Nature Digital Medicine: Grass-roots entrepreneurship complements traditional top-down innovation in lung and breast cancer
The majority of biomedical research is funded by public, governmental, and philanthropic grants. These initiatives often shape the avenues and scope of research across disease areas. However, the prioritization of disease-specific funding is not always reflective of the health and social burden of each disease. We identify a prioritization disparity between lung and breast cancers, whereby lung cancer contributes to a substantially higher socioeconomic cost on society yet receives significantly less funding than breast cancer. Using search engine results and natural language processing (NLP) of Twitter tweets, we show that this disparity correlates with enhanced public awareness and positive sentiment for breast cancer. Interestingly, disease-specific venture activity does not correlate with funding or public opinion. We use outcomes from recent early-stage innovation events focused on lung cancer to highlight the complementary mechanism by which bottom-up “grass-roots” initiatives can identify and tackle under-prioritized conditions.
MIT Hacking Medicine
The mission of MIT Hacking Medicine is to infect, energize, and empower a diverse, global community in healthcare entrepreneurship and innovation to scale medicine to attack and solve healthcare problems.
Role: Co-Director (2018-2020), Research Group Lead (2018-Present)
MIT Hacking Racism Challenge
The mission of MIT Hacking Racism Challenge is to create a space for collaboration among those with diverse backgrounds to dismantle racial injustice in healthcare delivery and address the social determinants of health. Through the various tracks we hope to shine a light on current structures that propagate racism and implement sustainable solutions to promote racial equity. These hackathons are meant to pave the way for more extensive and exhaustive work across all facets of society. In order to build a better tomorrow, we begin our work today.
Role: Co-Founder (2020), Co-Director
From the Basement to the Dome – How MIT’s Unique Culture Created a Thriving Entrepreneurial Community
Nature Digital Medicine: Rapid crowdsourced innovation for COVID-19 response and economic growth
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected life worldwide. Governments have been faced with the formidable task of implementing public health measures, such as social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns, while simultaneously supporting a sluggish economy and stimulating research and development (R&D) for the pandemic. Catalyzing bottom-up entrepreneurship is one method to achieve this. Home-grown efforts by citizens wishing to contribute their time and resources to help have sprouted organically, with ideas shared widely on the internet. We outline a framework for structured, crowdsourced innovation that facilitates collaboration to tackle real, contextualized problems. This is exemplified by a series of virtual hackathon events attracting over 9000 applicants from 142 countries and 49 states. A hackathon is an event that convenes diverse individuals to crowdsource solutions around a core set of predetermined challenges in a limited amount of time. A consortium of over 100 partners from across the healthcare spectrum and beyond defined challenges and supported teams after the event, resulting in the continuation of at least 25% of all teams post-event. Grassroots entrepreneurship can stimulate economic growth while contributing to broader R&D efforts to confront public health emergencies.
MIT COVID-19 Challenge
The MIT COVID-19 Challenge harnessed the passion, enthusiasm and expertise of thousands of innovators world-wide via a series of virtual hackathons that resulted in initiatives that address the many challenges related to COVID-19. The MIT COVID-19 Challenge was launched in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative was built by members of the MIT community with the foundational support of the MIT Innovation Initiative, Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, and MIT Hacking Medicine.
Role: Co-Founder (2020), Co-Director
MIT Hacking Medicine – San Francisco Grand Hack 2019
MIT News: Yearlong hackathon engages nano community around health issues Hacking Nanomedicine kicks off a series of events to develop an idea over time.
MIT News – MIT.nano – August 9, 2019
A traditional hackathon focuses on computer science and programming, attracts coders in droves, and spans an entire weekend with three stages: problem definition, solution development, and business formation.
Hacking Nanomedicine, however, recently brought together graduate and postgraduate students for a single morning of hands-on problem solving and innovation in health care while offering networking opportunities across departments and research interests. Moreover, the July hackathon was the first in a series of three half-day events structured to allow ideas to develop over time.
MIT Hacking Medicine – DC Grand Hack 2019
MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node – HealthHACK 2019
MIT Hacking Medicine – Boston Grand Hack 2019
MIT Hacking Medicine – Post-Hack 2019
