Live at the Yale Innovation Summit 2026

Transcript

Howard Forman: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Howie Forman.

Megan Ranney: And I’m not Harlan Krumholz, but I’m excited to join you all at the annual livecasting of Health & Veritas at the Innovation Summit. My name’s Megan Ranney. I’m the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, and Howie and I are both physicians, scientists, professors here at Yale University trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare.

Howard Forman: We’re going to do five guests in rapid order. They all know that they’re going to be our guests, so don’t get scared if you’re in the audience. We have pulled someone in previous years. And so I’m just going to give brief introductions. We’re going to have them come right up here soon as I’m introducing them and we’re going to proceed from there. So let me start off. Jaya Dadwal is the CEO and co-founder forEVA Health, a women’s health start-up focused on raising healthcare standards for the female body. Previously a healthcare attorney in Australia specializing in strategic medical negligence and litigation. Jaya was inspired to create forEVA after witnessing gaps in women’s healthcare firsthand. She received her bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from the Australian National University, her bachelor of laws from the University of Technology, Sydney. And last week, when I was not in New Haven, graduated with her MPH from Yale specializing in healthcare management program, the program that I’m fortunate enough to lead. And so I’ve known her these last two years. I’m going to turn it over to Megan for the first question.

Megan Ranney: Okay. So I actually have two. First is it “for ee-va” or “for eh-va”? And then my second is, tell us about your reason for transition to entrepreneurship. You know that for me at the School of Public Health, I love thinking about how we link science and society. So I’d love to hear your story.

Jaya Dadwal: Absolutely. So it’s “for ee-va.” It’s actually named after my grandmother and I have a little E pin that was her broach. And so the idea behind the start-up is both deeply personal but also rooted in strong unmet needs. And so as mentioned, I was a lawyer before I came to Yale, and my practice was in medical negligence but in defense, Howie. And so I worked quite closely with doctors, nurses in claims that were brought actually against the state because Australia has a universal healthcare system. At the same time during law school, I was writing my thesis on contraceptive and reproductive device class actions. So most recently the Essure device, which if you haven’t heard about it, I would encourage you to google it, was a form of permanent contraception, a.k.a. sterilization. And many women had severe complications. This device was a metallic coil. It would rupture within fallopian tubes.

Women had the device break and that metal migrate throughout their body causing organ perforation and pain so severe that they could not even walk to the front door. And so I studied this class action for my thesis and I linked this class action among a history of reproductive device class actions such as a Dalkon Shield. Now what was awful about the Essure class action is in the statement of defense filed by Bayer, the manufacturer. They stated that the injuries that these women complained of being severe pain, menstrual cramping, and even brain fog from this pain were “symptoms that are common to all women of a reproductive age.” And so my takeaway from this was very much that we conceptualize a female body as a side of pain. That’s not good enough. I had seen the same within my practice, the idea that the damages for claims specific for female plaintiffs were less than claims for pain or emotional suffering carried a lower what we call market rate.

And while I was doing my thesis, I also dug into my family history and that’s why I’ve named the start-up after my grandmother. And I saw that a lot of the experiences of the women I were writing about existed in my own family history. At the same time, we’ve had an explosion in consumer health tech. We have wearable tech that can tell you your sleep score. It can tell you your heart rate. It can give you so much information but none of it is specific to the female body and it’s also trained primarily on male datasets. So I thought we have a unique opportunity here where technology is now as well as a growing awareness about the needs for women’s health to develop a product that actually gives women the tools to understand their bodies but also validate their experiences.

And my takeaway and the reason I transitioned to entrepreneurship is not only did I believe that this product and this kind of paradigm shift, frankly, was possible right now, it was very much what women deserve. And so that was the reason I came to Yale. It’s the reason I named the start-up after my grandmother, and it’s the reason, frankly, that I’m graduating doing this start-up full time with no health insurance. I’m away from my beautiful parents who are actually sitting in the audience and are flying back to Australia today. And I’m doing this because they’re rooting for me, but I’m also rooting for all the women around me that deserve better care.

Howard Forman: So I want to follow up. I’m going to ask you a two-part question. One is, why did you choose to return to school specifically to do this? Because a lot of people just go ahead and do it first and then maybe figure out how to do a part-time program. And then slight second part to that question is there was one class that you told me nine months ago that was absolutely essential to you coming to Yale why you wanted to be here. You want to say a couple of words about that as well.

