The Spark of Intention

In the 15 years since bioengineer Nuttada Panpradist moved to Washington, she’s found Seattle to be a particularly friendly, inclusive place to live and work. So it was a shock when, during the pandemic’s early years, she encountered anti-Asian hate on the sidewalks of the city she calls home.

“People would shout insults and say, ‘You’re part of the problem.’ I just didn’t know how to confront it,” says Panpradist, who came to the US after finding limited opportunities for young women engineers in her native Thailand. “They didn’t know I was part of the army of warriors developing the point-of-care technology to diagnose COVID-19 at home and in clinics. Now that technology has been commercialized and saves lives.” The tone of this recollection is not angry or rueful; she’s proud of her work and sad for the sidewalk trolls who are often unable to see past their own fear.

This outright harassment (and cruel irony) is an extreme example of how aspects of individual identity can intersect with and transform the journey of the academic entrepreneur, or the path from the lab to the market. It also underscores the breadth of experiences and perspectives that drive UW researchers to identify societal challenges and seek novel solutions with the potential to change lives.

After wrapping up her PhD in December 2021, Panpradist became the first UW Bioengineering student to complete a graduate certificate in the Global Health of Women, Adolescents, and Children program (Global WACh) at UW’s School of Public Health.

“I saw a lot of income-based disparities in access to healthcare when I was growing up in Thailand, near Bangkok,” she says. “It’s always been important to me, in my career, to build technology not just for the sake of science and discovery but to really have a social impact,” particularly in developing countries with complex public health challenges.

When talking with Panpradist, one gets the sense that this isn’t virtue-signaling; it’s a mantra that grounds and guides her, at the bench or in the field or wherever she’s chosen to deploy her considerable energy and enthusiasm.

Over the years, she’s worked on teams developing rapid tests for COVID-19 and tuberculosis and a test to measure drug resistance in HIV patients. The latter, a product called OLA Simple, won second place in the 2018 Holloman Health Innovation Challenge, leading her to engage with the commercialization experts at CoMotion, UW’s collaborative innovation hub. Over the next few years, Panpradist enrolled in I-Corps, a training workshop focused on customer discovery and developing an entrepreneurial mindset, and raised more than $300K in research awards from funders including UW’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Institute for Translation Health Sciences, UW Population Health, and the UW Global Innovation fund—major wins she attributes, in part, to the training she received through CoMotion programs. She was also invited to present OLA Simple results from fieldwork in Kenya at a WHO conference in South Africa last fall.

“I-Corps really changed not just how I look at technology but how to frame the research, listen to the communities I’m trying to serve, and come up with technology to address the concerns,” Panpradist says. “I’m still using those tools in my research and work to develop and deliver technology useful to those communities.”

She was also approached by Magali Eaton, CoMotion’s director of innovation training at the time, who was developing a cohort-based pilot program to support the rich experiences and specific challenges of women and BIPOC entrepreneurs through weekly meetings and customized coaching. When Panpradist signed up for RAISE (Researchers and Academic Innovators Success in Entrepreneurship), she found a safe space to share experiences, ask questions, and learn from others.

“Immigration is hard because you don’t understand the culture, you don’t always know the right thing to say or do, but you reach out to resources and find allies,” Panpradist says, noting she’s become accustomed to being the only woman or person with an accent in the room. “Being part of the RAISE cohort reminded me I’m not the only one living through these challenges.” She now leads a similar “safe space” group for undergrads she mentors.

Long before she pursued a PhD or faculty appointment in linguistics, Alicia Beckford Wassink understood that human languages and speech patterns seldom fall into neat categories. At home, in a working-class, single-parent household, she grew up speaking Mainstream American English, African American English, and Jamaican Creole (also called Patois or Patwah), an English-based dialect that emerged among enslaved West Africans. It is widely spoken as a native language in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora, though it has no official status.

“I was always very aware that there were attitudes around all of those varieties of English,” says Wassink, who works at the intersection of language and society as director of UW’s Sociolinguistics Lab; she also studies phonetics, or the acoustic properties of spoken language and perception.

“I was very interested in how languages form when two groups of people, who don’t speak the same language, come together for extended periods.” It seems to logically follow that this process would get knottier with more groups or confounding variables in play, but Professor Wassink is a deft detangler.

One of her current projects, since 2019, involves understudied English dialects and racial bias in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. ASR—used in devices like smart speakers and pay-by-phone services, among other applications—tends to be trained on natural speech from large databases and, as such, is subject to the same sorts of biases and inequities endemic to other aspects of American life, not least in emerging technology. Her goal is to leverage sociolinguistic knowledge and tools to identify blind spots and pain points that minorities (specifically speakers of understudied dialects) experience with ASR, and work with tech companies to write programs that improve service for these users.

“Microsoft had sent a representative to hear me give a talk about this work at a conference, and they approached me afterward to consult for them,” Wassink recalls. “That got me thinking, ‘If Microsoft is interested, maybe other firms would be interested too.’”

