In 1971, Fred Smith, then 26 years old, founded FedEx. That new venture was full of innovation, with a young CEO at the helm.
Clearly, industry-defining, transformative ideas, technology, and businesses can come from founders in their mid-20s and younger.
While becoming the next Fred Smith is a lofty goal — no pressure — each of the following innovators on the inaugural Inno Under 25 list for Memphis have unique talents, expertise, and beyond-their-age achievements.
Memphis Inno's editorial team selected this group of Inno Under 25 honorees — some of the brightest young entrepreneurs, tech innovators, and rising leaders in the area — after consulting with industry stakeholders and supporters in the local innovation and tech ecosystem.
Read more on the 2021 Inno Under 25 group below.
Alexis Johnson | University of Memphis, Biomedical Engineering
In 2020, as she prepared to present at the Tennessee LSAMP Conference in Knoxville, Alexis Johnson kept her expectations low. During her presentation at the Works in Progress Symposium in 2019, she had frozen in front of the audience. The painful memory of this lingered in her mind. But this time, Johnson didn’t freeze. Instead, she won first place in the mathematics and engineering category — an award she again earned at the event in 2021.
Johnson is a senior at the University of Memphis studying biomedical engineering, and her presentation at the Tennessee LSAMP conference — LSAMP stands for Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation — centered around her research on a device that would help keep bone grafts in place and secure, allowing the bone to regrow properly and prevent infection.
Her work, however, goes beyond the victories she’s scored with LSAMP. Johnson is also a STEM ambassador with the West Tennessee STEM Hub, a role that has her engaging with K-12 students throughout West Tennessee in STEM-related activities, increasing their interest in entering those fields.
Her own interest in STEM work has increased over time, too, and after graduating, she hopes to get her master's degree and Ph.D. — while keeping an entrepreneurial mindset. Johnson had a summer internship with the ZeroTo510 Medical Device Accelerator in 2019. Eventually, she hopes to develop her own medical devices.
“I would love to do that,” Johnson said. “I believe that all of the founders who went through ZeroTo510 had a profound impact on how I look at life now."
Ana Vazquez-Pagan | St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences
While in college, Ana Vazquez-Pagan was struck with two tragedies: She lost her grandmother to Alzheimer’s, and a friend to diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (a rare, fast-growing tumor). But, rather than set her back, the experiences inspired Vazquez-Pagan, driving her to learn more about the world’s medical mysteries.
These days, she’s a third-year graduate student at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Memphis, where she’s the program’s first Puerto Rican student.
She’s doing her predoctoral work in the lab of Stacey Schultz-Cherry, Ph.D. — a faculty member in St. Jude’s Department of Infectious Diseases — and her research topics include understanding influenza virus pathogenesis in high-risk populations, including pregnant women and people with obesity. Her hope is that her research informs innovative vaccine platforms.
Vazquez-Pagan is also a young ambassador for the Harvard Global Health Catalyst. And, recently, she added another distinction to her resume. She’s one of 16 U.S. doctoral students selected for the Yale Ciencia Academy, which helps young researchers develop planning, mentoring, and effective communication skills through practical exercises and peer discussions. The students will present in-person seminars at Yale University in summer 2022.
Jonathan Spagnoli | University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine
Jonathan Spagnoli might only be in his second year of medical school at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), but that hasn’t stopped him from leading the charge in the creation and implementation of a tool that could help medical professionals save infants from a life-threatening buildup of fluid around their hearts.
When he worked at UTHSC’s Center for Healthcare Improvement and Patient Simulation (CHIPS), he acted as the lead inventor and simulation specialist for a team that made an Infant Pericardiocentesis Trainer. Pericardiocentesis is the definitive emergency treatment for cardiac tamponade, a life-threatening condition caused by fluid accumulation around the heart.
Jonathan and his fellow inventors made a device that trains medical professionals to treat the condition in infants. Understanding how to effectively treat the problem is key, too, because though tamponade is rare, the procedure must be performed accurately — and within a matter of minutes — when it does occur.
In April 2019, Spagnoli and the rest of the team presented the trainer device at the Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) Symposium in Memphis. Currently, it’s used to train residents and fellows in pediatric cardiology, pediatric critical care, and neonatology at UTHSC, and it could become significantly more widespread than that. Right now, his team is looking for a licensing deal, which would further expand the device's usage.
Luis E. Blanco and John Wilcox | Diatech Diabetes
Experience has given John Wilcox and Luis E. Blanco a deep understanding of issues diabetes patients can have with their insulin pumps. Wilcox — who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was nine — uses a pump, as does Blanco’s stepfather.
It isn’t their acute awareness of the problem, however, that makes them Inno Under 25 honorees — it’s the fact that they’re doing something about it. Along with Nick Cooper and John Clark Gray, Wilcox and Blanco are the co-founders of Diatech Diabetes, a local medical device startup developing a software platform that could ensure people with diabetes receive the proper amount of insulin.
But, why are some not getting the right amount?
There are about 600,000 diabetes patients in the U.S. who use an insulin pump, which regularly injects insulin into the body. For a variety of reasons, though, these pumps malfunction frequently, causing patients to get the wrong amount of insulin — which can lead to their blood sugar skyrocketing, or plummeting. And this can cause serious health problems. Diatech's software platform, SmartFusion, is set to study data in an insulin pump’s system to make analyses and predictions, while also providing alarms that say when a pump is malfunctioning and dosages aren’t right.
The group has a long way to go before they have a product ready for the market; but so far, so good. Recently, Diatech received a $300,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and it's preparing to begin testing the effectiveness of the product with a preclinical swine model.
Tifahri Yusuf | University of Memphis, Biomedical Engineering
“Tifahri Yusuf is a born leader.”
That’s a significant compliment coming from Jolieke G. van Oosterwijk, Ph.D., the chief science officer for Memphis-based US Biologic. And she has good reason for giving the praise. Also an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis, van Oosterwijk served as a mentor this past year for Yusuf and her fellow teammates — Chase Guyton, Ben Silverberg, and Ian Johnson — as they developed a medical device during their senior engineering design course.
An electrophoresis laboratory device called the Queen Cutter, its origins stemmed from a problem Oosterwijk presented to the group, wanting them to find a solution. When researchers and scientists cut DNA bands, they typically use a scalpel or X-Acto knife. But these bands are tiny, about five millimeters in length. You risk cutting yourself, and the various bands sliced generally end up different sizes and weights.
Yusuf and her team, however, created a device that is more efficient and safer, while always cutting the bands in the same size — substantially increasing accuracy.
Their device also has a light built into it, which means you don’t have to rely on laboratory lights. Theoretically, you could use the Queen Cutter anywhere, and it has ample potential to be commercialized. The group went through the ImagineU Summer Entrepreneurship Accelerator at U of M’s Crews Center for Entrepreneurship, and recently, Yusuf presented the device at the ImagineU community demo day event. A design patent has been filed for the product, and a utility patent will be filed soon.
A daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, Yusuf recently graduated from the U of M with a degree in biomedical engineering. Currently, she works for Medtronic in a contract position, and she's planning to apply for medical school.
