Uma Sthanu
Uma Sthanu is a high school student from Austin, Texas, dedicated to problem solving with a passion for leveraging technology to provide equitable reach of education and healthcare to all.
- Before founding and developing TBDetect, Uma incubated two start-ups: T2L Academy, an Ed-tech startup, to provide education for all, removing economic barriers. Making resources accessible to all through videos delivered online & creating a learning hub to help K-8 students, Uma hopes to increase participation and exposure for the underprivileged to expand their learning beyond the school curriculum. As someone who had the fortune to be able to participate in various elementary & middle school competitions in Science, Math, Arts & Literature, she believes that encouraging participation in these competitions will make learning more fun for all!
- Sayffer, a Health-tech startup, serves as a secure & compliant health data sharing application for K-12 staff, teachers & parents. Sayffer’s mission is to digitize the manual communication and collaboration that exists in K-12 around health data. The application is accessible to all and available on all mobile platforms, built to ensure HIPAA & FERPA compliance.
Leveraging the learnings from the earlier startups, for her current project, Uma recognized the potential of technology of AI & Machine Learning to solve problems at a global scale and decided to use Machine Learning to solve the ongoing Tuberculosis pandemic, which, despite being centuries old, continues to kill over a million a year, especially in Africa and South Asia. Uma hopes that TBDetect can help many nonprofit organizations and smaller hospitals battling Tuberculosis around the world and struggling with the lack of sufficient qualified medical resources.
Uma Sthanu completed a certification on Machine Learning for Healthcare from Stanford University, and on Design Thinking for Innovation and Business Strategy from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. She has also obtained other marketing and data science certifications from Google, IBM and Hubspot, attended a Girls in Engineering summer camp at UC Berkeley, and is part of the Google CodeNext Class of 2023. She is also a 6-time Science Fair winner at the regional, state, and national levels – finishing State 1st in the Software & Systems category in 2022, being a Broadcom MASTERS semifinalist (Top 300 in the Nation) in 2021, winning the Broadcom Coding with Commitment Award & the Society of Women in Engineering Award for Excellence in Science, Engineering and Mathematics for 6-8th graders in 2020 & the UT Austin Dell Medical School Future Health Leader Award in 2018 for her earlier projects in science, technology, and healthcare.