My Mission

An Ambulance to the Future

More than 5,000 people die in the United States every year while waiting for an organ transplant. There aren’t enough donated organs to support all the people who are waiting for a life-saving transplant. Even worse, sometimes a donation can’t get to where it’s needed most: surgeons have only hours to move a transplant from a donor to a recipient before the organ dies. At Until, we want to make it possible to indefinitely cryopreserve organs— transforming hours of viability into weeks or months. That means no donated organ would be lost to logistics, and more people can get the transplants they need to save their lives.

Long-term, we hope to use this technology for whole-body reversible cryopreservation. Every day, new medical breakthroughs are happening. Imagine being diagnosed with an incurable cancer – whole-body cryopreservation could be the stopgap solution that allows you to press “pause” on your disease while allowing modern medicine to catch up. By the time you wake up again, that particular form of cancer might be as cured as the common cold.  It seems like science fiction, but we’re working on making it a reality.

I’m part of the engineering team at Until. I design the control systems and hardware that enables experimentation on the core technologies that will allows us to safely freeze, and warm, organs.

My Path

Debate kid re-oriented from pre-med to hardware engineering

In high school, I was a debate kid. I enjoyed argumentation and policy. I grew up surrounded by doctors and always saw doctoring as a direct way to drive positive outcomes. I joined Stanford to focus on pre-med, but soon discovered that the problems I encountered weren’t the ones I was most attracted to. So I switched to majoring in electrical engineering with a minor in biology.

My advice to young people? Don’t specialize too soon. Use your college time to explore diverse interests. I tried my hand at medical research, built aquatic robots and rockets, explored industry with a variety of internships, and did part-time work at the Hoover Institution, to weave my policy interests together with my passion for bio-tech.

I’m currently on leave from my MS in electrical engineering at Stanford. At some point, I want to pursue a PhD and get into policy as a career.