See the Impact Design Immersion Fellowship awardees for 2024.
Aria Rodli
Aria Rodli
As a former gymnast who battled my own body image issues and the daughter of a father stigmatized by obesity, I’ve witnessed firsthand the deep-seated problems with America’s relationship to exercise. In college and grad school, I studied preventive care and community health promotion and learned more about the systemic discrimination faced by those with obesity, which fueled my commitment to reframe movement as essential for health, not just weight loss. These experiences drive my pursuit to democratize well-being for all and transform our approach to physical activity, making it inclusive and supportive for everyone.
IDIF Focus: Beginning to exercise for those with obesity
Individuals with obesity commonly understand the health benefits of exercise but face barriers such as psychological, informational, and environmental challenges. These include a lack of supportive, non-intimidating environments, physical discomfort from excess weight, and significant social stigma in fitness cultures favoring certain body types. Marginalized groups, including low SES individuals and racial minorities, disproportionately face these issues, emphasizing the need for accessible and affordable fitness solutions. Over the summer I hope to better understand these challenges and work with individuals from this population to pilot a solution that makes exercise joyful and fun.
Ayesha Karnik and Camila Cordara
Ayesha Karnik
Ayesha and Camila met within the first month of the GSB and connected over their passion for creating patient-centric solutions.Â
Ayesha has always loved the healthcare space and believes patients should be treated like true customers. Growing up with an aunt with kidney disease motivated Ayesha to join Strive Health, a value-based kidney care startup before the GSB. There, she worked on new market growth and onboarded 250+ new nephrology partners. She’s excited to use her time at the GSB to continue working towards better ways of getting care to patients like her aunt.Â
Camila Cordara
Camila’s passion is to create technology that improves patient outcomes and experiences. Her background is in Biomedical engineering, and has experience in medical devices start-ups, research and management consulting with a focus on Medtech across Latam and the US. Having witnessed first-hand the challenges faced not only by Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) patients but also their caregivers, Camila is driven to transform how this chronic disease is managed. Her goal is to leverage technology to make the journey for kidney disease care focused on patients’ experience and driven by data.
IDIF Focus: Personalizing support for Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) management
Almost 38 million people are diagnosed with kidney disease today, and that number is likely to grow as early diagnosis improves. Patients face multiple challenges in managing their own health including complex treatment plans and information gaps across providers and caregivers. This results in apathy and treatment adherence as low as 12.5%. The project goal is to create a platform that helps patients better manage their disease in coordination with their providers and caregivers.
Carmen Gordon and Lizzie Hunpatin
Carmen Gordon
Carmen and Lizzie connected during their first quarter at Stanford GSB through their mutual interest in the socio-economic empowerment of artisans – the highly talented and creative individuals who make up the 2nd largest economy by employment in the emerging world.Â
Carmen, formerly a consultant at McKinsey specializing in Sustainability and Green Business Building, is passionate about leveraging innovation and art to create social impact. Before Stanford GSB, Carmen founded Malawimente, an NGO with a mission of expanding the global reach of Malawian artists, reflecting her deep commitment to integrating cultural appreciation with economic development.
Lizzie Hunpatin
Lizzie fundamentally believes that creative pursuits should be treated with the same dignity and respect as is reserved for more technical careers. Through the flagship GSB course, Design for Extreme Affordability, Lizzie spent six months building e-commerce infrastructure for EntreCosturas, a social enterprise that empowers women in an informal settlement in Costa Rica to become artisans and support their families by commercializing their handicrafts. Prior to the GSB, Lizzie was a technology private equity investor at Thomas H. Lee Partners, where she focused on B2B software and became passionate about the potential for technology to drive value creation for underserved communities with low-tech penetration.
IDIF Focus: Digitizing the artisan economy
Lizzie and Carmen will explore the unmet needs of artisan manufacturers in India’s active and diverse handmade and craft-led sector. These manufacturers, who often employ women from rural communities, face tensions between their traditional practices and the modern and digital solutions to which their buyers are accustomed. As a global textile hub, India is home to over 200 million artisans whose livelihoods depend on their crafts, supplying some of the world’s most notable retailers and fashion brands. The team aims to identify opportunities to tech-enable design collaboration between artisan manufacturers and the fashion brands they supply. Their goal is to create a solution that can enhance and automate critical workflows of artisan manufacturers, scaling their reach and potential to uplift the livelihoods of their artisans.
