alumni impact
FOR THE LONG HAUL ROOMINATE
BIONANO GENOMICS
Bettina Chen (BS ’10), Cofounder
Erik Holmlin (PhD ’98), President & CEO
While in a graduate program at Stanford, Bettina Chen and a fellow student lamented that there weren’t more women in the sciences. “It even goes back to childhood,” Chen says. “Nearly all science-based toys, like Erector sets, are geared toward boys.” Their solution: Roominate, a simple kit that allows girls to construct—from layout to furniture to electrical outlets—their own dollhouse. (For more on Roominate, see “Dollhouse Deluxe,” page 7.) The initial signs are promising—girls like playing with the kits. But Chen will have to wait to test her larger goal. “Success for us would be to inspire more girls to pursue science as women,” she says.
Erik Holmlin says President Clinton’s announcement, in 2000, that the human genome had been successfully sequenced for the first time ushered in “a momentous time period”—one he wanted to be part of. “I felt that the private sector afforded tremendous opportunity to have impact,” he says. In 2001, Holmlin joined Caltech chemist Jacqueline Barton—in whose lab he had done his graduate work—to start GeneOhm, a company that created cost-effective, rapid molecular and chromogenic testing. In 2011, he was named CEO of BioNano Genomics, a company developing a platform to provide rapid, high-resolution genome maps. On starting a company, Holmlin says: “Believe in yourself and your idea, then work to get others to believe as well.”
C8 MEDISENSORS Paul S. Zygielbaum (BS ’72, MS ’73) Cofounder, President, & CEO [top left] Robert McNamara (BS ’73, MS ’73, PhD ’78), Cofounder, Vice President [middle left] Jan Lipson (BS ’72), Cofounder (deceased) [bottom left] For years, Jan Lipson watched his son—who was diagnosed with type I diabetes at the age of 10—struggle to keep track of his glucose levels. An expert in optical technology and spectroscopy, Lipson wondered if he could use light to measure glucose without drawing blood. And so he reached out to two of his oldest friends: Caltech classmates Robert “Mac” McNamara and Paul Zygielbaum, each of whom had decades of experience in technology companies. Solving the science piece of the puzzle was hard enough, says Zygielbaum. “The greater challenge,” he says, “is convincing others to back you.” Their product—the C8 MediSensors device—is the size of a smartphone and provides noninvasive measurements every five minutes. This fall, it was cleared for trials in Europe; the team expects a 2013 product launch in Europe, with U.S. trials to begin thereafter. Regrettably, Lipson was killed in a car accident in 2010, before the prototype went into production. “There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t think about Jan,” says McNamara. “We believe his inspiration and passion will lead to better, healthier lives for millions.”
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