“As a scientist, I always thought that if I develop something innovative, it will affect a whole community,” says Minmin “Mimi” Yen ’11, who was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship as a grad student and who worked on translating bench science to clinical applications. But when she flew to Haiti in 2014 to study the cholera epidemic, she realized the path to impact wasn’t so simple. “I realized some things get stuck in the lab. I saw people lined up waiting for hours to see one doctor. And many were very sick. I realized in startups people talk a lot about innovation, but the people who really need the attention often don’t get it.”
