Announcing the Elektra Labs Strategic Advisory Board
Today, we’re thrilled to share that nine esteemed healthcare and security professionals are joining Elektra Labs’ Strategic Advisory Board (SAB).
Our new board consists of:
- Ariel Stern, PhD
- Beau Woods
- Bill Wood, MD, MPH
- Christine Eun
- Eric Perakslis, PhD
- John Wilbanks
- Julia Austin
- Noah Zimmerman, PhD
- Sofia Warner, MD, MBA
Elektra Labs is working at the exciting multidisciplinary intersection of connected technologies, healthcare, security, data legal rights, and algorithms. To do this well, we need to collaborate with those who are able to shift between engineering, data science, clinical, security, ethical and legal issues. Our SAB is packed with Renaissance polymaths.
Elektra would not be the company it is today without the support of our advisors — and many more folks along the way. I’d like to take a moment to briefly share a couple stories about each member of our new SAB.
I am forever grateful for my co-founder, Dr. Sofia Warner, one of the most compassionate, handy, get-it-done, will-work-with-extreme-ambiguity people I’ve ever met. It’s rare to find builders who can manifest a product out of a vision, and Sofia is a roll-up-your-sleeves inventor. She deeply cares for patients and the practice of medicine, and I’m continuously impressed by her energy to support both our company and her practice.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t thank her husband, Eric Weiskott. Eric not only named the company — and saved us from our original name, Phosify!- but also kindly welcomed me into their home where I stayed on and off for 6+ months after we graduated from grad school.
Julia Austin incubated our company when it was a seedling of an idea in her Harvard Business School Product Management course. We were stubbornly “not going to work with regulated products” and wanted to build a “neurotech and sleep” marketplace. Her emphasis on user interviews and direct research helped us shift to a much better path of getting inside the belly of the beast and working collaboratively with regulators. Julia, who formerly served in CTO and VP Eng roles at DigitalOcean, Akamai and VMware, has pushed our thinking on product and engineering — and I’ve always been impressed with the clarity of her writing (see VP Eng vs. CTO) and fearless activism (favorite tweet).
Soon after graduation, Zak Kohane told me that I “must meet” Eric Perakslis, an introduction that fundamentally shifted Elektra’s trajectory. Eric is by far one of the most generous people I’ve met — he dug in deep with Elektra and never expected anything in return. He has a strong ethical underpinning and desire to help patients that rings true in all decisions he makes. While many in healthcare are only now waking up the security issues, Eric wrote primers about security early on and pushed the government forward in this capacity while he served as FDA’s CIO. His ability to produce high-quality work quickly blows my mind; he turned the seedling of an idea that we had from a conversation into a Lancet Digital Health inaugural issue article in less than 24 hours. Eric has introduced our Elektra team to nearly all the first deals we did as a company, and also to many of our close friends and supporters in the industry.
One of these introductions was to Dr. Bill Wood, an oncologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bill is one of those rare academics who truly works at the forefront of technology. He’s supported nearly all of the major start-ups working in this space, and is driven by a real vision that there’s a better world out there for his patients, and he will make it happen. I’ve been impressed by Bill’s compassion and patience as we work through various business models, because the United States healthcare payment model is not always set up to help patients win. It takes a lot of thoughtfulness from both the executive team and advisors to figure out the best models that will produce the best work for the most people. Bill is driven by evidence-based science, and doesn’t get sucked into hype. He’s building an epicenter for high-quality research ideas that turn into high-quality products.
I learned about Professor Ariel Stern when I read her HBS case on Adaptive Platform Trials Ariel and I first met in San Francisco, walked around Golden Gate Park, and took a hilarious selfie (bonus points if you can get her to give it to you; double bonus if she shares her favorite street artist instagram). Ariel is one of the rare thinkers who has been diving into the security of healthcare devices, knows intricate details about biomarkers, and pushes the regulatory environment to modernize. She convinced, and then supported me to join the Harvard MIT Center for Regulatory Sciences (CRS), where we put together a Digital Medicine Symposium (insert shameless Forbes plug), and wrote articles on topics like algorithmic bias. Ariel has been my guru navigating the brave new world of peer review: thanks to the support of her and CRS, over the last year Elektra teammates have co-authored six published peer-reviewed articles, and four pending articles in journals such as Nature’s npj Digital Medicine, JMIR, and Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. I’m closely tracking the work Ariel’s team continues to produce around security, software as a medical device, and digital tools in clinical trials (h/t Caroline Marra). Ariel’s team is on the forefront of this research.