Carolyn Bruckmann and Doug Phipps
Carolyn Bruckmann
Doug Phipps
Carolyn is a dual degree (MPA/MBA) student. Before graduate school, she worked to reduce economic inequality at a global level at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in East Africa at One Acre Fund, and in Connecticut at the Connecticut Governor’s Office. Carolyn started her career as a consultant at Bain & Company. She believes that social isolation is a driver of growing socioeconomic divides and polarization and is passionate about building caring and connected communities. She has been exploring the loneliness epidemic at Stanford GSB, focusing on loneliness among college students through Startup Garage and independent research.
Doug is a dual degree (MA Education/MBA) student. Before Stanford, he worked for Teach for America in Washington DC and taught for five years at KIPP DC College Preparatory. He has also managed programs that center student belonging at Dartmouth College and Peninsula Bridge. Throughout his career, Doug has consistently helped people find connection. He is invested in bringing a sense of belonging to our country’s most underserved students, especially in Washington DC, where he has deep ties with the education community.
IDIF Focus: Growing Together: High Schoolers and Belonging
High school students across the country are experiencing a loneliness epidemic. They are spending less time with friends (on average ~40 minutes/day) and more time on their devices (on average 9 hours/day). Teens in underserved communities and minority groups are most at risk; they are 11 percentage points less likely to feel connected to peers at school. Carolyn and Doug will be addressing this problem with the goal of understanding what interventions build a sense of belonging for these students.
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Hamza Farrukh and Nicki Liang
Hamza Farrukh
Nicki Liang
While living in his family’s village in Pakistan, Hamza contracted typhoid from contaminated water. Fortunately, he recovered and became driven to prevent others from enduring similar hardships. During his undergraduate studies at Williams College, Hamza initiated the Solar Water Project and further developed it while working at Goldman Sachs. The Solar Water Project team navigated numerous hurdles related to clean water access and successfully developed a solar-powered water filtration system known as the OASIS Box. This innovation is now operational in over 170 villages across six countries.
Nicki is an MBA candidate with an undergraduate degree in computer science from Harvard. Prior to business school she spent five years at Bain & Company, primarily specializing in sustainability and ESG. During this time she consulted extensively for nonprofit organizations and charitable foundations, trying to solve challenges related to innovation and funding. Nicki is eager to leverage this experience, working directly with WASH sector nonprofits to amplify their impact.
IDIF Focus: Solar Water Project
The Solar Water Project is eager to extend their reach into East Africa, seeking collaboration with potential customers, funders, and partners to deliver clean and accessible water to more communities. Their aim is to empower local populations and establish lasting partnerships that contribute to sustainable development. Additionally, the team is committed to integrating climate technology solutions to enhance our impact in these regions.
Mehek Mohan
From ages 13 to 20, Mehek endured the stress and pain of unpredictable menstrual cycles, always being told my hormone levels were “within range”—a vague and unsatisfying answer that left her questioning the standards of normalcy, such as which range and who makes up this range? This frustration ignited a deep-seated desire to innovate highly personalized health products that demystify medical information and are both actionable and easily accessible. Mehek’s journey in bioengineering led to the creation of at-home STD tests to encourage proactive health management and destigmatize testing, while her efforts in pharma propelled the adoption of AI tools aimed at enhancing patient-specific outcomes in real-time during clinical trials. Driven by a commitment to transform healthcare, Mehek is passionate about building cutting-edge solutions that distill extensive medical research into tailored educational insights, particularly for marginalized communities, to alleviate anxiety and ease the pressure on our overburdened healthcare system.