Jaya Dadwal: Absolutely. So I’m a big believer in the power of education. It could be because I was raised by a very strict Indian dad, and if you have Indian parents, you’ll understand that. And so I believe that there’s so much.... We don’t know what we don’t know. And I was a lawyer. I had a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy economics, but I didn’t know the first thing about business. Lawyers are not great at math, and we hate Excel. And so I knew that I had a deep passion but I did not have the skill set, and my absence of the skill set was in my mind significant enough to justify I couldn’t just learn it on the go. I had to come and really immerse myself. At the same time, I’m developing a healthcare product. I have to understand the ecosystem I’m working within deeply. Ideally, I would have years of experience within the U.S. healthcare system, but I was also transitioning from Australia.

And so I knew that to make myself a compelling founder, I had to do the work. Now the class that I was very passionate about getting into was Jennifer McFadden’s Start-up Founder Practicum. And if Jennifer’s watching this or if she ever hears this, shout out to her. She was an incredible mentor. And what this class did is, it gave me the time to throw myself into the start-up because I’ve been doing the start-up, I say full-time and also school full-time for two years. And so having course credit be able to be allocated to my work on the start-up was incredibly useful. And she also introduced me to a fantastic network of mentors. I would say the number one thing you can do for your start-up is seek advice from people who are either been where you’ve been or are where you’re going, so to speak. And so that was incredibly useful.

Megan Ranney: I love that. And I do want to give you a shout-out just as we were walking in. You did exactly that with seeking advice asking to chat with me and I’ve already connected you with one of our next podcast guests, which is a fun thing about this Innovation Summit is getting to know each other. The network is everything. So last question for you, would love to hear a little more about how forEVA implements technology to expand healthcare access for women. What is your vision for this company?

Jaya Dadwal: So right now we’re actually working on a grant from the NSF where we’re speaking to a hundred women about their experiences of unmet care within the health ecosystem. So also if you’re a woman in the audience and want to rant to me about your experience, I’d love to hear from you. And so the main takeaway that we have realized is, women just feel so deeply unheard. And we saw a report come out a couple of years ago from the UK that 84% of women feel like their health experiences have been dismissed.

What we want to do with a tool like this is bridge that gap so women can understand what’s happening in their own bodies, communicate it to clinicians when they go to practice and also have the knowledge to assess which interventions are working effectively for them. For example, for PCOS, we know that the pill and metformin are common treatment options, but many of the women that we’ve spoken to don’t feel satisfied with these options. And so they’re stuck searching through internet forums about alternatives. And so what we want to do is have a resource library and a tool that combines both their biometrics and the evidence to give them a greater range of options.

Megan Ranney: I love that. And you know that one of my thesis is that part of the reason for the last lack of trust is that people don’t feel listened to and don’t have solutions that work for them. Jaya, thank you. We are so excited for your future. Honored to have you as a graduate.

Jaya Dadwal: Thank you both.

Megan Ranney: And can’t wait to see you make so many other people’s futures better. Thank you.

Jaya Dadwal: Thank you both.

Howard Forman: All right. So Dr. Monique Rainford is the CEO and co-founder of Enrich Health, a start-up focused on addressing disparities in maternal health. As an obstetrician, gynecologist, Dr. Rainford is a published author, TEDx speaker, and an assistant professor of clinical obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine. She’s also a founder and owner of WL Inc., Where she provides women’s health consulting services. She received her bachelor’s degree from University of Pennsylvania, her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and her MBA from the Yale School of Management graduating in 2024, which is when I first got to meet her around 2022. You have always been passionate about women’s health from the first conversation we’ve ever had and so we’re just so delighted to have you here.

Megan Ranney: It is an absolute joy, Monique. I will also say Monique is one of the first people that I met when I came here in 2023. We wrote a piece together about the Opill, which was the over-the-counter progestin-only contraceptive that’s now available in the United States. You are an incredible inspiration. So I’m going to start by asking you a similar question to what I asked Jaya. What motivated you to start Enrich Health, and can you share a little bit with the audience about what the process was like? I know a lot of people here work in healthcare and are probably really curious about what it’s like as a doctor to start an entrepreneurial venture.