Our team had the good fortune of meeting Christine Eun, through our lead investors at Maverick Ventures. Ambar Bhattacharyya made the intro to Christine, whom he mentioned was an influential product and marketing leader on Apple’s health team. As a remote team, we’ve honed our user-test ritual, which has allowed us to test our product across a wide range of pharma, biotech, and software manufacturers across the globe. The user test with Christine was different — the way she sees and digests products is magical. She got to the heart of what we were looking to do in mere minutes. After the first time we met her, the Elektra team was still saying “Well, Christine recommended…” at every product meeting we had for weeks. We’re grateful she decided to join our SAB and she’s supercharged the Atlas.
The next three advisors I met through a glorious platform called Twitter, and against all odds, became friends IRL.
Beau Woods is one of the security researchers I admire the most. A long-time follower of his Tweets, I got to know Beau while we were serving as Entrepreneurs in Residence together at the FDA’s Digital Health Unit. Beau has pushed my thinking on security issues more than anyone else I’ve met. He’s one of the rare white-hats who can seamlessly navigate between the hacker world into government, and then back. His accolades speak for themselves founder of I Am the Cavalry, board member and/or founder of multiple DEF CON villages, one of the strongest supporters behind the FDA-led #WeHeartHackers, and the mastermind behind the Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices (If doctors take such an oath, shouldn’t engineers, data scientists and those deploying connected tech?). Beau is among the most generous people I’ve met, bringing together people who may never have become friends in other circumstances. He is tirelessly focused on issues where computer security intersects public safety and human life, and strives to ensure that these technologies are worthy of the trust we place in them.
Generosity is a theme across all Elektra Strategic Advisory Board members, and John Wilbanks has it in spades. After reading and watching many of John’s articles and talks, I had the chance to meet him at a conference — and then proceeded to cold-email him to ask if we could meet for breakfast. He said yes, and I’ve never been so anxiously excited for a morning coffee. John and his team at Sage Bionetworks have taught me the most important lessons on open data, data rights, getting helpful toolkits out into the world, and the brilliant world of Elinor Ostrom. John refined a lot of my views on digital specimens and is a world-class storyteller. He’s also a renaissance man, pulling in lessons from history, engineering, science, and art — and never forgets the human that he serves in the end. Everytime I see him, I am reminded that I wish I had recorded the conversation because my hands can’t write down all his nuggets fast enough.
Noah Zimmerman and I first met through Twitter under the auspices of the Project That Should Not Be Named <ahem> biomedical blockchains </ahem>. Although these days neither of us build digital asset technologies anymore, that collaboration launched an open-access database at Mount Sinai and a STAT News article — and Noah then even wrote a kickass children’s book on the topic. We next masochistically decided to write a textbook together, a primer on digital medicine and measurement (ebook out winter 2020!), and then proceeded to help found the Digital Medicine Society, a 501c3 professional society for practitioners who serve in the digital era of medicine. Little did I realize that a trajectory-shifting gift Noah would give to Elektra was an introduction to his best friend, Mark Shervey, who joined our executive team this summer. We are enormously lucky to have met the two of them early in our journey.
The Elektra team has taken on the audacious mission of advancing the safe, effective, and personalized adoption of connected technologies in real-world settings. We’re building one of the first pharmacies for connected technologies, and facing all the hopes and challenges that come with new tech that will transform healthcare.
I’m excited and honored to have their input and guidance as we develop our evidence-based Atlas of digital measurements, develop tools for decentralized clinical trials, support feasibility studies for mobile technologies, and build systems to reduce bias and improve the security of connected medical tools to better serve people in participating in research and receiving care in own homes.
If our Strategic Advisory Board inspires you like it does for us, we’re hiring! Join us and make it easier to evaluate and deploy technologies in medicine that are worthy of the trust we place in them.
I hope you will visit our website and sign up for our newsletter to learn more about the talented people who are leading our efforts to advancing the safe, effective, and personalized adoption of connected technologies in real-world settings.
Elektra Labs is a healthcare-security company building the infrastructure to evaluate and deploy connected technologies (e.g., wearables, biosensors). By 2023, an estimated 5 million individuals will be remotely monitored by healthcare providers. In the digital era of medicine, Elektra Labs is committed to advancing the safe, effective, and personalized adoption of connected technologies in real-world settings.
If you’re an engineer, security researcher, or research collaborator with a passion for digital medicine send us a note (hello@elektralabs.com) — we are hiring! We’re looking to grow the team, and we need your help in building the infrastructure for safe, effective and ethical tools in the digital era of medicine.