IDIF Focus: Patient-provider telehealth AI platform
Mehek will be exploring the intersection of AI with personalized health care monitoring. Chronic disease, rare disease, and “worried well” patients are three segments of people who require real-time, accurate, and personalized health information in the context of recurring symptoms and disease tracking. These patients have a long health history and require personalized care plans along with frequent access to medical professionals. In the current model, patients suffer long wait times for appointments (on the order of months) and may require second or third opinions. From dozens of interviews, patients feel lonely and abandoned. In an effort to self-educate, they spend hours a day researching their condition. The flood of information is overwhelming: difficult to parse through, understand effectively, and apply to their specific needs. These patients desire a continuous, dedicated care platform that can synthesize large amounts of medical data and contextualize it to their health history for better symptom tracking, education, and longitudinal pattern matching. Mehek plans to explore how open-source medical large language models trained on personal data can function as multimodal chatbots that process voice, text, image, and video for 24/7 patient access to health information and actionable guidance.
Katie Van Dyk and Olivia Rosen
Katie Van Dyk
Katie is an MBA at the GSB currently pursuing opportunities at the intersection of female empowerment and education. On campus, she’s involved with the GSB Impact Fund on the Education Deal team, along with Women in Management. Prior to the GSB, Katie worked as a software engineer at Meta, where she was responsible for building out experiences on Facebook.com for hundreds of millions of users. She also served as co-president of the Duke Technology Scholars alumni board, where she worked to create opportunities and community for women pursuing engineering careers. Katie has a B.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science from Duke University.Â
Olivia Rosen
Olivia is an MBA at Stanford GSB, where she is pursuing opportunities at the intersection of entrepreneurship, healthcare, and social impact. She is currently on the healthcare deal team of the GSB Impact Fund and interning part time at a seed stage startup as head of business operations. Most recently, Olivia was Chief of Staff at an early-stage consumer startup, where she oversaw logistics, customer experience, and market operations teams. Previously, Olivia was a Private Equity Associate at Alpine Investors, dedicated to Alpine’s multisite healthcare acquisitions. Olivia started her career in biotech consulting at ZS Associates. Olivia received a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College.
IDIF Focus: BeyondChoice
Women’s reproductive and mental health has long been ignored. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, access to abortion has become a national focus, and these disparities are being felt more acutely than ever. While access remains a critical piece of the journey of abortion and miscarriage patients, much less attention has been paid to supporting patients following these procedures. BeyondChoice aims to support young patients who recently had an abortion or miscarriage and are looking for reliable information and confidential resources. This summer, the team will conduct primary research to understand the patient journey and map out existing support resources. With these learnings, they will begin prototyping and testing various business models.
Layla Aboukhater and Zach Dyce
Layla Aboukhater
Zach Dyce
Layla is pursuing an MD/MBA at Stanford. Layla’s path shifted during her second year of medical school when she took time off to assist a loved one unknowingly addicted to a prescribed medication. The challenging experience of seeking support highlighted the significant gaps in access to care for the Substance Use Disorder population. This realization led her to work at an addiction clinic, where she found her passion for psychiatry. Layla aims to build a career in psychiatry with a focus on addiction. She also plans to leverage her medical and business skills to improve psychiatric practices in the Levant region, particularly in Syria where she grew up. Layla’s extensive interactions with addiction patients have provided her with a deep understanding of their narratives, recognizing recurring pain points and obstacles on their journey to sobriety and sustained remission.
As the child of two addicts, one of whom died from opioids, Zach has been learning about and fighting against the addiction epidemic his entire life. Having seen firsthand the impact that addiction has on an individual and those around them, he is personally motivated to help the United States break the cycle of addiction and drive lasting, large-scale change in the way the U.S. treats and supports people suffering from addiction. While he may not have any formal training in the science of addiction, Zach has spent a lifetime living the experience. From learning to navigate the unpredictable behaviors of addicts as a child to being a counsel for countless friends and acquaintances who reach out for advice and emotional support, addiction touches his life every day.
IDIF Focus: Digital innovations in addiction treatment
More Americans die each year from drug overdoses and alcohol-related deaths than car crashes. With about 50 million Americans suffering from some form of substance addiction, the team wants to rethink and reimagine how those suffering from addiction are treated and supported. Throughout the summer, Zach and Layla hope to better understand an addict’s journey to sobriety, especially after leaving rehab, to identify where technology can be leveraged to scale compassion and bespoke digital therapeutics. Their goal is to test hypotheses and rapidly iterate and prototype a solution that can be the foundation of a for-profit, patient-first business model.
