Abigail Holland: My Journey Into Neurotech
Abigail Holland is quietly taking the neurotech world by storm. As the Product Owner of IDUN Technologies — a company building a truly innovative yet sector-leading full-stack EEG platform — she’s setting standards for what can be achieved with a little bit of elbow grease, a solid thinking cap, and a whole lot of initiative. Her multifarious background spans biomedical engineering and clinical neurosciences, academia and industry, product and engineering — and is living proof that success in neurotech can come from touching, in Abigail’s own words, “a little bit of everything”. Here, she discusses how to actually get a neurotech job straight out of uni, how consumer neurotech will impact clinical, and the true impact of women-in-STEM supporting women-in-STEM.
Abigail’s Journey
SV: Thinking back to your early inspiration, what was the first moment that sparked your interest in neurotech and mental health?
AH: There’s a lot of different things that I would say combined to get me so interested in this space. I’d say the trigger for me to first think of neuro as a problem to be solved came when I was in high school. I did a project for class where I had to pick a part of the body and talk about the biological processes involved in pathologies, and I wound up semi-randomly choosing mental health, and specifically depression. I learned so much about neural chemicals, and electrical signals, and how everything is related. Obviously, there are still a million question marks in that space, but even then I already felt this insight that maybe there was something we could actually influence — that it might be more of an engineering problem — and that we could actually reach an eventual solution where we have control over our own emotions, our journeys — even our futures.
SV: Can you give us an overview of your career in neurotech so far?
AH: After I started to get a bit obsessed with the concept of being able to engineer solutions to all of these different biomedical issues, I wasn’t really sure exactly in which direction I wanted to go. I chose my biomedical engineering degree as it allowed me to start out very general, without specialising too early. I’d started to specialise in biomechanical engineering in my second year of university when I found our local NeuroTechX Student Club. I saw a poster that said, “Are you interested in fixing neurological problems with technology? Come and meet us at 9pm, February 14th!” It really made me laugh, firstly because that was exactly what I wanted to do — it was such an incredible coincidence — and secondly because who was this group of people who are so nerdy that they’re hosting an engineering event at 9pm on Valentine’s Day? So I was like, okay, I have to check this out. I don’t know who these people are, but they’re my people. And I went and it was amazing.
From then, this group of really smart guys working out of the neuroscience department of Queen’s University just agreed to take me under their wing. Eventually I ended up running the NTX Student Club with them for a couple years. With that group we made a big-open source library that was a hardware agnostic system for mobile EEG systems. You could plug in the Neurosity or the Muse or the Emotiv and everything would be able to run through our system. That was my first software experience and my first experience applying neurotech.
From there, because we were working with Muse, I ended up going to work at Muse. It’s a really small neurotech community in Canada, so it’s a lot of the big players are nearby to Queen’s University. Our team got in touch with Graeme Moffat and said, “hey, we’re using your product, we really like what you guys are about, would you come and give us a lecture on data science?”. Graham didn’t come but Muse’s then-Head of their research department, Nicole, came. She was awesome — I gave her a tour of Queens and we hung out for the day. Later I visited her in Toronto, took her out for coffee, and asked her for a job. So I directly leveraged the NTX Student Club to get into that position, which was very cool. Going to these industry events, or creating them if they don’t exist, is a really good way of just meeting people in the field and creating your own opportunities.
After I had done my internship at Muse, I went back to do my fourth year at University and actually got involved in the finance side of things. I went and joined a private equity firm, and I didn’t really like it. I missed working on products and I missed working with neurotech. And so extremely early into that journey — I only lasted three months full-time — I went back to NeuroTechX and started joining a whole bunch of discussions, and I ended up on a call with someone who wanted to ask me about IDUN. When I was at Muse, I had looked into IDUN’s electrodes to see if they would make sense in the Muse headband. I remembered that they were a cool company and that interaction nudged me to reach out to them. It was very serendipitous — they needed someone with experience in the field at that time — and so within about a month, I moved to Zurich and started living here. It worked out really well because I had an amazing team and was so obsessed with the product. I was loving every second of it, just obsessing over what we were building, and everyone else in the team was on the same vibe. I actually went over originally to be a business analyst. I got there and they didn’t have a coder — they were just switching from being an electrode company to a full stack EEG company — and I was the only one who had a lot of coding experience. So I landed and immediately shifted to a full-stack developer role totally by accident.
“Going to these industry events, or creating them if they don’t exist, is a really good way of just meeting people in the field and creating your own opportunities.”
