Population Health

April 22, 2025

Initiative announces selection of summer 2025 Social Entrepreneurship Fellows

Student tests an augmented reality deviceThe University of Washington Population Health Initiative announced today the selection of four graduate fellows for the summer 2025 cohort of the Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship program, which is run in partnership with the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship and CoMotion.

The four fellows will spend 10 weeks over the summer producing innovative solutions and contributions to support the work of preexisting, multidisciplinary projects developed by University of Washington researchers.

The students selected for this summer’s program are:

Name Project School Program
Aishwarya Raj Stress Reduction Intervention for African American Kinship Caregivers in Skipped Generation Households School of Medicine PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics
Deborah Oladipo Implementation of hospital-grade breast pumps for parents of NICU infants in low resource settings School of Public Health Master of Public Health
Hyeonjeong Byeon Virtual Study Assistant for Potential Research Participants College of Engineering PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering
Marria Peduto AirFlux IQ College of the Environment Masters in Marine Affairs

Program faculty and staff have developed a structured workplan to support the fellows through their projects, with additional access to mentors and subject matter experts.

The fellows will work collaboratively as a team, contributing their expertise to all four projects while focusing primarily on one of the projects. The fellows will support the generation of new ideas to support financial sustainability of projects while preserving the societal impact of their work.

Each of the summer 2025 projects have been developed by UW researchers with the purpose of benefiting community and improving population health:

  • Stress Reduction Intervention for African American Kinship Caregivers in Skipped Generation Households, a multicomponent stress reduction intervention that increases Black kinship caregivers’ utilization of informal and formal resources, knowledge and tools to address children’s developmental needs across the life course, and strategies to decrease daily stressors unique to their families. (LaShawnDa Pittman, American Ethnic Studies and Wadiya Udell, UW Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences)
  • Implementation of hospital-grade breast pumps for parents of NICU infants in low resource settings, an intervention that seeks to increase access in low- and middle-income countries to life-saving pumped milk from effective hospital-grade breast pumps. (Krystle Perez, Pediatrics)
  • Virtual Study Assistant for Potential Research Participants, a bilingual chatbot to support recruitment, inquiries, screening, and fraud detection in research studies. The goal of this project is to increase accessibility for traditionally underserved populations. (Weichao Yuwen, UW Tacoma Nursing & Healthcare Leadership)
  • AirFlux IQ – Direct measurements and models to identify air pollution emission sources, an approach that dramatically reduces uncertainty for known emission sources and identifies previously unknown sources. The end goal is a scalable and data-efficient method to help communities precisely target pollution mitigation approaches. (Julian Marshall, Civil & Environmental Engineering)

Learn more about this fellowship program by visiting its web page.