Ludwig Neumann and Marcos Diehl
Ludwig Neumann
Born and raised in Mexico, Ludwig is an aspiring entrepreneur with a robust financial background, focused on improving opportunities for Mexicans. His career launched in investment banking, where he worked as an analyst at Evercore and later as an associate at Morgan Stanley. Ludwig then became a founding member at Riogrande (YC21), leading over 12 acquisitions and rising to Head of Strategic Finance/CFO. His interest in insurance and fintech is driven by firsthand experiences with the inefficiencies of the Mexican market, which culminated in him losing coverage. This personal encounter fuels his commitment to transformative solutions.
Marcos Diehl
Marcos is an industrial engineer with a profound commitment to improving people’s quality of life. His career is marked by initiating and leading numerous social impact ventures, aiming to make a tangible difference. Previously, Marcos led the sports and health team at Bain & Company, focusing on enhancing health outcomes. He is currently furthering his studies at Stanford University. Marcos’s drive is deeply personal, stemming from a critical health incident in his youth that highlighted the importance of accessible quality healthcare. This experience has fueled his resolve to expand healthcare access to the millions currently underserved.
IDIF Focus: Pulso
Our target segment are the low to mid-income Mexicans aged 20-50 years in the informal economy who need health insurance. They suffer from (1) Limited Access to Preventive Care, (2) Financial Vulnerability and (3) Lack of customized solutions. During the summer, we hope to understand better the real needs and willingness to pay from the target segment while ideating at least a couple of potential solutions.
Mara Steiu
Mara Steiu
Mara is an MA Education / MBA student at Stanford, passionate about using technology to generate positive impact in K-12 schools. Before Stanford, Mara was a product manager at Microsoft, Twitter, and Confluent. As a high school student, she founded a financial education mobile game and launched the first start-up accelerator in Romanian public schools, which has so far empowered over 500 students to launch their own businesses, winning a TEDxAward for social impact.
IDIF Focus: TeachAssist
In the United States, nearly 20% of students require special education services due to diverse needs, such as ADHD, dyslexia, and autism. However, merely 1% of the teaching workforce specializes in special education. Given the complex federal special education laws and the scarcity of specialized staff, schools struggle to remain compliant and meet the high demand for special education services that students and their families expect and deserve. TeachAssist streamlines special education compliance for K-12 schools while ensuring that every student’s learning experience is tailored to their unique abilities and requirements.Â
Pablo Golac
Pablo Golac
Originally from Bolivia, Pablo is a Stanford MBA candidate with a passion for economic mobility and an interest in homeownership as a tool for wealth generation. Pablo became interested in residential real estate as the child of immigrant parents who built their wealth by flipping homes in Florida. He started his career on Ashoka’s Venture Team and then later joined Deloitte Consulting, where he worked with the Monitor Institute to develop inclusive economic growth blueprints for medium to low-income workers in the U.S. Prior to coming to the GSB, he was working as a founder within Deloitte’s incubator, building an HR-tech solution to more quickly onboard frontline workers in high turnover industries. Pablo came to the GSB to found a social enterprise.
IDIF Focus: Economic mobility for frontline workers
In the U.S., homeownership remains the primary source of wealth generation and storage. Nevertheless middle and low-income earners are increasingly delaying or forfeiting participation in the “American Dream” of homeownership. In addition to soaring home prices and high interest rates, the initial cash barrier (e.g. down payment, closing costs) associated with a home purchase is cited as a top reason why middle and low-income workers are unable to become homeowners. This summer, Pablo plans to explore how community-based lending mechanisms can be deployed to help essential workers in the US clear the initial cash barrier associated with homeownership.