Monique Rainford: Thank you. And thank you so much for being here. This is really exciting. What motivated me? Interestingly, business school. So I’ve been in healthcare for a long time as an OB/GYN, and many of us as physicians are not comfortable with how healthcare is happening right now. I also had a passion for health disparities, and I knew I wanted to do something about it. So sitting in business school in the earlier days, I started to think I was going to do a research study to make a difference. And then in the conversations I’m thinking, “A research study... why don’t I do a start-up?” It’s a little delusional, I think. So Howie has great guests for his colloquium and every time I was writing the essays about the guests, I was convincing myself over and over again, should I do this? Should I do this every single paper?

And so that’s basically how I decided to do this. And early in the process, I was able to partner with a friend from residency who was also interested. So we were able to co-found Enrich Health. For anyone doing it, start-ups are leaps of faith. You are jumping, I would say, without a parachute and you actually don’t know where you will fall, but if you are passionate about the process, courage is when passionate is greater than fair, is a quote I heard. And basically if you’re really committed to what you want to do, you jump and you hope you have a soft landing, but there’ll be bumps along the way. I wouldn’t let that stop you, however, but there will be bumps along the way.

Howard Forman: I’m going to tie this back to your company in a minute, but could you tell us a little about your third book, which was Pregnant While Black? And I want to tie this together to two other themes. One is that you’re in the School of Management at a time that I think health equity has been elevated appropriately to try to address health disparities. How do you foresee maternal health disparities, which are some of the most dramatic ones in our country, playing out in the future, and how do you envision the role of Enrich Health in addressing them?

Monique Rainford: Things will only be better if we collectively commit to making things better. They’re not going to happen by accident. And Enrich Health was formed because it wasn’t happening, and we needed a broader approach. We are offering a comprehensive solution. We’re doing prenatal care. We’re doing care for one year postpartum. We have wellness sessions for people who don’t have their medical care with us. We’re developing an app. So we want to be one comprehensive solution to help this problem. Many other people are working on the problem—that’s necessary. Clearly it hasn’t been fixed and year after year, instead of seeing the disparities narrow, we see it continue to widen. So it really is a part of a comprehensive solution, but it has to go beyond the few founders here or there. I think society as a whole has to, well, I hope, start valuing women’s health, start valuing maternal health. And when you think about it, maternal health trajectory and pregnancy determines a whole life trajectory for women and their babies. So when are we really going to value women and maternal health in the way we should?

Howard Forman: For those of you that may not have seen, it was a really great and heartbreaking op-ed in The New York Times yesterday from one of our graduates.

Megan Ranney: I literally just wrote this down.

Howard Forman: No, Sejal Hathi, who is one of my former undergraduates from way back. So I’ve been in touch with her now in 15 years, and it’s heartbreaking, and it points out and she’s the other extreme in terms of having had a horrible outcome, horrible experience, but coming from a position of admittedly great wealth and position in society, she’s effectively the secretary of health for the state of Oregon and has worked in the White House and has worked as a deputy commissioner in New Jersey. So I want to just emphasize that the problems are so widespread at this point that even those in the most privileged positions are suffering badly. And I really would strongly urge you, we’ll put it in the show notes that anybody should look at that op-ed because it just... I’d love to hear your comments on it because I know you commented on it yesterday.

Megan Ranney: Yeah. I was pointing to how I said, I literally wrote this down to comment on Sejal’s op-ed. She’s not alone. I had similar experiences after both of my pregnancies. Interestingly, my younger sister lives in another country and had an incredibly different experience with both delivery and postpartum care. So we deeply need solutions like Enrich Health, and I look forward to your making a difference with it. So I’m going to ask a final question and also yes, I’m grateful to Sejal. I think it’s a great example of how honesty and storytelling and vulnerability can help spur change, which will then lead to my last question to you, which is about how your experience as a physician has influenced your work as an entrepreneur and vice versa. How do you find that interplay between the clinical work and the entrepreneurship?

Monique Rainford: The beauty of being a physician is that patients share their deepest emotion with you. And so hopefully we’re empathetic, but we get to identify with it and it inspires us to want to do better. So when patients come in and say, “I haven’t been treated this well” or “Nobody has listened to me,” it continues to inspire me to do the work and it makes it necessary to the work. So I think it’s a motivation and a wind behind the wings to push us to move forward.

Megan Ranney: Thank you, Monique. We are so grateful for your work and excited for what comes next.

Howard Forman: Congratulations.

Megan Ranney: Congratulations.

