The PandemicTech Newsletter: Summer 2022
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Highlights
What we’re excited about: Join us in Singapore for the Global Health Security 2022 Conference from 28 June — 1 July 2022. We are proud to be an event sponsor! Learn more here.
What we’re listening to: Senior Advisor Oyewale Tomori on the podcast circuit, including interviews with The Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast about the surge of monkeypox cases outside of Africa (listen here) and with Nature’s Careers Podcast on the state of African science in 2022 (listen here).
What we’re watching: The video showcase from Global Health Security Innovation Week 2022, a virtual event held in March 2022 organized by the Texas Global Health Security Innovation Consortium (TEXGHS) as part of South by Southwest 2022. Watch all of the event’s sessions here.
Featured article: Media coverage of monkeypox paints it as an African virus. That makes me mad. — Innovation Fellow Ifeanyi Nsofor’s candid opinion article in NPR News (read here)
GHS Innovation Week 2022
PandemicTech is proud to have been a Foundation Sponsor for the TEXGHS @ SXSW 2022 Global Health Security Innovation Week. Organized by the Texas Global Health Security Innovation Consortium (TEXGHS) as part of South by Southwest 2022, this 12–15 March 2022 virtual event brought together the GHS and technology innovation communities to define, communicate, and solve our most critical challenges in preventing, predicting, detecting, and responding to global health security threats.
The conference featured over 60 sessions to include keynotes from Dr. Tore Godal (Norwegian Ministry of Health), Dr. Peter Hotez (CNN; National Institute of Tropical Medicine), Pradeep Kakkattil (UNAIDS Health Innovation Exchange), and Dennis Boyle (IDEO). GHS Innovation Week 2022 also featured special sessions to include the TEXGHS x IDEO Design for One Health Workshop (watch highlights here) and the TEXGHS @ SXSW 2022 GHS Demo Day. Co-Founder Lisa McDonald kicked off GHS Innovation Week (watch here) and several members of the PandemicTech team participated as speakers.
Missed the event? Catch all of the sessions in the GHS Innovation Week 2022 video showcase here.
Congratulations to the entire TEXGHS team and the many outstanding organizing partners on an incredible event!
Global Health Security Conference 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly raised interest in global health security to unprecedented levels, and we are incredibly excited for the GHS community to convene in-person in Singapore for the Global Health Security 2022 Conference! PandemicTech is proud to sponsor GHS 2022, and our Co-Founder Andrew Nerlinger will be participating in the conference as a session moderator. The conference will feature a hybrid format that enables inclusion of both in-person and virtual speakers and attendees. Conference participants will come together to develop and endorse a Singapore Statement on Global Health Security that builds on the inaugural event’s Sydney Statement on Global Health Security from GHS 2019. Learn more and register here. We hope to see you at GHS 2022!
Introducing: Sumanyu Sharma, PandemicTech Innovation Fellow
PandemicTech has awarded Sumanyu Parashar Sharma an Innovation Fellowship to support his work of developing the ecosystem of incubators, accelerators and programs designed at identifying and scaling innovations aimed at pandemic preparedness and response in India.
Sumanyu is the Manager, Portfolio and Innovation for Social Alpha — a multistage innovation curation and venture development platform for science and technology start-ups that aim to address the most critical social, economic and environmental challenges. Social Alpha supports entrepreneurs through a network of innovation labs, startup incubators, accelerator programmes, seed fund and market access mechanisms.
As part of the Health team at Social Alpha, he is involved in evaluation and due diligence of startups. He is responsible for regular monitoring of portfolio enterprises and providing them with advisory and execution support. He also works with different ecosystem partners for building the innovation pipeline and for lab-to-market enablement.
Sumanyu has earlier worked as a management consultant where he was involved in projects including due diligences, financial modeling, go-to-market strategy development, channel development, market research and competitive benchmarking studies among other strategic projects across sectors and geographies. Prior to that, he was part of the strategy office at a leading home healthcare startup.
Sumanyu is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee with an undergraduate degree in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering. He has a keen interest in healthcare delivery and pandemic preparedness, especially for remote and marginalized communities.
In The News
Congratulations to Mayra Ameneiros on her selection as an Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative (ELBI) Fellow for 2022 by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security:
Lisa McDonald and Andrew Nerlinger were judges for the World Health Organization Western Pacific Innovation Challenge and speakers during Scaling for Impact: The 2nd WHO Innovation Forum in the Western Pacific Region. Watch Lisa’s presentation on building an accelerator here and watch Andrew’s panel on scaling healthcare innovation systems here.
Andrew Nerlinger and Mayra Ameneiros served as judges for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) 2022 Next Generation for Biosecurity Competition:
https://www.nti.org/news/winners-of-2022-next-generation-for-biosecurity-competition-announced/
Luis Ochoa Carrera presented during the ABSA-International 2nd Biosecurity Symposium:
Oyewale Tomori was quoted in a Nature news article on monkeypox:
Portfolio company Wella Health and its CEO Ikpeme Neto announced the launch of WellaHealth 2.0:
Acknowledgements
We would like to greatly thank our key sponsors — Bill Wood Ventures (Austin, Texas) and the Laura and John Arnold family (Houston, Texas) — for their ongoing support for PandemicTech. Thank you also to the PandemicTech team for their many contributions to this newsletter and congratulations for your many accomplishments! We hope to see you all soon in-person after so many hours spent together virtually…
— The PandemicTech Team
