. 14-18 to highlight the region’s strengths in AI, robotics and life sciences for both local and outside founders, investors and corporate partners. 

“Our goal is certainly to connect founders to capital, talent, mentors and customers,” Grelli said. “Another goal is to continue to build our region’s brand equity outside of Pittsburgh.” 

StartUP PGH overlaps with the tail end of EXPlore: Pittsburgh Tech Week (Sept. 10-16) and extends the festivities through Sept. 18. Events already planned for the week include the Pittsburgh Robotics Network’s Discovery Day, Innovation Works’ Venture Expo and the AI Strike Team’s AI Horizon Summit.

Community members are now invited to submit additional events to add to StartUP PGH’s calendar. 

“This is really the first time I think in our region’s history that we’ve ever had all of these organizations come together with this very shared goal, galvanized around wanting to make sure that we are telling the story of Pittsburgh as the epicenter of frontier technology,” Grelli said. 

Since Grelli started teaching at CMU in 2020, she said she’s seen the interest in entrepreneurship grow considerably. Now, the rate of students and faculty who want to work with the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship is “growing at a far faster rate than our programs and structures allow for,” she said. 

At the Swartz Center’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp last year, for example, 900 students attended, a record for the event. Through Grelli’s new role, she hopes to capitalize on that momentum. 

In practice, that might look like rewarding students with academic credit if they join an accelerator program — similar to how students earn credit through internships, according to Grelli. 

“What we want to do through this new role — part of what we’re doing — is building a lot of the incredible work that the Swartz Center does into the infrastructure of our academic programs,” Grelli said, “so rather than serving just 400 founders, we can serve the more than 10,000 students we have a year through their academic pathways.” 

Gather AI’s new head engineer is ready for physical AI complexity

Danielle Dean has long been fascinated by how people think and why they behave the way they do. That fascination is what led her to data — one of the clearest ways to actually study these things. 

“My whole career has been focused on how we use data and AI systems to interact with the real world,” she told Technical.ly. “With physical AI systems, you have that next level of complexity — making it work in the real world, so you can’t just hit a retry button.” 

That’s the world Dean stepped into in early June as head of engineering at Gather AI, a Pittsburgh-based company that provides physical AI systems for warehouse logistics.

The firm uses commercial drones and forklift-mounted cameras to monitor a warehouse’s operations, like counting inventory or reading hard-to-reach barcodes. It’s a space that’s still emerging and Dean says she likes the challenge. 

“Warehouses are not as uniform as you might expect,” Dean said, adding, “I think the challenges in physical AI in general are how to build AI systems that work on constrained hardware [and] within the constraints of the environment.”

Despite the newness of the industry, Dean isn’t a stranger to AI roles. She previously worked as senior director of artificial intelligence at SimpliSafe and senior director of robot autonomy at iRobot. Across both positions, she learned about “the power of data,” and that’s what excites her about Gather AI, too.

“We’re already at a bunch of warehouses — we can leverage insights from that in order to provide even better solutions,” she said. “So it’s a compound effect — that data aspect is really critical.” 

More power moves: 

• Chad Whitacre, former leader of the Open Source Pledge, stepped away from tech entirely to live offline.
• Beyond Reach Labs tapped longtime SpaceX engineer Brandon Edelson as its new head of engineering.
• Michael Jarrett is the City of Pittsburgh’s new Innovation Team Director. The role, funded by the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University, takes an equity-centered, design-based approach to identifying the root causes of civic challenges.
• Mohammed Ali Khan joined Gecko Robotics as regional vice president of business development.  
• Abridge named San Oo as its chief technology officer. Oo previously held roles at Slack and Notion. 
• Mark Westerlund is now director of software engineering at local startup Perforated. Westerlund previously worked at the local tech company Rivers Agile.
• Hellbender, Inc. hired Kaylee Kerin as its technical project manager.
• Richard Harter was promoted to chief operating officer at IT company Magna5.
• UPMC laid off 200 workers and cut another 300 open positions, which the health system said was part of a routine labor force realignment.