Monique Rainford: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Howard Forman: Thank you for empowering yourself.

Dr. Kimberley Steele is a program manager of health science futures at the Advanced Research Agency for Health, better known as ARPA-H, where she is championing systems lymphatics, an underserved and under-researched area of inquiry, diagnostics, and treatment. She was also a co-founder of CaRAVAN [Collaborative Research Advocacy for Vascular Anomalies Network], a nonprofit supporting lymphatic medicine research. Prior to joining ARPA-H, Dr. Steele served as special projects director at the Lymphatic Education and Research Network and spent over 14 years as a surgeon before her son’s diagnosis of a rare lymphatic anomaly inspired her to shift her focus to lymphatic disease. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto, medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine [located in Barbados], and her PhD from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. So welcome to you and thank you for joining us.

Kimberley Steele: Thank you.

Megan Ranney: Kimberley, Dr. Steele, it is such a joy to have you here and to get to spend some time with you again. I’d love for you to start by talking a little bit about ARPA-H—in an ideal world, what it does, how it spurs innovation. I think a lot of us here in academia spend time talking about the importance of high-risk/high-reward work. And to me, ARPA-H in the best of worlds epitomizes that. So can you explain a little bit about it for folks?

Kimberley Steele: I’m going to try. It took me probably a whole year to understand it. So I’m a program manager. My background, I’m a surgeon. I came to ARPA-H because I understood they were looking for bold, tough, audacious problems. And at the time, as you heard, I stepped out from my career for a really tough problem in my personal life. I had a child diagnosed with this ultra-rare disease and it was affecting a body system that I think both of you would say in medical school, we didn’t learn about the lymphatic system.

Megan Ranney: Other than dissecting, you know, that was—

Kimberley Steele: So when this diagnosis happened, it made me stop for about 24 hours, where I was frozen because we were told he had a 35% chance of five-year survival and that there were only partial treatments, no cure. Yeah, I froze. And then I went into action. I was lucky I was at Hopkins. I could reach out to everyone and anyone. But what I saw as I tried to reach out was there weren’t a lot of people around that knew about the lymphatic system and more importantly, they all were working in silos. Why? Not because they wanted to, but because the system really does, I guess, motivate you to hold things close to your chest, not work together. And we’re also very, very busy. So this one child, an N-of-1, brought an army together globally, and he’s now—so he was diagnosed at six—he’s now 17 and he’s stable, but we don’t have a cure yet.

So ARPA-H, what is it? It’s the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a government agency that exists so that it can support what the biomedical ecosystem is designed right now not to be able to do. And that is fund research that we take big bets on, that are structurally stuck, topics that are neglected, and we put these big bets on them even though they’re really high-risk. So I went and I pitched. I pitched how difficult this lymphatic system is because one, we can’t see it. We have to make the invisible visible. And two, even if we do see it, we have no treatments. And just by chance, this incredible system could be the secret to solve all kinds of devastating diseases.

And that’s what I pitched, and now we have two programs, one based and focused all on diagnosing lymphatics through imaging, through biomarkers, through genetics, because we’re 30 years behind. And then a therapeutic one called GLIDE—Groundbreaking Lymphatic Interventions and Drug Explorations. How do we target the lymphatic system to cure human diseases? And there’s lots of them. In my career, it goes back to, I was a bariatric surgeon. I worked with patients every day in obesity, and we now know that underlying lymphatic dysfunction plays a huge role in metabolic disease, in cardiovascular disease, in transplant, in infectious disease, in cancer. I’m not sure if I answered exactly about Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, but.

Megan Ranney: You did great.

Kimberley Steele: Okay. I could say, though, that traditional funding supports incremental progress. And not that that’s wrong—those are well-defined questions, well-established questions inside these established disciplines—but ARPA-H does the opposite. Moonshots and big bets and they took this chance with lymphatics.

Howard Forman: That’s great. That’s a great story. You’ve experienced many shifts in your career. I mean, from looking into you before we had you here today, I was fascinated by this, so I’m happy I got to ask this. You were a competitive ice dancer.

Megan Ranney: So cool.

Howard Forman: You were not just a surgeon, but you were a bariatric surgeon, which remains a critical area of us understanding, as you said, obesity, not just surgical treatment of obesity but understanding the biologics and endocrinology of obesity, and you’re a researcher, you have a PhD as well. How has each transition influenced the way that you think about innovation?