Within the first year I then decided I had too much hubris working on neurotech products without knowing any of the theory. So, I moved to London to go to grad school at UCL to study clinical neuroscience, where I focused on Neurological Disorders (specifically, Dementia). After that I really just wanted to go back to IDUN. I wanted to see how the product was going. I wanted to see what they were working on. They needed someone to help out on the product side, so I went back and have now been doing that role for a year and a half. It’s a very nice alternative to coding for me. It’s much more strategic, big picture, and working with people. I find product a really enjoyable role because really all I want to do is talk about neurotech, the future, and how to get to the future.
SV: How have you approached building your career in neurotech?
AH: I think in my career path in neuro, I’m led by two big questions. The first is: Does what I’m doing contribute to a better understanding — or a better application — to help to solve neurological conditions or mental illnesses? That’s my guiding principle in every decision I make. Secondly, I ask myself every year: What is going to help me learn the most in the next year? I’ve been trying to make all of my decisions based on those two questions. I’m really motivated by how can I personally learn a lot, and how can I contribute to these big problems that I want solved and that are really important to me.
SV: How has mentorship, particularly from women, shaped your journey?
AH: Women pushing me forwards has really helped me across the board. They’ve really helped me overcome any subconscious imposter syndrome that I’ve felt. The only reason I even considered engineering was because one of my teachers, a female teacher, pulled me aside and suggested it could be for me. At University, I had three really inspiring woman in the biomedical engineering department who were my mentors, across classes and for the NTX Student Club; Dr Heidi Ploeg, Dr Susan Boehnke, and Dr Claire Davies. They were both really intelligent and strong, and doing incredibly inspiring things. My Capstone Professor, who oversaw my year-long final project, has since become the Chair for Women in Engineering. The three of them together not only exemplified what women in this academic area can accomplish — they really took the time to encourage me that I could potentially get there as well. I try and similarly encourage the women that I meet in neurotech (at IDUN, on twitter, at conferences), and to provide helpful resources and advice whenever I can. By lifting up women in my sphere, hopefully I can encourage them to flourish in neurotech the same way my mentors have encouraged me.
Neurotech and Health
SV: How do you see wearables and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) changing the healthcare landscape, especially in the space of preventative and personalized medicine?
AH: I think that in the long run, this whole reactionary healthcare system that we have — there’s no way that that is the right way to handle things. It’s expensive. It’s a waste of time. It sucks for the patients. It sucks for the doctors. We are collecting way so much data now that we could potentially use to make diagnoses, or to personalize treatments, or to monitor people and identify problems before they even get sick. I think that wearables and BCIs are going to enable countless new applications for monitoring and diagnostics. They’re going to change the game for health care.
SV: Why do you believe diversity is critical in the development of wearable technology and its applications and healthcare?
AH: For me, it comes down to who is building the system. For a lot of the wearable companies right now, it’s groups of men. They will test the device on themselves, and they’ll make sure that it’s comfortable for themselves and that it’s valid on themselves and that it aligns with research that they collect in-house, often on themselves. I mean, at IDUN, also do all early prototype testing primarily on ourselves — it’s a totally normal thing and it’s not to point fingers, but at the end of the process you’ve just accidentally built a prototype ideal for the population group that is working on the device (and probably their friends, family, and nearby community) — it might not work on any other populations. That is the state of many wearables and medical products, where many published trials and papers are also conducted on specific population groups, that are currently on the market.
“I truly believe that consumer neurotech will help to democratise clinical neurotech, make the tech less expensive, and make it more widely available.”
If you think about the current neurotech devices that are on the market, this bias is seen, where devices won’t work for all hair types. So that was something that was really important for us at IDUN, to totally avoid hair. I’m sure we’ll find some populations that the tech doesn’t work — but the point is that we’re trying to work with them and have a more representative team, and we’ll try to update the tech to make it work for them. I try to talk to different populations and to test the tech on the widest possible variety of people. We try to work on validation with labs who work with different population groups, and I do things like bring the tech with me to conferences and ask anyone who will talk to me at the conference to try it out and give me feedback. I am constantly trying to figure out: Does this work for that person? Why? Why not? Are we actually going to be able to measure their brainwaves comfortably, reliably, and get high quality signals?
SV: How will consumer neurotech applications affect the clinical space?
