Happy New Years! 🚙 👋🏽

Welcome to the first Driver’s Seat of 2024!

📍 Today’s Lineup:

🧭 The Chicago Tech Scene Navigator

🎓 Inside Illinois Universities

📊 Chart of the Week

🗺 Events Around the City

🔙 Previous Issues of the Driver’s Seat

Let’s dive in! 🚙 💨

🧭 The Chicago Tech Scene Navigator

In case you missed it, I published a comprehensive guide to help founders navigate Chicago’s tech scene. 👇

The Chicago Tech Scene Navigator includes up-to-date information on Chicago venture firms, accelerators, founder communities, co-working spaces, and more.

You can visit the link at www.bullishonchicago.com or click below 👇

If you have items you’d like to contribute, feel free to email or dm me.

🎓 Inside Illinois Universities

Two of our top universities recently shared exciting announcements to welcome in 2024:

UIC’s new Chancellor outlined 5 key priorities:

• Student success: focusing on recruitment, retention and graduation while fostering a sense of belonging / connection among undergraduate and grad students.

• Research infrastructure: positioning UIC at the forefront of knowledge and discovery.

• Community Engagement: improving access to educational opportunities / clinical care in underserved communities.

• Partnerships with businesses and nonprofits: enhancing faculty opportunities and strengthening student engagement and employment opportunities.

• Recruiting and retaining the best faculty and staff: ensuring that the people who make UIC excel feel seen, valued and motivated.

Watch the Chancellor’s address here

IIT landed $6m to expand their tech workforce:

• IIT Funding: Received $6m over four years from the NSF for the TechForward initiative.

• Diverse Workforce Development: TechForward aims to diversify the tech sector, particularly addressing underrepresentation of Black and Latino tech founders.

• Industry Collaboration: The initiative encourages collaboration between IIT faculty and Chicago's tech industry to tackle societal challenges.

• Enhancing Research Commercialization: Focus on translating research into marketable solutions for societal impact.

• Training and Inclusion Programs: TechForward will offer commercialization training to 250 students, including underrepresented groups, starting with two projects in February.

📊 Chart of the Week

President Biden announced $8.2B in new funding for 10 major passenger rail projects across the country, including major upgrades to Chicago Union Station.

Major regional hubs will benefit from multiple corridor selections, such as the Chicago Hub, where a comprehensive plan for the Chicago terminal and service chokepoints south of Lake Michigan will benefit all corridors and long-distance trains south and east of Chicago.

This would be largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago.

Bullish on high speed rail!

🗺️ Events Around The City

Access to Care for Alzheimer’s Disease

• Hosted by MATTER

• Wednesday Jan 10

• RSVP

Immersive Technology Meetup

• Hosted by AWENite Chicago / VRARChicago

• Wednesday Jan 10

• RSVP

Heads-Up Computing: Towards The Next Generation of Interactive Computing

• Hosted by ACM Chicago

• Wednesday Jan 10

• RSVP

Chicago Data Professionals Meetup

• Hosted by CDP

• Thursday Jan 11

• RSVP

Tech Socratic Seminar

• Hosted by Chicago BitDevs

• Thursday Jan 11

• RSVP

👋 See you next week!

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram for even more Chicago startup news and photos of my favorite restaurants in the city.

🗞 Previous Issues of the Driver’s Seat

#38 - 5 reasons to be bullish on Chicago in 2024

#37 - Co-working Trends in Chicago

#36 - Chicago Communities on the Rise

#35 - Mapping Drive’s Mission

#34 - Chicago’s Semiconductor Strategy