Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship
The Population Health Initiative, in partnership with the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship and CoMotion, offers a Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program in which students explore how best to deploy social enterprise models for innovations that are developed by University of Washington researchers.
The program supports graduate fellows from different disciplines to work on a range of different projects. Students from a range of disciplines are encouraged to apply, including business, engineering, social work, law, public policy and public health.
Each fellow will have primary responsibility for one of the projects, but fellows will work as a team, with each fellow contributing their disciplinary expertise to all four 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.
We hosted a virtual informational session for the 2025 program from 12 – 1 p.m. (Pacific) on Thursday, March 13, 2025. A recording of that session can be viewed by visiting our Zoom library.
Summer 2025 projects
The projects for the summer 2025 cohort are being developed by UW researchers to improve different aspects of population health. All innovations are seeking novel ideas for how they can be financially sustainable while ensuring that the societal impact of their work remains as important as any potential revenue generation.
Stress Reduction Intervention for African American Kinship Caregivers in Skipped Generation Households
African American grandmothers raising grandchildren in skipped-generation households (consisting only of grandparents and grandchildren) experience numerous economic, social, and health-related vulnerabilities, including severe economic deprivation, legal marginalization and poor mental and physical health outcomes. Yet, few interventions designed to reduce stress and improve health among this population address three key factors that impact their well-being: financial hardship, parenting challenges, and daily stressors.
Dr. LaShawnDa Pittman and Dr. Wadiya Udell are developing 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. To develop the intervention and set the groundwork for a future feasibility study, they are conducting focus groups with kinship caregivers to get their input on intervention content, intervention format, and data collection methods. They will develop a community advisory board (CAB) to help guide intervention development. This fellow will support this team by conducting a deep dive into customer discovery, marketing strategy and explore how to build a pathway to program sustainability.
Implementation of hospital-grade breast pumps for parents of NICU infants in low resource settings
When babies are in the NICU, they are often too immature and/or too ill to directly feed at their mother’s breast. In high resource setting NICUs, parents are still able to provide their premature newborns with their life-saving pumped milk from effective hospital-grade breast pumps. Additionally, donor human milk is a resource resulting from other parents pumping and donating their milk while they build up their own supply. However, in low resource settings such as often seen in low- and middle-income countries, NICU parents do not have access to effective breast pumps, thus limiting what their premature babies can receive of their milk and causing donor milk to be a non-existent resource. In the absence of mother’s milk, there are very limited options available because formula is not widely available and IV fluids have risks in these settings.
Dr. Krystle Perez’s team has done some initial exploration of context-specific needs in low resource settings and early prototyping in collaboration with a NICU team in Ethiopia. This fellow will be supporting the team to conduct customer discovery to understand needs from micro and macro level lens between country and organizational needs and priorities, conduct a market analysis, and explore recommendations for sustainability.
Virtual Study Assistant for Potential Research Participants
Increased accessibility for traditionally underserved populations is a widespread goal of translational research, which aligns with Washington State Bill 2SHB 1745 (known as the Diversity in Clinical Trials bill), requiring state-based entities to develop policies encouraging the participation of underrepresented groups in research. Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) could support the process with the use of a virtual study assistant (VSA). In addition, traditional approaches to increase language accessibility are labor-intensive. Multilingual large language models (LLMs) could support the process, therefore significantly reducing the human resources needed to perform translation and adaptations. However, if used without careful intention, machine translations may also exacerbate biases and existing inequities for marginalized groups.
Working closely with the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) teams (e.g., bioethics and biomedical informatics), the Dr. Weichao Yuwen and the research team is developing a VSA to support recruitment, inquiries, screening, and fraud detection in research studies. A bilingual VAS chatbot prototype in English and Spanish is under development and testing. This fellow will support the VSA team by conducting a deep dive into customer discovery and market strategy and brainstorming a pathway to sustainability.
AirFlux IQ – Direct measurements and models to identify air pollution emission sources
Air pollution is the leading environmental risk factor for ill health, in the US and globally. Addressing air pollution requires identifying, quantifying, and mitigating various emission sources. However, emissions inventories typically are bottom-up calculation-driven datasets; they often lack spatiotemporal precision and are rarely compared against direct observations. This leads to “known unknowns” (i.e., emission levels for known emission sources are uncertain) and “unknown unknowns” (i.e., emission sources that are not in the emission inventory and are generally unknown to air pollution regulators).
Dr. Julian Marshall’s team is developing an approach that dramatically reduces uncertainty for known emission sources and identifies previously unknown sources. They combine detailed measurements of air pollution levels in communities with mathematical modeling, to identify and constrain what the emissions would have to be, to be consistent with the measurements. Their approach is scalable and data-efficient and can help communities precisely target pollution mitigation approaches. The fellow who joins the Air Pollution Emissions project will explore customer insights, identify customer segments, craft a marketing plan that reflects the value proposition customers articulate, and recommend a revenue model consistent with costs and customer value.
Student eligibility
We will be offering fellowships to four graduate students. Students at the master’s and doctoral levels and professional students from all UW schools and colleges are eligible to apply. This eligibility includes international students.
Applicants must be enrolled in a degree-granting program at a UW campus (Seattle, Tacoma or Bothell). Students who are expecting to graduate in Spring 2025 are not eligible to apply.
Compensation
Fellows will be compensated up to $10,000 over a 10-week period, working approximately 30 hours per week. These roles are not benefits eligible.
Timeline
- Application period opens on February 10, 2025.
- Applications will be due by 11:59 p.m. (Pacific) on March 27, 2025.
- Applicants will be notified whether they are invited to interview for the fellowship positions the week of April 3, 2025.
- Interviews will be scheduled for the week of April 1 – 4, 2025.
- Candidates will be notified by late April as to whether they were selected.
- Fellowships are for a 10-week period over the summer, starting on June 16, 2025 and ending August 22, 2025.
Application instructions
All applicants must submit the following documents:
- Recent CV or resume.
- Unofficial transcript.
- One- to two-page cover letter outlining why you are interested in the fellowship program and how your skills will enable you to contribute to the success of the project. The application should indicate if there is a specific project that you are particularly interested in.
Please combine the CV/resume, transcript and cover letter into a single .pdf file and upload your application to REDCap.
Select candidates will be required to participate in a 30-minute interview for the fellowship positions.
Review criteria
Applications will initially be reviewed by representatives of the Population Health Initiative, the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship and the Evans School. Select candidates will then be invited to interview for the fellowship positions. Candidates will be notified whether they have been selected for interviews according to the published timeline.
Interviews will last for 30-minutes and will be with a panel consisting of the faculty and staff who reviewed the applications.
Applicants will be selected based on the following criteria:
- Demonstrated the analytical skills necessary to complete the project
- Demonstrated interest in social entrepreneurship
- Academic performance to date
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills (interviewing, writing and presentation skills)
- Demonstrated experience working within in a team environment
Questions
Please contact pophlth@uw.edu with questions regarding this fellowship program.
Past Fellows
View the previous cohorts, projects and project results for past summers.