AH: I really see the clinical versus non-clinical space as a big spectrum, and I only expect it to get greyer and greyer over time. We developed these clinical systems because we needed to be able to quantify, diagnose, and potentially impact various neurological conditions. But the issue is that they actually don’t really work for many people in many contexts. We really need to be able to draw that out of the clinical sphere and move it into more of a consumer space, to make products from a more consumer perspective. I truly believe that consumer neurotech will help to democratise clinical neurotech, make the tech less expensive, and make it more widely available — but importantly it’ll be a step towards solving clinical problems for a wider spectrum of people in a much more comfortable way. You can already see it with things like smartwatches that can be used to diagnose Parkinson’s Disease or identify cardiac arrythmia — we’re creating better, earlier, more widely accessible diagnostics using consumer-focussed human machine-interfaces (HMIs). An interesting way to view consumer tech going forwards is that everything people carry with them all the time — it’s going to become a sensor. That’s going to add a lot of value while changing very little about the consumer or user experience.
Making Neurotech Happen
SV: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your role of bringing IDUN’s tech to fruition?
AH: I think the biggest challenge for me around my transition from Research Engineer to Product Owner at IDUN, was having to switch from thinking about what I personally need to build right now in order to reach a specific outcome to understanding what 10 people need to be doing simultaneously to end up with this really complicated combination product. How does everyone work in tandem, at the right speed, going in the right direction — as well as staying motivated and understanding each other — while all working on this confusing siloed deeptech? It’s very exciting how quickly we’re moving and how we’re all sprinting in the same direction. It’s not easy, and I’m so happy that our team has been able to pull together and ship these things that are really, really hard to build.
There’s also a difficulty that now we have this tech, who is our market? It’s all about finding the killer application and the people that desperately need your product enough to generate revenue to sustain the company. I think tracking down those people is an issue a lot of neurotech faces. At IDUN, once we had our first few customers with very clear use cases that really needed our tech, everything else fell more into place.
SV: How do you see the neurotech market shaping up? What are the big challenges to adoption?
I think that there’s still a huge gap in gathering mass-market attention. People don’t really know about neurotech. They don’t understand it. They’re really nervous about the idea of people reading their brainwaves. When you only talk to people in the neurotech space, it feels like we’re on a roll and we’re all going in the right direction and things are getting faster and faster. But if you take a bit of a step back, it feels like the distance between reality and that future is really quite far.
I think that part of the problem really is that all these small neurotech start-ups, who’ve now built this revolutionary tech, just don’t have the resources to go out and properly sell to their market. Even the ones who recently closed large rounds seem like they’re (probably rightfully) spending every single dollar and resource on building these crazy deeptech solutions. I think that we need more middlemen to help bridge the gap — there’s just not enough money going around at the moment for one company to do all of the hardware, all of the software, and all of the go-to-market. It’s too much.
“When you only talk to people in the neurotech space, it feels like we’re on a roll … But if you take a step back, it feels like the distance between reality and that future is really quite far.”
Abigail’s Advice
SV: What would you say to someone aspiring to enter the neurotech field? Do you have any shortcuts to success?
AH: Get more comfortable just Googling things. Go on YouTube and watch a whole bunch of videos on whatever you’re trying to learn about. Learning how to self-learn gave me a huge level up in the neurotech field, because you need to be aware of so many different niches. Even if you get hired to work in the field as, for example, as a full-time hardware engineer — if you’re not being proactive about learning, you’re still going to miss out on things you really need to know because it’s just such a widespread field. Even if you’re starting out and have a lot of that learning journey ahead of you, you’re going to get way better PhD offers and you’re going to have much better confidence if you’ve really pursued self-learning already.
SV: What resources or communities could you recommend to someone looking to learn more about neurotech and build up their network?
AH: The go-to for neurotech is NeuroTechX. It’s where you find most people and it’s how I’ve gotten my jobs. It’s really how I’ve gotten into neurotech. It’s also how I’ve met most of my friends in neurotech. It feels like the whole neurotech community communicates via the NTX Slack channel. The organisation have also compiled some really great resources, as well as the Primer, that have really helped give people who are new to the sector a head start. Even when other organisations are making resources, you’ll find those within NeuroTechX. So that’s my number one recommendation.
If you want to get fancy and join some other things, you can look at IEEEBrain — they have some cool stuff going on too. But my main suggestion is just go to NeuroTechX, find enthusiasts in your city, try to make friends with the coolest / nerdiest people you can find!
Edited by Sophie Valentine for NeuroTechX’s Content Laboratory.
Sophie Valentine has a background in experimental psychology and cognitive neuropsychology research, with degrees from Bristol University. Her work is focussed at the intersection of tech-for-good, product, digital health, and neurotechnology.
