Three of 11 student startups chosen to participate in iVenture Accelerator’s intensive summer program have connections to the Beckman Institute. Each startup will have access to a 10-week curriculum, a network of advisers, co-working space, and up to $10,000 in funding.
Launched in 2015, the iVenture Accelerator assists startups—including technological innovations, social ventures, or cultural campaigns—in defining product market fit, building prototypes, developing pilot programs, building key partnerships, and scaling their project.
The three teams with Beckman connections:
PhantomCor develops a physical and functional cardiac model used to simulate various heart pathologies for use in education, research, and diagnostics. Team members include Pierce Hadley, Bara Saadah, and Hugh Yeh—undergraduates in the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group (BST). The team is advised by bioengineering faculty members Wawrzyniec Dobrucki, Michael Insana, and Brad Sutton. PhantomCor looks to advance cardiovascular health care through personalized medicine, more accurate imaging, and visualization of the heart.
Vitrix Health creates affordable and simple medical screening solutions designed around low resource contexts for the world’s deadliest diseases, starting with oral cancer. Aashay Patel, CEO and co-founder of Vitrix Health worked in the Bioimaging Science and Technology group as an undergraduate. He graduated this year with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering. “My time at Beckman definitely was important to my understanding of some of the principles that drive our product,” Patel said.
YouMatter Studios uses media and technology to build a more diverse and inclusive society. Katherine Mimnaugh, a member of Beckman’s Illinois Language and Literacy Initiative and a recent Illinois graduate, is the head of production at YouMatter. Her thesis research investigated therapeutic applications for virtual reality, a technology that YouMatter uses to advocate inclusion of underrepresented people in modern media.
