April Lane Schuster

Consultant

Bio

April Lane Schuster’s primary responsibility for the Loyola Program for Neuroscience and Society is to oversee the project’s business competitions. She is a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. She teaches entrepreneurship in the undergraduate business and executive MBA programs. She holds a bachelor’s in communication studies from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s in entrepreneurship from DePaul University. She sits on the board of Catapult Chicago, a collaborative co-working space for innovative digital startups where she previously served as executive director. She also worked as the associate director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center and has started a few businesses of her own.  

What inspired you to become a part of this project?

From an entrepreneurship perspective, neuroscience excites me because there are so many new ventures being developed in response to it.   

You ran a one-day business competition among Loyola University Chicago students and plan to do another one this coming year. What happens during these competitions?

We created a one-day immersive experience. The idea was to have Loyola students come in and learn a little bit about neuroscience, a little bit about entrepreneurship and then have them break into groups and come up with business ideas, which they pitched to Bill, myself and a colleague. We wanted it to have a Shark Tank feel. The students who showed up in the spring were all neuroscience students. So, they were excited to learn about business terms. There were four teams. We had originally planned to only hand out prize money to the first and second place teams. But all of the ideas were so great that we ended up giving all four teams money. The feedback we got from students was to make it a two-day competition, so we may do that next.