From California to Ethiopia, and Back Again
An ongoing quest to find ways to make the world a healthier place
The baby girl was wailing, her mother trying to breastfeed her into comfort while the health clinician jabbed needle after needle into the baby’s arms and legs. Her malnutrition had forced her mother to the small town of Loggia, Ethiopia, far from their pastoral community, in an effort to get formula. At the time Ethiopia was in an extended drought, and the nomadic communities in the country’s northeastern desert region had been hit particularly hard. Health workers quickly realized that the girl had not received any of her vaccinations and an immunization spree was underway.
I was standing in the corner of Loggia’s health clinic, watching this unfold, with my colleagues on the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Vaccine Delivery team. We had flown that morning to the region of Afar (and truly, it felt a world away) to try to better understand — and visualize — some of the major barriers to routine immunization in nomadic communities, which make up ~85% of Afar’s two million inhabitants. I had been working on CHAI’s Remote Temperature Monitoring Device (RTMD) strategy, a technology intervention in which connected sensors are installed on fridges throughout the vaccine cold chain to monitor vaccine temperatures and report when anything is out of the ordinary. This enables rapid response from health workers to protect vaccines when grid infrastructure breaks down, potentially saving thousands of vaccine doses, and therefore potentially thousands of lives.
In this surreal moment, watching this live immunization, I found myself asking, “How did I get here?”
Growing up in the Bay Area, I had always been convinced of the power of technology (and biotechnology) companies to change lives. My interests in health and business led me to study Biomedical Engineering and Economics in college, and then work in consulting in New York and in Singapore. In reflection, my motivation at work was directly tied to the cases where I was having real-world impact — a feeling I experienced most profoundly when working with healthcare clients, whether it was launching a new vaccine or improving oncology patient access programs. This realization led me to CHAI and then to Stanford, where I just finished the first year of a MBA/MS Bioengineering program.
When I heard about Obvious Ventures’ world positive approach to investing, something clicked: here’s a firm that’s looking for the companies that are trying to make the world a healthier place. Whether that’s creating the best meat substitutes (near and dear to my vegetarian heart) or finding technology-enabled ways to discover better therapeutics, Obvious invests in companies that are addressing the world’s greatest challenges. That’s a mission that I am aligned with, and one that I want to help further.
I’m a couple of weeks in now, and I’m feeling the Silicon Valley ethos with my standing desk and kale smoothie. I’m excited to dedicate my summer to better understanding healthcare data and the business models that enable precision medicine.
Helping Obvious figure out where we can back entrepreneurs who are solving the world’s toughest health problems? Now that’s 🌍➕.
