Entrepreneurship belongs to the entire University.

The Chief Innovation Officer leads UVA’s entrepreneurship and innovation strategy across Grounds, the Commonwealth and the world. Reporting to the President and to the Executive Vice President and Provost, the role is held together with the Donna and Richard Tadler University Professorship of Entrepreneurship.

The role advances the University’s broader mission by connecting entrepreneurship and innovation to UVA’s priorities in education, research, discovery, and public service. Working across schools, disciplines, and institutional boundaries, the Chief Innovation Officer helps translate ideas and discoveries into real-world impact—creating new ventures, technologies, partnerships, and solutions that serve the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world.

Paul Cherukuri, Ph.D.Chief Innovation Officer · Donna and Richard Tadler University Professor of Entrepreneurship · cherukuri@virginia.edu

Following a national search, UVA named Paul Cherukuri its inaugural Chief Innovation Officer in August 2025. A physicist, chemist, engineer, and entrepreneur, Cherukuri has built a career at the intersection of scientific discovery, technological invention, and venture creation. He came to UVA from Rice University, where he served as the inaugural Vice President for Innovation, bringing experience as a scientist, company co-founder, and builder of research institutes and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

UVA already has strong entrepreneurial programs inside its schools: the Licensing & Ventures Group, Darden’s Batten Institute, McIntire’s Galant Center, the Coulter Center in Engineering, social entrepreneurship at Batten and many more. The office was not created to replace them or to add another layer of administration. It exists to connect them, raise their profile and find where the University should go next.

Its work is carried out through UVA Innovates, the pan-University initiative that connects founders with expertise, mentorship, capital, infrastructure and community. The office supports the UVA community through:

• The Foundry: Where any UVA student walks in with an idea. No application.
• Enterprise Studio: Turns faculty research into startups, licenses and partnerships.
• Commonwealth BioAccelerator: The region’s first wet-lab accelerator.

In December 2021, UVA alumni Donna and Richard Tadler committed $5 million to establish the Donna and Richard Tadler University Professorship of Entrepreneurship. The University’s Bicentennial Professorship Fund matched the gift, bringing the total investment to $10 million.

Richard Tadler graduated from the McIntire School of Commerce and Donna Graff Tadler from the School of Education, both in 1979.

They chose a University Professorship on purpose. At UVA, University Professorships are reserved for scholars whose work goes beyond any one school. The Tadler chair holds faculty appointments in both the McIntire School of Commerce and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the President and Provost choose who holds it.

“Entrepreneurship is still in the very formative stages in academic circles, and we wanted to focus on something that will be transformative for a university that was so important to both of us… We are honored to help make that happen.”

Entrepreneurship at UVA grew up school by school. Courses, competitions, makerspaces, translational research funds and clinical-trial infrastructure all existed, but no one was responsible for the whole. The Tadler gift was made to change that: to strengthen the University’s commitment to collaboration across disciplines and schools on some of the world’s most pressing problems, and to spur new innovations and more involvement from students and alumni.