September 16, 2025

Summer 2025 Social Entrepreneurship Fellows develop strategic roadmaps for UW innovations

The Population Health Initiative’s Summer 2025 Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program concluded in August with fellows presenting their findings to students, faculty and staff from schools and colleges across the University of Washington campus. Over the course of 10 weeks, the fellows worked on population health innovations developed by UW researchers, exploring how these innovations could be financially sustainable while delivering meaningful societal impact.

The Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program was created by the Population Health Initiative in partnership with the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance and CoMotion. The program aims to expand opportunities for students from all disciplines to gain real-world experience in social entrepreneurship, while also providing UW investigators with a roadmap to sustainability for their population health-related innovations.

Students selected for this summer’s program were:

Name	School	Program
Aishwarya Raj	School of Medicine	PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics
Deborah Oladipo	School of Public Health	Master of Public Health
Hyeonjeong Byeon	College of Engineering	PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering
Marria Peduto	College of the Environment	Masters in Marine Affairs

The fellows’ final presentations and reports offered the UW investigators detailed analyses in customer discovery, market landscapes, competitive positioning and final recommendations for business models to advance their projects. While each fellow had primary responsibility for one project, the cohort structure enabled students to collaborate and contribute their disciplinary expertise across all projects.

Raj worked on Technology Navigator: Improving Resource Access for Washington’s Kinship Caregivers, a project aimed at developing a multicomponent stress-reduction intervention to support African American grandmothers raising grandchildren. The intervention focuses on addressing financial hardship, parenting challenges and daily stressors. Raj evaluated how to expand the platform’s reach and impact by assessing the needs of target populations and potential users, exploring funding mechanisms and analyzing three project options. Based on her market research and stakeholder interviews, Raj recommended a path toward sustainability that included:

• Build strong relationships with lawmakers to maintain engagement
• Leverage existing state infrastructure to identify integration opportunities
• Use assessments to evaluate effectiveness and outcomes
• Implement clear training processes
• Continue empowering caregiver and child voices

Oladipo worked on Implementation of Hospital-Grade Breast Pumps for Mothers of NICU Patients in Low-Resource Settings, a project focused on improving access to life-saving breast milk for premature babies in under-resourced NICUs, where access to breast pumps and donor milk is limited. Over the 10-week fellowship, Oladipo engaged with 36 stakeholders across six categories: buyers/payers, influencers, end users, competitors, regulators and saboteurs. Her recommendations for increasing impact and marketability included:

• Finalizing the prototype to inform manufacturing cost analysis
• Securing funding for further development, clinical validation, and pilot implementation
• Advancing product development to clarify the optimal commercialization path (e.g., licensing, spinout, or absorption)

Byeon worked on Virtual Study Assistant for Potential Research Participants, a bilingual AI-powered tool designed to support recruitment and screening in research studies. The assistant aims to improve accessibility and reduce resource demands while addressing potential biases in machine translation. Byeon conducted interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, including accessibility advocates, nurses, clinical data managers, academic researchers and healthcare equity professionals. Byeon’s customer discovery and market analysis led to key recommendations:

• Explore scaling and funding pathways
• Build trust in the system
• Take a community-based approach to maximize impact and ensure sustainability

Peduto focused on AirFlux IQ, a project addressing air pollution by reducing uncertainty around known emission sources and identifying previously unknown ones. Peduto interviewed stakeholders from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the Washington Department of Ecology, funders and founders. Her findings highlighted limited and project-specific funding mechanisms, as well as significant uncertainty in the evolving regulatory and funding landscape. Peduto’s strategic recommendations included:

• Building within a UW lab to apply for pilot funding
• Targeting international NGOs
• Investing in scalable tools and dashboards
• Focusing U.S. efforts on case studies and state partnerships
• Monetizing high-value datasets selectively

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