Kimberley Steele: Oh, I think it’s completely built me from the days of my skating, where it was all about resilience and motivation and determination and a lot of hard work, teamwork, working with my partner, listening to my coaches and understanding how coaching is so fundamental to your improvement on a daily basis, going to medical school on a third world island, coming from the end of the glory of skating to working in a third world environment where the people really need you, where you don’t have the tools, and you have to have a really good physical diagnostic acuity, right, to be able to treat patients and be humble and want to help to coming back and going to surgical residency—whoa, that was not easy. And then going and learning about research and the importance of helping others. So I went from being a surgeon helping one at a time to this program manager now, where I am hopeful that I can help millions one day.

Megan Ranney: Thank you. And I think that experience in a lower-income country can change the way that one thinks about diagnostics but also about patient voice and you realize the universality of human experience and the importance of structures and systems in determining what we have access to. So I appreciate that. One of the things that has struck me about your journey is the way in which, even in your telling the story about how you went to ARPA-H, the way in which you’ve centered the patient voice. We’ve heard that in the two prior guests already on this podcast, but I’d love for you to share a little more because it’s attention, often, in academic research: How do you make sure that community is centered? How do you make sure that people with lived experience are heard? Can you share with us how you’re doing that? And I think it’s, what, the discovery duo model? Can you tell a little bit about what that looks like?

Kimberley Steele: I’m so excited that you’re asking me about this because this is the best part of my job. As a program manager, one of the things that is mandated is that you make sure that the technology we build gets to the person it was built for. So, accessibility. And each of the program managers have different ways to do it, but I use my own experience. When my child was so sick, there weren’t a lot of experts out there. I reached out to a basic scientist, Dr. Timothy Le Cras at University of Cincinnati. I called him up in the middle of the day and said, “I need help. I’m a mom first. My son is going to be taking this treatment. It’s an N-of-1. I know we need to research it. Will you help?” And he said, “Of course.” I went every Friday to his labs.

I didn’t understand the biology very well. Lymphatics really was not my expertise at the time, but being there in his lab changed the course of his research. And so when I came to ARPA-H and asked to make sure that everything that we build is accessible, we created the discovery duos. The discovery duo is mandated in every single one of my teams. I have about 30, now, research teams. Each one must find an early scientific or early stage investigator. Someone outside of the field of lymphatics—we have medical students, we have engineers, we have pathologists, we have radiologists. It’s pretty cool. And then they are teamed up with a patient or caregiver ambassador. We call the early scientific investigator our “Jedis.” We keep [saying] that they’re going to have those [light]sabers one day…and then the patient ambassadors are our “bridges.”

Together they start from day one in the science. They aren’t on advisory committees. They aren’t part of needs assessment. They are the co-contributors of the science from day one, and we’re seeing this in real time. So our teams are really only eight months in. Our discovery duos are there. They go to every meeting. They have been just a part of the science and they are changing the course of this research. We just recently had a Discovery Duo Summit, where they all came together to hear this interventional radiology fellow talk about how he’s learned so much in one hour versus three years of his work. It’s just been the best part of this entire experience.

Megan Ranney: I love that, and I know our next guest is going to talk a little more about bringing community voice in, but gosh, it would be so cool for us to try that system on a larger scale here at Yale or across the country and the globe to mandate that lived experience being part of the research process from the get-go. It both means that your research is going to have greater application, and it means I keep coming back to that theme of trust that on the other side folks are going to be ready to use and scale it because they will understand the process all along the way.

Kimberley Steele: I mean, they’re helping us build this market that right now has been so stuck and getting out there on social media. And so I hope you all will follow us because we have to build this whole body system to where it belongs, where it deserves.

Howard Forman: Thank you so much.

Kimberley Steele: Thank you.

Howard Forman: That’s great. Dr. Yusuf Ransome is an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, where he’s the founder and director of the Society Connectedness and Health Lab, SOCAH. His research integrates social connectedness, contemplative practices, and digital technology to address public health challenges through a holistic approach. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College, my hometown. His MPH from the University of Michigan and his Doctor of Public Health from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He’s here today to talk about Soul Health, a faith tech solution focused on addressing the mental wellbeing of the missing middle. Welcome.

