Tierra Foley Galloway: Building Bridges Between Innovation, Access, and Impact
From Personal Experience to Public Impact: How One Biomedical Engineer is Transforming Healthcare and Building Pathways for the Next Generation
Tierra Foley Galloway has built her life like a bridge—connecting what too often remains separated.
Science and service. Innovation and access. Healthcare and equity. Personal experience and public impact. As a biomedical engineer, nonprofit founder, and community advocate, she has turned the most defining moments of her life into pathways for others to cross.
A biomedical engineer, nonprofit founder, community advocate, and emerging voice in healthcare innovation, Foley Galloway has built a life and career defined by purpose, intellect, and impact. Her work spans medical technology, women’s health, nonprofit leadership, civic engagement, and cultural community-building, but the thread connecting it all is unmistakable: she is committed to transforming personal experience into public good.
Her story begins with a moment that could have simply remained a family memory. Instead, it became a mandate.
As a high school student, Foley Galloway sat beside her mother during a high-risk pregnancy appointment. Her mother was pregnant with Tierra’s only sibling and had been placed under close medical monitoring. During one visit, the family learned that her mother had fibroids the size of softballs—large enough to potentially threaten her unborn brother’s life.
When Foley Galloway asked what caused fibroids, the doctor explained that the causes were not fully understood, but that fibroids disproportionately affect Black women.
For many, that answer may have ended the conversation.
For Tierra, it started a calling.
As a young Black woman who had once imagined becoming an OB-GYN, she refused to accept uncertainty as the final answer. That moment sharpened her curiosity into conviction. It awakened in her a lifelong commitment to science, engineering, health equity, and the urgent need to address the gaps that leave Black women, families, and underserved communities unseen.
While still in high school, Foley Galloway enrolled in LSU Health Sciences Center’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program. She began in the School of Public Health, where she earned first-place recognition for her research, then advanced into the Department of Physiology, where she received the American Physiological Society Undergraduate Award. Before she had even entered college, she was already learning how to transform questions into research, research into knowledge, and knowledge into power.
She went on to Baylor University, where she earned a degree in biomedical engineering with a minor in mathematics in 2021. In doing so, she became the third Black woman to graduate from Baylor’s biomedical engineering program—a milestone that reflects both her academic excellence and the path she now represents for others.
At Baylor, Foley Galloway expanded her interests into machine learning, artificial intelligence, and diagnostic innovation. As a McNair Scholar in Dr. Schubert’s lab, she studied how machine learning could support the early diagnosis of polyps before they become cancerous. She later built on that research foundation at Michigan State University, where she had the opportunity to study the uterus and connect her engineering training back to the women’s health questions that first inspired her journey.
Her professional career has taken her into the heart of the medical device industry. At LivaNova, she contributed to neuromodulation devices supporting patients living with seizures. At Alcon, she has worked on ocular surgical devices in a cross-functional engineering role, managing projects, aligning stakeholders, balancing budgets, supporting manufacturing teams, and advocating for both business priorities and the people responsible for bringing life-changing technology to patients.
But what makes Foley Galloway’s leadership distinct is not only her technical expertise—it is her ability to see the human being behind every system.
She understands that innovation is not impressive simply because it is advanced. Innovation matters when it reaches people, closes gaps, improves care, and allows families to experience better outcomes. It must be built with dignity, trust, and access in mind.
In an era where artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital health, and medical devices are rapidly reshaping healthcare, Foley Galloway is part of a generation of leaders asking the more important question: Who benefits from this progress?
For her, the future of healthcare innovation requires more than technical brilliance. It requires leaders who understand engineering, ethics, business strategy, equity, community, and lived experience. It requires people who can build systems that are not only smarter, but more just.
In 2024, Foley Galloway expanded her mission beyond industry by founding Queen’s Calling, a nonprofit created to empower young Black and Brown girls through mentorship, leadership development, confidence-building, identity, and access to resources. As the first engineer and first college graduate in her family, she understands what it means to walk into unfamiliar rooms without a roadmap.
Queen’s Calling is her answer to that experience.
It is a declaration that the next generation should not have to stumble into opportunity by chance. They should be guided, resourced, affirmed, and prepared to lead. Through Queen’s Calling, Foley Galloway is not simply mentoring young girls—she is helping them imagine themselves as leaders before the world tells them to shrink.
Her impact does not stop there.
After relocating from Houston to Pennsylvania and experiencing the isolation that can come with beginning again in a new city, Foley Galloway created Tea Time Book Club. What began as four friends gathering on FaceTime quickly grew into a fast-rising literary and cultural platform with more than 100 members and over 1,000 followers in just three months.
Tea Time Book Club is more than a book club. It is a cultural gathering space, a soft place to land, and a creative ecosystem for women to connect through literature, storytelling, wellness, art, and personal growth. The platform was recently sponsored by Marshalls and selected for the Marshalls Good Stuff Accelerator, recognizing Foley Galloway as one of the women entrepreneurs building brands with depth, influence, and community-centered impact.
In every space she enters, Foley Galloway builds.
She builds technology. She builds programs. She builds community. She builds confidence. She builds bridges between worlds that are too often kept separate: science and storytelling, engineering and equity, innovation and access, ambition and service.
Her civic leadership reflects that same commitment. She serves on the Political Action Committee for the NAACP and the Civic Engagement Committee for Urban League Young Professionals in Pittsburgh, where she advocates for equity, community engagement, systems-level change, and expanded access to opportunity.
When asked what she attributes her success to, Foley Galloway names faith, purpose, resilience, and the people who helped her believe she belonged in rooms she had not yet entered.
But her success is also a reflection of her refusal to wait.
The best career advice she has ever received is to stop waiting until she feels fully ready and start moving with courage, preparation, and purpose. That advice has shaped the way she leads: she asks bold questions, takes on difficult work, advocates for herself, and builds what she wishes had existed when she was younger.
Her message to young women entering biomedical engineering, healthcare innovation, or STEM is clear: your perspective is not a weakness; it is part of your value.
She encourages young women to bring their full curiosity, voice, lived experience, and ideas into every room. Learn the science. Understand the data. Ask how products are made, how decisions are approved, how budgets are managed, and how patients are impacted. But also speak up, build relationships, lead before you feel ready, and remember that representation matters most when it becomes access for someone else.
The values that anchor Foley Galloway’s life and leadership are faith, purpose, integrity, service, and courage. Faith keeps her grounded. Purpose gives her work direction. Integrity shapes how she leads. Service reminds her that every door opened comes with the responsibility to hold it open for others. Courage allows her to keep entering rooms, asking difficult questions, and creating what did not exist before.
Today, Tierra Foley Galloway stands at the intersection of healthcare innovation, technology, nonprofit leadership, entrepreneurship, and civic impact. She is currently applying to MBA and engineering master’s programs at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to further develop her ability to lead across business strategy, medical technology, and systems-level change.
But her goal is not simply to succeed in spaces where women like her have been historically underrepresented.
Her goal is bigger than access.
It is transformation.
Tierra Foley Galloway is building a legacy defined by movement: from curiosity to calling, from research to innovation, from isolation to community, from personal story to collective impact.
She is not only opening doors.
She is redesigning the pathway.
And she is making sure the women and girls behind her know exactly where to walk next.
To connect with Tierra Foley Galloway, visit her LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/tierrafoley. To learn more about Queen’s Calling, visit queenscalling.org. To follow Tea Time Book Club, visit @teatimebc on Instagram.
