Rahul Panicker

Last updated

Rahul Panicker
Rahul Panicker 1.jpg
Born
Mavelikkara, Kerala, India
NationalityIndian
Alma mater
Occupation(s)President and Co-founder Embrace Innovations
Known forCo-founder at Embrace, and President and Co-founder at Embrace Innovations

Rahul Alex Panicker is a technology leader and entrepreneur, formerly Chief Innovation Officer at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, [1] and best known as the President and Co-founder of Embrace Innovations [2] and Embrace, a social enterprise startup that aims to help premature and low-birth-weight babies, through a low-cost infant warmer. [3] [4]

Contents

Until early 2016, Panicker served as the President of Embrace Innovations, a social enterprise that designs and brings to market healthcare technologies for the developing world, starting with an infant warmer. The Embrace infant warmer costs less than 1% of a traditional incubator, and is currently being distributed across clinics in India, and over 15 developing countries. [5] [6] [7] He is also a member of the FICCI Health Innovation Task Force in India. [8] Starting 2016, he has been engaged in exploring and speaking about the potential impact of AI and what societies can do to prepare for the future, including at TEDx IIT Kharagpur.

Early life and education

Panicker was born in Mavelikara, Kerala, India [9] to Moly and P.C. Mathen Panicker of Kottarakara. He attended Indian Community School, Kuwait, and Sarvodaya Vidyalaya, Trivandrum, India, and hails from Vayalikada, Thiruvananthapuram. [10]

Panicker holds an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford Department of Electrical Engineering, and a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), India. He is also an alumnus of the design school at Stanford. [11]

As part of his Ph.D. at Stanford, Panicker worked at the interface of machine learning and optics. His thesis work used machine learning techniques to demonstrate a 10 to 100 fold increase in capacity of multimode optical communication systems. His work combined convex optimization, machine learning, adaptive optics and spatial light modulators. [12] He also worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, applying artificial neural networks to accelerator-beam controls.

Career

Before starting Embrace, Panicker worked briefly at Infinera Corporation. While there, he worked in a team led by co-founder, President, and member of the Infinera Board, David F. Welch, Ph.D., in the new products group, working on ultra hi-speed optical telecom systems.

Embrace

In 2007, while studying at Stanford, Panicker and a few other fellow graduates were part of a class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, at the d.school at Stanford University. They were asked to create a low-cost infant incubator that could be used in developing countries. [13] They designed an infant warmer that worked without electricity, was expected to be low-cost and was designed for use even by rural mothers in developing countries. After the class, they co-founded Embrace (non-profit), a 501(c)(3) non-profit, in 2008 to bring their project to life. [14] The non-profit entity, Embrace, donates infant warmers to clinics in need, and the for-profit social enterprise, Embrace Innovations, sells the warmers to other clinics.

Embrace has also been awarded the INDEX: Design to Improve Life award in 2011, [15] and the Fast Company Innovation By Design Awards, 2012,. [16] [17]

Awards and recognition

YearTitle
2015 MIT Technology Review TR35 35-Innovators-Under-35 worldwide [18]
2013 The Economist Innovation Award for Social and Economic Innovation [19] [20]
2013 World Economic Forum and Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year [21] [22]
2012 Industrial Designers Society of America International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) Gold [23]
2012 Tech Award Laureate [24]
2012 CNBC TV18 Young Turk [25] [26]
2008 Echoing Green Fellow [27]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Tech Interactive</span> Science and technology center in San Jose, California, United States

The Tech Interactive is a science and technology center that offers hands-on activities, labs, design challenges and other STEAM education resources. It is located in downtown San Jose, California, adjacent to the Plaza de César Chávez.

