Kendra Batchelder

My background is actually in education and mathematics, and after I graduated, I decided that wasn't the career path I was going to pursue. Around that time, I had a few family members and friends that were affected by cancer, so I became more interested in translational research, which ultimately led me to be more interested in commercialization. I completed my PhD, an interdisciplinary PhD in computational biomedicine focused around signal processing, which transitioned more into AI and risk prediction models. After graduating, I decided to pursue an opportunity at Cornell University in the Runway Startup Postdoc Program, which is a program that hires recent PhDs and helps them transition into a CEO business role of their own startup. I founded Medara last year, where we're developing an AI to forecast future disease, with our first application being breast cancer. We have a great collaboration with several hospital institutions and researchers and AI experts as well that are extremely valuable to our development and our commercialization process. As a technical founder, I've gone through a transitional phase - originally we had to develop something, so we started with a prototype, and since then, we've hired software engineers to help integrate the tech into the workflow. Now that we have engineers and other team members involved, I'm transitioning more into a management position. We have multiple different projects going on - some are clinical, some are product development. We're focusing a lot on regulatory and developing partnerships with vendors currently as well.