Ricardo Anaya and Yoshimi Muneta
Ricardo Anaya
Before Stanford GSB, Ricardo worked at Nexus Group, a private equity firm with investments across LATAM, focusing on the higher education, entertainment, and packaging industries. He became deeply passionate about the future of work space when he joined Kurios, an upskilling startup for professionals in Latin America. While at the GSB, he is a VC Fellow at Owl Ventures. He wants to help people access better job opportunities without enduring the same challenges he faced when he pivoted from being a corporate lawyer to an investment professional.
Yoshimi Muneta
Yoshimi is an MBA candidate with extensive experience in strategic consulting and international expansion. At EY-Parthenon, she advanced her understanding of education policy through several due diligence and go-to-market projects in Mexico City’s higher education sector. Leading HR efforts in the new countries she launched at Wolt (now part of DoorDash), she hired 16 out of ~100 interviewed candidates with a 94% retention rate, underscoring her commitment to connecting people to a job they love.Â
IDIF Focus: Dadel: Launching LATAM students to first jobs
Undergraduate students and recent graduates across Latin America, particularly in Mexico, often spend months or even years searching for a job that aligns with their aspirations, qualifications, and experience. Consequently, some resort to dishonesty or accept unsuitable roles. Our aim is to develop a business model for a future-of-work solution tailored to their needs. By analyzing user needs, stakeholder interests, and industry dynamics, we’ll define a compelling value proposition and assess willingness to pay. Through qualitative interviews and experiments, we’ll validate our approach and secure a pilot partnership.
Tireni Ajilore
Tireni Ajilore
Tireni is keen to advance wealth equity for underserved communities. Prior to the GSB, Tireni was an investor at BGF, where he focused on making investments to reduce the funding gap for small businesses in the UK. He is passionate about financial inclusion and breaking down barriers to accessing capital. Through his community and professional experiences, he has seen firsthand how the lack of funding for small businesses significantly contributes to the wealth gap. He is dedicated to finding solutions to enable overlooked individuals to secure the funding needed to build wealth for themselves.
IDIF Focus: Small business credit needs
Small businesses in America frequently face a shortage of capital. This issue is particularly challenging for business owners of color, who have long struggled to access the necessary funding. Community finance organizations are vital in providing financial services to these small businesses that are often overlooked by traditional banks. However, many community lenders struggle with operational inefficiencies and lack of access to capital that limit their impact. Addressing these challenges will enable community lenders to serve more clients and better fulfill their mission of fostering economic growth in marginalized communities.
Zooey Carter Wilkinson
Zooey Carter Wilkinson
Zooey brings extensive experience in democratic approaches to organizational governance, economic justice, and translating academic policy research on race and gender equity into actionable organizational strategy. They also have experience in wealth building, including building models of community ownership, multi-use real estate and cooperative ownership, community funds and community focused banking, urban farming, and resident-led projects in revitalization. Throughout their career, they coordinated 11 electoral political campaigns at the local, state, and national level. Zooey has worked in organic farming and local food access, addiction recovery support services, youth education in transformative justice and democratic community building, prisoner support organizations, social impact investing, state and local economic development, and most recently, the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic mobility, where they worked with public and private sector stakeholders to multiply forms of Black-centered economic development and financial inclusion. They are a Harry S. Truman Foundation Scholar, alumni of Deep Springs College, and former Gerald R. Gill Fellow from the Tufts Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
IDIF Focus: Litigation funding as a tool for civil rights law
Access to civil rights legal services, protections, and public safety continue to be a growing problem for marginalized communities in the U.S. This problem has significant public and community health impacts and negative ramifications for socio-economic mobility since it is costly for residents and cities.
Community residents, organizations, attorneys, investigative reporters, and researchers point to the difficult challenges of rising violence and incidents of police misconduct as well as the limited adoption of alternative solutions for police departments (i.e. de-escalation and harm reduction, hiring specific professionals for mental health crises, hiring more public servants from the communities they serve, and more). The problem is significant, widespread, and upsetting. However, many dedicated Americans have worked to create alternatives and solutions. The problem focus for this project is the lack of access to recourse and legal protections for civil rights violations. This is a challenge for residents of afflicted communities and for civil rights lawyers who struggle with financial unsustainability. Zooey will explore the need for a social entrepreneurship lens to collaborate on innovative approaches to more effective and financially sustaining models.