Population Health

February 24, 2025

Summer 2025 Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship applications due March 27

Image of student engaged with a virtual reality headsetThe Population Health Initiative is again partnering with the University of Washington’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship and CoMotion to offer its summer Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program. Applications are due by the end of day on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

The program offers each graduate or professional student a total of $10,000 each over the course of 10 weeks to explore social enterprise models with the potential to support innovations developed by UW researchers. The four fellows will be selected from across a variety of disciplines and investigate a range of projects. The projects are focused on finding innovative ways to maintain the balance between financial sustainability and social impact.

The four projects for summer 2025 are:

  • Stress Reduction Intervention for African American Kinship Caregivers in Skipped Generation Households, a project that is working to develop a multicomponent stress reduction intervention to support African American grandmothers raising grandchildren, focusing on addressing financial hardship, parenting challenges, and daily stressors
  • Implementation of hospital-grade breast pumps for parents of NICU infants in low resource settings, a project that is exploring solutions for improving access to life-saving breast milk for premature babies in low-resource NICUs, where limited access to breast pumps and donor milk creates significant challenges.
  • Virtual Study Assistant for Potential Research Participants, a bilingual virtual study assistant that seeks to support recruitment and screening in research studies, leveraging AI to improve accessibility and reduce resource needs while ensuring careful consideration of potential biases in machine translations.
  • AirFlux IQ – Direct measurements and models to identify air pollution emission sources, whose goal is to develop a scalable, data-efficient approach that combines air pollution measurements with mathematical modeling to reduce uncertainty in emission sources and identify previously unknown ones, helping communities more precisely target pollution mitigation efforts.

Each fellow will have primary responsibility for a single assigned project, but the cohort will work together and contribute their disciplinary expertise to each of the other projects. Fellows will be guided through a structured workplan by program faculty and staff, and will also have access to mentors and subject matter experts to enhance their expertise and contributions to their projects.

Eligible graduate and professional students from all UW schools or colleges are encouraged to apply by the March 27, 2025 deadline. Please visit the program webpage for more information.