Megan Ranney: Welcome, Yusuf. Well, you’ve just made your tour along all the great schools of public health before clearly landing at the very best one, I just have to say. Well, it’s a joy to have you here and to get to talk about your work. Can you tell us what is Soul Health? Why did you start it? What problem are you trying to solve, and why are you the person to do this? I’m going to make you do your pitch deck in five minutes. Yeah.

Yusuf Ransome: So thank you. It’s a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me. Soul Health, essentially, it’s a faith tech digital health solution designed to support mental wellbeing in what I’m calling “the missing middle.” And what that means is, when we think about mental health, the average person thinks about mental illness. And that is the diagnostic side of what happens, thinking about depression, right, thinking about anxiety, thinking about schizophrenia. But the problem with that is, it’s a two-sided situation that while we are understanding the diagnostic side of it, people don’t actually talk like that in real life. What they say is, “I’m experiencing trouble because I’ve just been laid off” or “The current things that are happening in the world around war, etc., it’s giving me anxiety.” And so there is no place in a formal system for dealing with that.

And so in talking to individuals, we hear that people want to talk about how they experience but not labeling themselves. And that’s what contributes to stigma, contributes to people once they engage in a system, drop out earlier than they have a chance for the treatment to be able to help them. So in talking with a lot of individuals, what we want to do is figure out a way to identify what they’re experiencing, provide solutions for them, and have it in a tech setting that allows them to have immediate access when they experience that. And so that’s the missing middle. The average person who isn’t talking about what they’re experiencing in diagnostic terms, but nevertheless, they need the help to experience and provide support.

Howard Forman: I am trying to pitch the idea that the Yale School of Public Health should be thought of as the most interconnected school of public health in its home university, Yale. And I think this is always true. I just think we don’t say it often enough. How is your public health research at the School of Public Health and this wider Yale ecosystem for those that may not know it, the School of Public Health is an 18-minute walk from here or less. I mean, we are very small campus here. How has that brought insight or supported you to create the solution to solve this problem?

Yusuf Ransome: Yeah. So the first is interdisciplinary collaboration and community. So while in public health, we have access to the evidence linking, for example, spirituality and religion, which I’ll talk about too, depression. We also have great schools of management and great ecosystems as Yale Ventures—Susan and others—there that you can dream big early, as Monique mentioned, where you could think about, how do I take this evidence that has been established for decades and move it into action? And so the ability to have conversations both with researchers across the spectrum. And then finally, community, right. New Haven is one of the places Yale is in the middle of the community, and so we have no shortage of talking to the people who we are building solutions for. And that’s one of the great things that we like about the ecosystem, access to world-class faculty, but also the community, that you are one step away from finding out how best might I serve you.

Megan Ranney: Oh gosh, Yusuf, that’s beautiful. I’m glad we recorded that because it was so... yeah, exactly. Howie mentioned, and you’ve mentioned faith and belief systems. I know from conversations with you that this is a central component of your solution. People are both on the one hand deeply moved by in their religion and spirituality, but it can also be politicized, polarizing, or something that folks have skepticism about. So I’d love for you to share a bit with the audience about how you think about faith and belief systems, what you have to say to funders who ask about this, why and how you make it so central to your work. I will pause it for each of us in the room, whether we consider ourselves religious or not, that in some way, shape, or form, some sense of purpose is part of what drives us every day. And I know from talking to you that that’s part of how you think about spirituality as well. So would love to hear your take.

Yusuf Ransome: Yeah. So thank you again. So I’ll provide the example that will illustrate how this works. So my uncle is one of the persons I described earlier who have lost their job, struggling to reconcile that the skills that they were trained on earlier no longer match the economy that they’re in, and so has had difficulty translating that, has been stressed out because of that and even, when we think more broadly about social determinants, lost housing due to unemployment. And so is grappling with these complex issues. How am I going to get back into life at this age? How am I going to meet the economy? And so he’s quite stressed out. But if you talk to him, he’s always, have a smile and he says, “God’s got me, I have faith.” And so what does that mean? That means that people aren’t just, again, thinking about the fact that they’re depressed.

They’re not saying they’re depressed. They’re searching for meaning to grapple with whatever current circumstances they’re dealing with. And it’s not only my uncle. Data from the Pew Research Foundation, so that’s seven out of 10 Americans define themselves as being spiritual. And the definition of spirituality varies, but what that simply means is that people are searching to bring meaning into their lives. How do I understand what has happened in economics, what has happened in a country around war? And so how do we incorporate that into systems? It’s a failure if we do not incorporate an individual’s belief system in whatever we’re designing, because it’s just fundamental.

