UCSD SOM Health Innovation Interest Group

Before medical school, Vasan attended the University of Washington where he enjoyed working on neural device engineering projects and spending countless hours with cardiology patients. He is hoping to continue integrating and building upon these skills of engineering, technology, and medicine to bring them to his future practice one day.   

Kiersten Gabaldon is a first-year medical student in the University of California San Diego School of Medicine PRIME-TIDE program who is passionate about promoting health equity. She is from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, where she earned a B.A. in Economics. Before medical school, Kiersten took two gap years in which she worked as a Financial Analyst at a movie studio before transitioning to a Finance and Technology Consultant role at an international consulting firm. As a medical student, she is excited to integrate her passion for business, medicine, and technology to empower all patients on the individual and systemic levels. 

Nimit is a current MS1 at UCSD, and is passionate about digital health innovation. Prior to medical school, Nimit worked as a Product Manager at Included Health for two years. He graduated from Stanford University in 2020 with a BS in Computer Science, with a concentration in Biocomputation. At Stanford, Nimit founded the first Health Datathon on campus, and has professional experiences in health insurance, digital health startups, and pharmaceutical management consulting. Nimit hopes to use his clinical and computer science background to build digital health solutions to modern healthcare challenges, and is excited to promote a passion for health technology amongst fellow UCSD medical students.

2021 Co-President: Before medical school, I was a bioengineering major here at UCSD and then a Master of Translational Medicine student at UCSF/UC Berkeley, where I worked for a medical device startup and learned about the business and engineering involved in healthcare innovation. I am specifically interested in the application of AI/ML to medical imaging, and in the future, I look forward to impacting the medical landscape through socially responsible policy-change, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

2022 Co-President: Prior to coming to medical school I attended UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) for a Master's in bioengineering and started a company using bacteriophage to target antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I'm interested in utilizing my experiences in business development, synthetic biology, and now medicine to translate innovative technologies to solve problems in health an medicine.

2022 Co-President: Before med school I studied BioEngineering at Berkeley (double Go Bears!) and spent two years working in computational drug discovery. I hope to leverage my experience with medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and AI/ML in future clinical research and industry.