A business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services, starting with management training and office space, and ending with venture capital financing. The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) defines business incubators as a catalyst tool for either regional or national economic development. NBIA categorizes its members' incubators by the following five incubator types: academic institutions; non-profit development corporations; for-profit property development ventures; venture capital firms, and a combination of the above.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ashok Gadgil</span> Energy efficiency researcher

Ashok Gadgil Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Faculty Senior Scientist and has served as director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The phase-change incubator is a low-cost, low-maintenance incubator that tests for microorganisms in water supplies. It uses small balls containing a chemical compound that, when heated and then kept insulated, will stay at 37 °C for 24 hours. This allows cultures to be tested without the need for a laboratory or an expensive portable incubator. Thus it is particularly useful for poor or remote communities. The phase-change incubator was developed in the late 1990s by Amy Smith, when she was a graduate student at MIT. Smith has also started a non-profit organization called A Drop in the Bucket to distribute the incubators and to train people on how to use them to test water quality. Her “Test Water Cheap” system could be used at remote locations to test for bacteria such as E.coli.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Devi Shetty</span> Indian Cardiac surgeon and Entrepreneur

Devi Prasad Shetty is an Indian entrepreneur and cardiac surgeon who is the chairman and founder of Narayana Health, a chain of 21 medical centers in India. He has performed more than 100,000 heart operations. In 2004 he was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2012, the third highest civilian award by the Government of India for his contribution to the field of affordable healthcare.

Panicker was an honorary title conferred by the King of Travancore in Kerala to distinguished Hindu individuals. This title was given to prominent Nair warriors who led soldiers in battle. It was also sometimes used by Syriac Orthodox Christians, Kaniyar, Ezhava,

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PATH (global health organization)</span> Global health nonprofit

PATH is an international, nonprofit global health organization. PATH is based in Seattle with 1,600 employees in more than 70 countries around the world. Its president and CEO is Nikolaj Gilbert, who is also the Managing Director and CEO of Foundations for Appropriate Technologies in Health (FATH), PATH's Swiss subsidiary. PATH focuses on six platforms: vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, devices, system, and service innovations.

The Lemelson Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) private foundation. It was started in 1993 by Jerome H. Lemelson and his wife Dorothy. The foundation held total net assets of US$444,124,049 at the end of 2020 and US$484,432,021 at the end of 2021. The Foundation seeks to harness the power of invention and innovation to accelerate climate action and improve lives around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences</span>

The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute affiliated with three University of California campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. QB3's domain is the quantitative biosciences: areas of biology in which advances are chiefly made by scientists applying techniques from physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gururaj Deshpande</span> Indian-American entrepreneur

Gururaj Deshpande is an Indian American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, who is best known for co-founding the Chelmsford, MA-based internet equipment manufacturer Sycamore Networks, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT and the Deshpande Foundation.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University is a design thinking institute based at Stanford University. The school is named after SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and was founded by David M. Kelley and Bernard Roth founded the program in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LA Cleantech Incubator</span>

LA Cleantech Incubator (LACI) is the City of Los Angeles's official cleantech business incubator established to accelerate the commercialization of clean technology and job creation in the Los Angeles region. LACI's staff of entrepreneurs, market specialists, and researchers combined with its 60+ mentor/advisor network provide expert advice on a full range of issues facing early to growth stage companies, including CEO coaching, financial modeling, business development, IP, and more. The organization is run "by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs" and pursues public objectives by harnessing private methods and resources. In 2014, LACI was ranked by UBI Global as the Number 6 university-affiliated business incubator in the world out of 800+ incubators in 67 countries.

Frugal innovation or frugal engineering is the process of reducing the complexity and cost of a good and its production. Usually this refers to removing nonessential features from a durable good, such as a car or telephone, in order to sell it in developing countries. Designing products for such countries may also call for an increase in durability and, when selling the products, reliance on unconventional distribution channels. When trying to sell to so-called "overlooked consumers", firms hope volume will offset razor-thin profit margins. Globalization and rising incomes in developing countries may also drive frugal innovation. Such services and products need not be of inferior quality but must be provided cheaply. While frugal innovation has been associated with good-enough performance, in some sectors such as in healthcare, frugal innovation must offer maximum performance without compromising on quality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Chen</span>

Jane Marie Chen is the co-founder of Embrace, a social enterprise startup that produces a low-cost infant warmer, that gives premature and low-birth-weight infants a better chance at survival.

Founded in 2001 by a team of MIT students, Design that Matters (DtM), is a nonprofit design company that partners with social entrepreneurs to design products that address basic needs in developing countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cornell Tech</span> Graduate school and research center in New York City

Cornell Tech is a graduate campus and research center of Cornell University on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, New York City. It provides courses in technology, business, and design, and includes the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, a partnership between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay</span>

The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay, also known as E-Cell, IIT Bombay, is the primary entrepreneurship promoting body of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, managed and run completely by the students of the institute. It organizes initiatives like the annual business plan competition Eureka! and the flagship event, The Entrepreneurship Summit (E-Summit) in January each year, which receives a footfall of over 30,000 people who include students, investors, corporates, mentors, celebrities and the most important; Entrepreneurs.

