This Undergrad
Made the Door She Opened

That fall, Sullivan met in person with Ehrlich, whose philanthropy has supported the Ehrlich Internship at the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer (DIAC) since 2021. The internship helps researchers turn promising discoveries into companies and treatments, but it had been built for graduate students. Sullivan, then a rising senior with no formal biotech background, did not have an obvious case for a seat at the table.

Still, Ehrlich encouraged her to go home and write a brief explanation of why the opportunity mattered to her, then send it back within an hour.

Sullivan wrote about her fascination with biology, her decision to step away from pre-med and pursue biotechnology, and her desire to understand how a discovery in the lab becomes a drug that reaches patients. With time to spare on Ehrlich’s deadline, she hit send.

By the start of the academic year, Sullivan had become DIAC’s first undergraduate Ehrlich Intern. While it was not the only reason she got in, her essay reflected the persistence that set her apart.

“No one was really telling me I couldn’t apply,” Sullivan recalls. “They were just telling me it wasn’t built for undergraduates.”

She also had another advocate in her corner. Barry Schweitzer, PhD, D ’82, associate director of entrepreneurship at The Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth, which oversees DIAC, had taught Sullivan in his undergraduate course, Vaccine, Drugs, and Entrepreneurship. In the class, students work in teams to turn real research from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth into biotech startup pitches for a panel of outside reviewers, many of them Dartmouth alumni working in venture capital. During the class, Sullivan’s team held its own.

“She had this maturity, this ability to communicate, this straightforwardness,” Schweitzer says. When Ehrlich later told Schweitzer and Angela Presley, PhD, the Magnuson Center’s program manager of entrepreneurship, that he was looking for an intern genuinely excited about cancer therapeutics, Schweitzer immediately thought of Sullivan. “I knew that she could hold her own in that room,” he says.

Over the following year of her internship, Sullivan worked closely with the research teams competing in the accelerator’s three cohorts, helping the physicians and scientists behind each project translate lab-stage work into a pitch a non-scientist could follow. She also worked regularly with the outside experts DIAC brings in to evaluate and mentor those teams, mostly Dartmouth alumni working as venture capitalists or biotech executives, gaining a close view of how investors actually decide what to fund.

“A lot of institutions have a hard time translating academic science into a real drug because it’s a business discipline,” says Ehrlich, who credits Dartmouth—and DIAC—with bucking the common trend. “That’s something most medical people aren’t trained to do.”

Ehrlich, who is the CEO of Cero Therapeutics, says his commitment to strengthening that bridge became personal when his father developed the same type of cancer for which Ehrlich had helped bring a treatment to market. Seeing his father benefit from that therapy reinforced his belief that scientific discoveries matter most when they make it to patients.

Through DIAC, Ehrlich and his wife, Sara Fried Ehrlich D ’93, support internships that give students exposure to commercialization while helping research teams think through strategy, fundraising, and the realities of bringing new technologies to market. The first student selected for the internship, Sophie Lloyd, PhD, was a doctoral candidate at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. She completed her internship in 2025 before finishing her PhD in 2026. She has since moved into a postdoctoral research position at Thayer.