Megan Ranney: Can I ask this? And you’ve shown that when you see religious institutions disappear from a community, that health decreases, yes? So it’s not just that it can support health, but also lack of that support system can hurt it, yes?

Yusuf Ransome: Absolutely. And so another point is when we think about engaging into mental health, what do you think is the first place that a person, the average American, go to engage with any sort of mental distress? Anyone? Okay. The religious system, right. So 15% to 20%, the first contact with someone about a mental distressing situation is typically with a faith leader. So that’s less than, almost a quarter of the population that we are missing if we do not engage with the systems. And so what happens is that if that institution is no longer there or that setting, that individual is missed and never enters into the system. And one might say, sure, individuals are engaging with religion and spirituality online, but again, there is no equivalent of that person online to meet that individual who is going to that place for such of meaning.

Megan Ranney: And we haven’t even talked about AI here.

Howard Forman: Very, very grateful for the work that you’re doing and the fact that you’re able to bring scholarship, both into entrepreneurship and to hopefully reach the greater good. So thank you.

Janani Ramaswamy is the Senior Executive Director of IP and Licensing Services at Yale Ventures overseeing Yale’s technology commercialization efforts and supporting partnerships with Yale innovators. Prior to Yale, Janani served as the director of medical device licensing at Innovation Partnerships at the University of Michigan, where she led the team responsible for med tech commercialization. Janani received her Bachelor of Technology in biotechnology from the Vellore Institute of Technology before earning her master’s and PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan. So welcome to you. I’ve had the good fortune of working with you through the Yale Ventures and our conflict of interest committee, and I’m so happy to have you here today.

Janani Ramaswamy: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Megan Ranney: Oh, Janani, it’s a treat to have you here. Your work really sits at the heart of Yale’s innovation engine, which is why it felt appropriate to have you as the final guest on today’s podcast. I’m curious from your perspective, because you get to see just about all of it, what excites you most about the future of innovation here at Yale?

Janani Ramaswamy: Yeah. I think before I answer that, we have to acknowledge the current momentum that is being built up at Yale, which is going to inform the future of innovation at Yale. I think being here at the summit is just a fraction of what is going on on campus. It’s amazing. We’re amplifying it all in one spot, and thank you all for being here, but we have such excitement and buy-in from every level of leadership at the university, from the president’s office all the way to every single person on my team at Yale Ventures. We’re all super excited about what’s happening and what can happen and I think that’s going to set the stage for everything that is to come.

So historically and to date, I think Yale’s biggest strength has always been the innovation coming out of the School of Medicine. We have so many drugs on the market that we’ve been proud of. We have so many acquisitions in the medical space, but including Arvinas, for example, recently, that’s not an acquisition, but we had the first FDA-approved product of a PROTAC [proteolysis-targeting chimera] from Dr. Craig Crews’s lab just a couple of weeks ago. But I think what’s even more exciting is the huge momentum we’re building up around the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences right now. So there’s huge investment from the university into building up SEAS, both in terms of resources and infrastructure but bringing in incredible talent from all across the country and the world.

And so we’re hoping to see more come out of there. We already have incredible activity in terms of quantum and climate change and so much more going on from SEAS, but I think we have a lot more coming out in addition to the really strong engine and pipeline that we have in the medical school. We’re also really excited that we’re able to now talk to people outside of traditional STEM. So we’re talking to architecture, we’re talking to people in divinity, we’re talking to people in nursing, and that’s really exciting because innovation is not just something tangible that you can hold in your hand, a drug or a device or a widget on your phone, but it’s so much more than that.

Howard Forman: There are a lot of reasons why Yale and, quite frankly, any university, scholarly institution would want to commercialize innovation, but there are also enormous obstacles, and it’s really, commercializations only occurred over the last several decades in a meaningful way at any university. What are some of the biggest challenges in turning promising research and advancements into marketable products and services?

Janani Ramaswamy: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I’d say just by the nature of being at an academic institution, all the research that we see tends to be very early-stage. So it requires a good amount of derisking and maturation before it can turn into a product or service in the market that can truly impact people. So while we have a great funnel of folks that are coming in through the doors and wanting to get things out to the market, there is a lot of work and resources and sweat and tears that go into getting it there, so that’s the standard challenge is always sort of that valley of death. Okay, we’ve taken it as far as we can within the university, but it still needs x, y, and z before it can turn into a product or a service.

