When: July 09, 2021, 07:00 PM Eastern Time
Where:
Link: Zoom Link Removed
Meeting ID: 897 1807 1531
Passcode: 43214321
Speaker: Dr. Fereshteh Aalamifar
Language: Parsi/English
Synopsis:
In this presentation, Dr. Fereshteh Aalamifar will share her challenges and lessons-learned of founding a health-tech company from a raw idea and defying the odds as a first-generation woman immigrant with limited resources and no prior experience in the startup world. Even though Dr. Aalamifar lends her success to the exceptional opportunities the academia provided to her, she was frustrated by academia’s status quo of pursuing publications and personal academic achievements as a goal without trying to find a genuine life mission. This led her to decline a prestigious postdoc position and become a full-time mom to figure her way forward, after graduating from her Ph.D. studies in 2017. Interestingly, her new struggles as a mom provided her with a new mission: Bringing AI technologies to pediatric health to address unmet needs. In this talk, Dr. Aalamifar will share lessons learned on how to start a medical device company with only $1800 of one’s savings while having a full-time commitment – being a full-time mom of a newborn in her case.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Fereshteh Aalamifar is the founder and CEO of PediaMetrix, a vibrant startup in Maryland aiming to revolutionize pediatric health through AI and computer vision. She founded PediaMetrix based on a personal experience as a mom in 2018. Dr. Aalamifar was recognized as the top 10 women in tech founders in the 2019 annual PitcHER™, won the most impact award in the medical imaging field at MICCAI startup Village, and was an invited member to the congress meeting on how to bring businesses to scale. She holds a Ph.D. and MSc from Johns Hopkins University, a second Master’s degree from Queen’s University, Canada, and a Bachelor’s degree from Isfahan University of Technology, Iran in Electrical & Computer Engineering. She was one of the recipients of the prestigious 2016 NIH doctoral Fellowship when she developed the first co-robotic ultrasound tomography system for prostate cancer detection which later resulted in a $270,000 grant sponsored by NIH and collaboration with industry. She is the inventor of three U.S. patents and has extensively published in medical imaging and robotics.
Under Dr. Aalamifar’s leadership, PediaMetrix grew from $0 in valuation in its founding days to multi million dollars in less than 2 years. PediaMetrix’s first product was recognized as one of the top 10 must-have apps in pediatrics at the 2018 annual gathering of American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2020, SoftSpot’s Alpha version received enormous interest from parents and pediatric providers in 8 countries, and 17 states in the US. PediaMetrix has now raised ~$1.5M and is well on its way to realize its founders’ mission to help parents and children in need.