She thought, “Well, I’m a professor. I know nothing about writing a business plan or engaging with the tech world. I certainly didn’t come into academia with any understanding of things like, what is investment capital? How do markets work?” This thinking can start to sound like self-doubt creeping in—or it can sound like keeping it humble in the face of a new challenge, depending on how you hear it.

That’s when Wassink learned, through a longtime UW colleague, about the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund (IGF), CoMotion’s signature grant program for teams working on innovations with the potential to enable new products and services, and she jumped on it. The Fund awards upward of $1M annually, with up to $50K per project team, typically in life sciences, engineering, and IT/tech. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story; mentorship and pitch practice are built into the program’s culture, pairing entrepreneurs with industry mentors and opportunities for pitch practice and feedback sessions.

Her positive experience with IGF led her to enroll in the more structured, in-depth I-Corps workshop, which runs for the duration of the academic quarter. Though not quite linear, the progression made sense to her.

“Some of my colleagues are people who come from backgrounds where they would talk routinely about politics and business and economics in their households. I-Corps helped me to remove some of that distance I felt,” she says. It was a delicate balance to unlearn aspects of her personal and academic mindset while also developing confidence and a more extensive vocabulary around the big-picture thinking that drives entrepreneurial success. “Pitch practice and customer interviews were very valuable for me in helping me refine my ideas and begin to think about how other people might hear them.”

Wassink was already an outlier as a humanities scholar participating in UW’s commercialization programs. She notes, however, that linguistics is considered a social science field at some universities, closely tied to psychology. She also entered this work as a Black woman determined to build her business with intention and a focus on social justice, from the ground up.

“At the beginning of the process, I asked if I could be assigned to a mentor who is a woman of color,” she says, “and that didn’t work out.” She registers this disappointment but doesn’t dwell on it; the white male mentor she worked with was a solid partner and she kept moving forward. She established contacts at the Foster School of Business and found community among women researchers of color in other departments.

“At some level, being able to ask any question that I wanted to ask, and have somebody take it seriously and try to answer it, was very helpful in both I-Corps and IGF,” she says. “It empowered me to keep asking questions.”

You’d think August 2020 would be a tricky time to pull off an international move, but not for neuroscientist Varadaraya Shenoy. He grew up and went to medical school in and around Mumbai, the financial center of India, and his training includes stints in Japan and St. Louis. When he arrived at UW Medicine in 2020 to pursue a research fellowship in cerebrovascular neurosurgery, he was ready to dig into the work.

“Right off the bat, my team started on an incredible project to transform care for head injury patients,” he says, noting that head injury is a widespread public health challenge. The National Library of Medicine estimates that in the US, 1.7 million people per year suffer traumatic brain injuries, with others estimating up to 3 million sports- and recreation-related concussions annually.

“Typically, when a patient with a head injury is transported to the hospital by ambulance, there can be logistical delays and treatment cannot truly begin until they reach the hospital, which is a problem in rural settings,” Shenoy says. “We are building a non-invasive wearable neck device, called the AugmenFlo, that helps first responders begin to treat head-injury patients in the field, without invasive surgery.”

His team is optimistic about the impact AugmenFlo could have in under-resourced countries, including the country of his birth. It’s no secret that India’s medical infrastructure has not kept pace with a generations-long population boom, sprawled across vast swaths of terrain, with serious access issues in urban and rural areas alike. The term “rural area” is a gross understatement in a setting where the nearest trauma center might be hundreds of miles away.

Shenoy’s multidisciplinary team—overseen by Laligam Sekhar, professor of neurosurgery and director of UW Medicine’s cerebrovascular lab—had an initial concept and did some pilot testing, which led to engagement with CoMotion and an IGF award in 2021. He was also referred to CoMotion’s Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program (PEP). This one-year fellowship provides funds and training for early-career researchers pursuing commercialization, designed to alleviate some of the pressure from academic grants and job-seeking. It came at a crucial time, when the team was experiencing a funding crunch and a major grant application had been rejected.

“CoMotion helped us turn our concept into an initial product,” he says, with palpable enthusiasm, “and it’s been transformational.” Next up is clinical testing at UW’s Harborview Medical Center, the only Level I trauma facility across Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho.

“One of the most valuable lessons I got out of PEP, by far, was the focus on customer discovery and the opportunity to meet guest speakers and fellow entrepreneurs, a bunch of folks from different disciplines who shared their experiences and pitfalls, things to do, things to avoid. Those things really helped us.” He also appreciated the communication skills gained through regular pitch exercises and the opportunity for a meaningful paradigm shift.

“I didn’t realize that a lot of the commercial technologies we use in our daily lives, some of these multi-billion-dollar companies, have spun out of universities,” he says. “We first saw the idea for its research potential, not the commercial potential, but our experiences with CoMotion over two years have changed our mindset. We see every potential idea from a different angle.”

Shenoy’s tone is strikingly upbeat when he talks about obstacles he’s faced, particularly as an immigrant.  The greatest challenge? Visa status. “I’m running a startup now, but my runway is essentially constrained by the visa,” he says. “The sense of having a one-year runway and renewal period with every funding path, it’s sort of clipped my wings. But constraints make you creative, right?”