September 10, 2024

Summer 2024 Social Entrepreneurship Fellows finish their projects and report out findings

The Population Health Initiative’s summer 2024 Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program concluded in August with the fellows presenting their findings to students, faculty and staff from schools and colleges across campus. The fellows spent 10 weeks working on population health innovations developed by University of Washington researchers to determine how these innovations could be financially sustainable while also having a substantial societal impact.

The Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program was developed to expand opportunities for students from all disciplines to gain real-world experience in social entrepreneurship while providing UW investigators with a roadmap to sustainability for their population health-related innovations.

The students selected for this summer’s program were:

Name	School	Program
Ashwin Nishad	College of Engineering	Global Innovation Exchange (GIX)
Niharthi Muddada	College of Engineering	Human-Centered Design & Engineering
Amaya Gatling	Schools of Medicine and Public Health	Global Health
Xinxin Feng	College of Education	Learning Sciences and Human Development

The Social Entrepreneurship fellows, along with the Buerk Center’s ITHS & WRF Summer Commercialization fellows, met regularly to discuss each other’s projects and to present their processes and findings throughout the program. The fellows’ final presentations and reports offered the UW investigators a detailed analysis in customer discovery, markets, competitive landscapes and a final recommendation for a business model to move their projects forward.

Muddada worked with the Juno – Empowering Mothers team, whose goal is to provide knowledge for post-cesarean mothers to enhance maternal recovery, support mental health and help with care for the newborn through a comprehensive app. Over the course of the summer, Muddada conducted research to explore market drivers, looked at indirect and direct competitors, conducted 25 customer interviews with key stakeholders like insurance companies, midwives, and hospital administration, and analyzed possible limitations. Her final recommendations included further developing the app, obtaining more funding and investments, and interviewing more insurance companies and users. Muddada’s roadmap for sustainability showcased a feasible future for the app.

Nishad’s project, Washington Passive Samplers, is a low-cost passive method for monitoring long-term average levels of light-absorbing carbon air pollution in polluted indoor environments. Over the 10-week fellowship period, Nishad examined Washington Passive Samplers’ current challenges and areas for growth by engaging with 20 stakeholders across universities, research institutes, NGOs and government agencies. Nishad presented his vision of scalability and viability of wide-scale adoption as a “snowball effect,” starting from the current state of the project and its patents and licensing, to grants and funding, finally leading to collaborations with universities, research institutes and future studies. His market analysis and recommendations will help to bring this low-cost monitoring device to low-income countries in a sustainable way.

Gatling spent the 10-week fellowship program investigating the pHastCam – Neonatal Birth Asphyxias, a portable, affordable device used for early identification of neonatal asphyxia through blood pH measurement and screening. Gatling conducted 35 stakeholder interviews in the healthcare and NGO sectors to better understand market feasibility and more fully develop the customer ecosystem. Her final recommendations, which spanned from short, medium to long term goals, focused on suggestions like prototype development and optimization, animal and clinical trials, FDA regulatory requirements and partnerships and contracts with NGOs and governmental agencies.

“I feel really lucky to have been matched with the pHastCam project that aligns so well with my Global Health MPH degree and Global WACh certificate program. My customer discovery interviews and the research I conducted for the phase reports taught me so much about global newborn health and helped me form valuable connections. This was my first experience working on the medical device innovation side of global health and I learned so much that really rounded out my skill set.” – Amaya Gatling

Feng’s Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Community Mental Health Intervention Integration into Neighborhood House sought to integrate mental health care into community-based social service organizations to improve access to low barrier, culturally relevant mental health care. This project also aimed to address upstream social drivers of mental health like food insecurity, poverty, discrimination and unsafe housing. Feng’s competitive analysis investigated other unconventional solutions to mental health and how reactive or proactive these other solutions were, with her concluding this project was uniquely situated on the far end of the proactive spectrum. Feng saw the greatest opportunities for impact moving forward as workforce training, culturally appropriate bilingual mental health programs, peer support specialists and further funding .

While the fellows all had primary responsibility for one project, the cohort structure enabled the students to work with each other and contribute their disciplinary expertise to all the other projects.