And so we are very fortunate at Yale to have six different accelerator programs run through Yale Ventures that are helping us move more of our research projects closer to a product or service, and we’re able to have a variety of programming and resources and mentors and entrepreneurs and residents’ expertise that we’re able to tap into to help derisk those along the way. But I think we are seeing that shift, more and more industry and investors and the general public are realizing that a lot of the innovation starts at the academic setting at the university, and it is worth continuing to invest in that process.

Megan Ranney: It’s awesome. And I want to give a shout-out to our newest accelerator, HealthTech Works, which is our School of Public Health along with the School of Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, working through Yale Ventures, really transforming the way that we think about health tech from a systems and population level as well as that individual device and individual level, which is really exciting stuff.

Janani Ramaswamy: Very exciting. Yes.

Megan Ranney: So Janani, I’m curious, how do you think technology commercialization is going to change or evolve over the next, I don’t know, I could say the next decade, but gosh, choose any time span within that. I feel like the next decade is very cloudy right now, so we can go a little shorter in time span, but what are you seeing as the big advances or changes on the horizon, for those who are listening in person or online?

Janani Ramaswamy: I mean, as Howie mentioned, tech commercialization at an academic setting is still relatively new, like 40 years or so. So I think we have a lot of room to grow. Since you said—no one said it yet, I’ll say it. I mean, AI is going to be the answer to almost everything in the short term. We’re still early enough that it’s hard to predict how that’s going to exactly mix things up, but whether that’s handling massive datasets that the health system is generating that we can probably glean so many insights from, or even just the day-to-day operationally or logistically in terms of making our jobs easier and better. I also think we are going to continue to see this consolidation of funding, you know, we heard about the ARPA-H program. There’s interest in funding these large moonshot initiatives that historically the NIH or NSF haven’t wanted to fund, but we’re also seeing similar trends in the investor world, where there’s large rounds going to mature companies, but not necessarily in the current market, a lot of early-stage capital being deployed.

So I think we’ll see more of those trends continue in the immediate future. And then at the university level, I’m hopeful that we will continue to see more and more folks engaging with us earlier in their academic careers. I mean, historically, innovation activity is not something that was necessarily rewarded by the academic tenure tech process, but we’re seeing more and more of that now, and with younger, more entrepreneurial faculty being hired, I’m hopeful that we will see more, more, and more coming through our doors.

Megan Ranney: My faculty at the School of Public Health know that we think about impact and being amongst the foremost scholar, but that impact can be measured not just by scholarship but of course also through the ways in which on scholarship is used in the world—

Janani Ramaswamy: Absolutely.

Megan Ranney: ... of which entrepreneurship can be a huge part.

Janani Ramaswamy: Absolutely.

Megan Ranney: So I appreciate that.

Howard Forman: Thank you so much for what you do and even for translating this for us today.

Janani Ramaswamy: Of course. Yes. Thanks for having me.

Howard Forman: Thank you.

Megan Ranney: Well, you have been listening to Health & Veritas with Howie Forman and me, Megan Ranney, standing in for Harlan Krumholz, who I can never substitute for, but can at least provide some sort of pale simulacrum.

Howard Forman: And by the way, he has promised that he will be here next year, and I’m hoping that you will continue to be here and that the three of us can do it together. So how did we do? To give us your feedback or to keep the conversation going, email us at health.veritas@yale.edu or follow us on any of social media, including our very active Instagram account.

Megan Ranney: And we do very much want to hear your feedback, your questions, your own experiences with these topics. And if you like the podcast, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. We always read your reviews. It also helps other listeners find us, of course.

Howard Forman: And by the way, I still have to read a script after 224 episodes. So Health & Veritas is produced with the Yale School of Management at the Yale School of Public Health. To learn about Yale SOM’s MBA for Executives program, you can look at som.yale.edu/emba, and to learn about the Yale School of Public Health’s Executive Master of Public Health program, visit sph.yale.edu/emph.

Megan Ranney: And I want to give a special shout-out to Gloria Beck, who staffed today’s episode, and to the amazing Donovan Brown and our producer, Miranda Shafer. Talk to you soon, Howie.

Howard Forman: Thanks very much, Megan. Talk to you soon.