cornell-phd
(3)
Tuan Cao
Tuan Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Genetica and LIFE AI, biotech companies building AI-driven precision health for Asian populations. A Cornell-trained computer scientist who once redesigned Google's Ads reporting engine, he left a comfortable Silicon Valley career to decode genomes built for the nearly one billion people of East Asian descent that Western genetic tools serve poorly. His current venture, LIFE AI, is a Singapore-based foundational AI platform he calls the Intelligence Layer of Human Health, securing 15+ petabytes of genomic data on-chain and aiming to let people own and benefit from their own genetic data.
Abhishek Ramkumar
Abhishek Ramkumar is the founder and CEO of Abram Scientific, a Menlo Park medtech company building CoagCare, a handheld point-of-care platform that reads the full blood-clotting story from a single drop in under ten minutes. A biomedical engineer with a PhD from Cornell and a B.Tech from IIT Bombay, he spent years at PARC and Blue Highway inventing diagnostic and surgical devices before turning a hard physics problem - measuring blood viscoelasticity and density in a vibration-proof wireless meter - into 17 granted patents and an $11.75M Series A led by Octapharma in 2026. His pitch is simple and life-or-death: get the right transfusion to the right patient at the right time, whether that patient is on an operating table or in a MEDEVAC helicopter.
Mian Zhang
Mian Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of HyperLight, the Cambridge-based deep-tech company commercializing thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics. A Cornell-trained physicist who did his foundational work in Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, Zhang took a notoriously hard-to-manufacture optical material and shrank it onto silicon-style chips - cutting signal loss roughly 100-fold in work published in Nature. HyperLight now runs the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN production line and is pushing 400G-per-lane photonic circuits into hyperscale AI data centers through partnerships with UMC, Wavetek, and Jabil.