Innovator Profiles

My Home Stars founder, Joel Baraka, grew up in Uganda’s Kyangwali refugee camp, where he spent most of his childhood and received his early education. For many of his peers, schooling serves as a source …

Business Owner Erin Vranas’ innovative spirit can be attributed to her commitment to constant learning. Being an obsessive, lifelong learner drives her to remain a forever student. It is also this trait that pushed Erin …

Guelay Bilen-Rosas is the director of Pediatric Transplant Anesthesia at UW Health and an assistant professor of anesthesiology at the School of Medicine and Public Health, focusing on pediatric transplant and airway management. The research …

Yoga is among the most ancient practices in the world of holistic health and wellness. That’s why the innovation embodied in the Happ:y Mat (an adaptation of a traditional yoga mat for use in clinical …

2018 was a year of change for Kattia Jiménez—it’s the year she left her full-time travel position with the Centers for Disease Control and began her new academic appointment at UW–Madison’s All of Us Research …

UPDATE April 2022: Where are they now? Boosted Chews has ceased its operations, but both founders have found new innovations to tackle: Kit Chow is now Director of Business Development at Internship on Demand, a …

Melissa Skala is a UW–Madison professor of biomedical engineering and an investigator with the Morgridge Institute where she leads the Optical Microscopy in Medicine Lab. Her lab uses photonics-based imaging technologies to develop personalized treatment …

Friends and collaborators Paolo Desiati and Elena D’Onghia don’t work on the same issues in their different roles at UW–Madison, but they share a passion for solving big problems. Together, they are developing magnetic shield …

UW–Madison alum Ben Winters ‘20 and his co-founder Jake Levitt worked with D2P to help launch FoodChain during the last year of Ben’s undergraduate degree program in the School of Business. Their idea was to …

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Erin Tenderholt, founder of a Madison-based startup called Blexx. Tenderholt has created a new patent-pending technology in hopes of improving how people dispose of hypodermic needles. “This …