Imagine Human

07/30/2021

[Saying goodbye (for now) to one of my greatest scientific and managerial mentors, Dr. Sandeepa Dey. I fully expect her to win the Nobel Prize one day using olfactory biosensors as a new non-invasive technology to detect disease]

Smell is our oldest sense, evolving over millions of years to protect us and shape our preferences for every day foods and products. After 4 years, l left my job at Aromyx to pursue my graduate studies at Harvard. Aromyx is a biotech startup which digitizes taste and smell by engineering human taste & olfactory receptors into biosensors that emit measurable light when exposed to any substance. Applications include design of plant-based proteins, wine contamination, fragrance recommendation engines, food contamination, and even disease detection. Joining as the third employee in 2017, I have been fortunate to be part of Aromyx’s evolution from a nascent technology into a successful commercial business. Most recently we raised a $10M Series A and acquired our first automation to scale data generation. Throughout this journey I have been blessed to work alongside a brilliant team of biologists, data scientists, and business experts. These include friends and mentors (including Sandeepa!) that I will have for life. They have shaped my passion for working with diverse teams to advance biotechnology through entrepreneurship. I couldn’t be happier for the team at Aromyx and look forward to their continued growth and impact in the world.
👅👃🧬🧬

09/08/2020

In our latest Imagine Human (www.imaginehuman.com) episode, serial entrepreneur, Daniel Burnett, and host, Matthew Kerolus, discuss the application of biomedical and machine learning technologies to prediction and prevention of COVID-19. Dr. Burnett is a participant of a global COVID-19 task force organized by Stanford StartX. Please give this episode a listen and offer us any feedback. If you know any other guests working on humanitarian initiatives, we would love to meet them and share their stories!
https://imaginehuman.com/episode-16-predicting-and-preventing-illness-in-a-pandemic-ebdba6af936d

Please share and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud. We appreciate it.

09/08/2020

In our latest Imagine Human (www.imaginehuman.com) episode, serial entrepreneur, Daniel Burnett, and host, Matthew Kerolus, discuss the application of biomedical and machine learning technologies to prediction and prevention of COVID-19. Dr. Burnett is a participant of a global COVID-19 task force organized by Stanford StartX. Please give this episode a listen and offer us any feedback. If you know any other guests working on humanitarian initiatives, we would love to meet them and share their stories!

https://imaginehuman.com/episode-16-predicting-and-preventing-illness-in-a-pandemic-ebdba6af936d

Please share and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud. We appreciate it.

03/12/2020

We live in a technological world driven by a deluge of media content and the platforms delivering that media to achieve certain business goals. Paralleling this rise in technology and media is a rise in depression, especially among millennials. While it is inconclusive whether or not specific forms of media such as social media cause increase rates of depression, the power of technology in its many forms to influence our mind and behavior is evident. It has permeated our politics, the fabric of our relationships, and our everyday decision-making. In fact, many of the platforms you use every day were designed to be addictive by people just like you.

In this episode of Imagine Human, we explore the following questions: What if we could use the same technological mechanisms used to enthrall and entice us every day for good, for the benefit of our emotional and mental well-being? What if we could leverage data, not to sell it to third party companies, but to design health plans customized for you?

w/ Stephen Cognetta and Anne Wu

02/15/2019

"What’s changed is social media and the structure of communication between people. Now people have tremendous ability to shape who they interact with. Say you’re an anti-vaxxer. You find people online who are also anti-vaxxers and communicate with them rather than people who challenge your beliefs.

The other important thing is that this new structure means that all sorts of influencers—the Russian government, various industry groups, other government groups—have direct access to people. They can communicate with people in a much more personal way. They can pose on Twitter and Facebook as a normal person who you might want to interact with. If you look at Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 election, the Russian Internet Research Agency created animal-lovers groups, Black Lives Matter groups, gun-rights groups, and anti-immigrant groups. They could build trust with people who would naturally be part of these groups. And once they grounded that trust, they could influence them by getting them not to vote or by driving polarization, causing more extreme rhetoric. They can make other people trust them in ways that would have been very difficult without social media."

I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged…