Speakers at the IIT Bay Area Alumni Association virtual event. (Siliconeer/IIT Bay Area Alumni Association)

 

The IIT Bay Area Alumni Association (IITBAA) held an extremely successful online event titled “Responding to the COVID-19 Crisis: Impact, Innovation, and Prevention,” Oct. 10, with an outstanding lineup of speakers joining in from India, Midwest, and West Coast, with attendees joining in from all over the world, and highly engaged interactive discussions.

I serve as a Board Member and Vice President at the IIT-Bay Area Alumni Association. Passionate about healthcare and having been engaged in several COVID-19 projects, I have witnessed the tremendous impact created by the community through its awareness, involvement, initiatives, and becoming a catalyst for changes. Now was the right time to hear from industry experts and thought leaders on how they are leading the changes. We therefore invited innovators, non-profit founders, social-venture leaders, and healthcare experts to share their thought provoking and game changing responses to the COVID-19 crisis, in IIT Bay Area’s first virtual event – IITBayTalk.

While I worked with the team to plan community activities for the lockdown situation, we learnt from early surveys that members were eager to contribute to the COVID-19 relief efforts and that they were concerned for their friends and family across international borders.

We decided to focus the event on the United States and India –  the two countries with the highest COVID-19 case counts. This session, which was open to everyone, was intended for the community to learn about the outstanding work that these leaders are accomplishing, what challenges they face, and how we as individuals and through the collective power of human ingenuity can help, as well as how to better protect ourselves and our loved ones.

The event provided a perfect opportunity for the audience to learn about grass root initiatives in both the countries and how to navigate the maze of policies, culture, and scale to succeed. As expected, the talks sparked seeds of ideation in attendees into how lessons from one context and geography could be applied to another.

Before the speakers commenced, I shared with the audience about some impactful international scale  COVID-19 projects I had been involved in. These projects range from open source AI/ML based remote vital sign detection to Yelp+Wiki for COVID-19 clinical trials, nanotechnology based devices to detect virus in bodily fluids to 3D printing of ventilator splitters.

Our first speaker was Mukesh Bansal, an IIT Kanpur alum, the founder and CEO of Cure.fit, founder of the COVID ACT Grant fund, and the founder of Myntra, which was acquired by Flipkart. Mukesh spoke about how the entrepreneur community in India launched the ACT Grant fund to fight COVID-19 by supporting startups, and how one of those companies Swasth, a coalition of healthcare specialists, is acting as an anchor for the success of digital healthcare delivery in India and adoption of National Digital Health Mission Standard.

The next speaker was Paddy Padmanabhan, an IIT Kharagpur alum, with an MBA from IIM Calcutta, and the Founder and CEO of Damo Consulting. He is a 25 year industry veteran in healthcare and the author of several best selling books. Paddy spoke about how the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, implementation of novel delivery care models, and advanced the use of AI/ML and emerging technologies – in remote monitoring, chatbots, symptoms triaging, contact tracing, and automation in disease management.

Paddy was followed by Balaji Sampath, an IIT Madras alum, with a PhD from University of Maryland, and the Founder of AID India. Balaji is also the recipient of Time of India Social Impact award, Ashoka Fellowship award, and more. Balaji spoke about how AID India utilized the networks created through its programs on homelessness and education, to provide food supplies to the old, blind, and disabled, small business grants to individuals, help with setting up kitchen gardens, and online education to kids in villages and orphanages.

Vivek Bhatt, the CTO at GE Healthcare was the next speaker. He is  an IIT Kanpur alum, with a PhD from Cornell and has been for over 20 years with GE Healthcare, where he leads the Clinical Care Solution and the Digital Products Incubator. Vivek provided an overview of how GE medical products are being used to manage COVID-19, before proceeding to share the extraordinary story of how with the China supply chain disrupted, GE and Ford partnered to produce 50,000 life saving ventilators in 100 days – an unprecedented manufacturing rate.

Dr Archana Dubey, who is the Global Medical Director at HP, spoke after Vivek. She is a population health expert, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford, the founder of Invent Health, and a founder at AISquare – a non profit platform designed for the community to find solutions for COVID-19 using data. Dr Dubey shared details on how AISquare is bringing together researchers and students, on 3D printing of PPE at HP and of the current knowledge of COVID-19 – status of vaccines, prevention, and testing updates.

The last speaker was Bharat Shyam, an IIT Bombay alum, with an MS from Stanford. He is the founder and Board Member at Restart Partners and a serial investor with investments in about 20 companies most of which have had successful exits. Bharat spoke about how Restart Partners is helping economies open safely by predicting PPE needs utilizing complex data models and by advocating mask usage. He also described the impact of COVID-19 on various industries and new market risks introduced, such as trade barriers and inequalities.

The session concluded on an exhilarating note with the audience energized by stories of how each of the speakers had successfully taken the pandemic by the horns. 

We are a community of entrepreneurs, innovators, non-profit founders, industry veterans, researchers, investors, policy makers, volunteers, individual and corporate donors – across industries and geographies. Together, we can achieve a lot in the fight against this pandemic.  The IIT Bay Area Alumni Association is continuing to drive engagement and staying committed to building a stronger community. Join us in our goal –  “Be a catalyst for change. Inspire and be Inspired”.

Author: Ishita Sharan