Embrace Innovations is an Indian healthcare technology company specializing in infant warmers. The company produces neonatal warming bags which are used to help reduce the risk of hypothermia in pre-term infants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Razmig Hovaghimian</span> American entrepreneur

Razmig Hovaghimian is an American entrepreneur. He is co-founder and CEO of the international online streaming video site Viki, and senior executive officer of global content, board observer and Entrepreneur in residence at Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten. He is also a co-founder and board member of non-profit neonatal health company Embrace. He also founded Hoodline, formerly Ripple News, a hyper-local, automated data newswire later acquired by social media neighborhood site Nextdoor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Li</span> American data scientist

Michael Li is an American data scientist, entrepreneur, and the founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Data Incubator, a data science training and placement company.

References

  1. "EmTech Digital AI for Social Good Rahul Panicker, Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence". MIT Tech Review. Retrieved 26 March 2019.
  2. Mischler, Michèle. "Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013". Schwab Foundation. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  3. Dooley, Sean (17 December 2010). "Embrace Infant Warmer Could Save Thousands".
  4. Ahmad, Samreen (9 April 2012). "Spreading life-saving warmth". Tehelka.
  5. Deepa, Balakrishnan (12 September 2012). "Portable incubators in 4 states a new lease of life". CNN-IBN. Archived from the original on 26 July 2013.
  6. Udayabhanu, Prem (24 December 2015). "The Keralite who made it to MIT's top 35 Innovators' list". Manorama Online.
  7. Ranganna, Akhila (18 January 2016). "Saving Lives: How Rahul Panicker Developed a Low-cost Incubator for Newborns". Man's World India. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  8. IANS. "National innovation council to build an ecosystem for healthcare products and services". health.india.com. Retrieved 28 May 2013.
  9. Sirnate, Vasundhara (3 October 2009). "Embrace of Life". Open Magazine.
  10. Udayabhanu, Prem (24 December 2015). "The Keralite who made it to MIT's top 35 Innovators' list". Manorama Online.
  11. Bagchi, Shrabonti (19 September 2011). "SAVING LITTLE LIVES". The Times of India. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 7 September 2013.
  12. Panicker, Rahul (2007). Compensation of Modal Dispersion in Multimode Fiber Systems Using Adaptive Optics Via Convex Optimization. Stanford University: Stanford University. p. 76. ISBN   978-0549355779.
  13. "Embrace: A low cost infant warmer". CNBC TV18. Archived from the original on 6 May 2012. Retrieved 18 April 2012.
  14. Platoni, Kara (January–February 2012). "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Stanford Alumni.
  15. The Daily News Staff (27 September 2011). "Embrace, Stanford enterprise, wins Index Award". The Stanford Daily. Retrieved 27 September 2011.
  16. Wilson, Mark. "The 11 Winners Of Our 2012 Innovation By Design Awards". Fast Company. Retrieved 17 October 2012.
  17. Kuang, Cliff. "Why Good Design Is Finally A Bottom Line Investment". Fast Company. Retrieved 11 September 2012.
  18. "35 Innovators Under 35, 2015". MIT Technology Review.
  19. Quarterly, Technology (30 November 2013). "Innovation awards And the winners are..." The Economist.
  20. "Bangalore-based startup founders win Economist Innovation Award". The Economic Times. 6 November 2013.
  21. "Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013". World Economic Forum.
  22. Mischler, Michèle. "Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013". Schwab Foundation. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  23. OZLER, Levent. "Best in Show of the 2012 International Design Excellence Awards". Dexigner. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
  24. Thorpe, Devin (30 September 2012). "28 Award Winners Highlight Innovation in Social Entrepreneurship". Forbes.
  25. "Rahul Panicker @EmbraceInnov & his health tech #startup story of creating portable infant warmer #YTatMakeInIndia". 17 February 2016.
  26. "Young Turks". Facebook . 16 April 2012.
  27. "Echoing Green Fellows". Echoing Green.