tufts-university
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Danielle Weisberg Built a Media Habit - Then Knew When to Leave It
She and Carly Zakin turned a 6 a.m. email into a company, a community and an exit. The useful lesson is smaller: meet people inside the life they already have.
Daniel Weinstein Put a Sensor Where Wearables Rarely Go: Inside the Mouth
A college idea about tracking what people eat became a years-long lesson in miniaturization, manufacturing, and patience. Daniel Weinstein is building Lura Health one tiny constraint at a time.
Alex Rappaport Bet on the Water Nobody Wanted
He started as a river guide, found a neglected piece of university science, and built ZwitterCo around an unglamorous industrial problem: filters that foul. The useful lesson is less about having an idea than learning how to carry one into the world.
Jeffery Ryan
Jeffery Ryan is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Interscope, Inc., a Massachusetts medical device company behind the EndoRotor System, a mechanical, non-thermal tool for interventional gastroenterology and pulmonology. A former U.S. Air Force captain who moved into medical device sales at Medtronic and Smith & Nephew, Ryan launched Interscope in 2013 with physician co-founder Dr. Ramon A. Franco, Jr., steering the EndoRotor from concept to FDA clearances and a 2020 distribution partnership with Micro-Tech Endoscopy.
Todd Dickinson
Todd Dickinson is the CEO and a board member of Stellaromics, a Boston biotech commercializing 3D spatial biology born from Karl Deisseroth's Stanford lab and Xiao Wang's work at MIT and the Broad Institute. A Tufts-trained analytical chemist who did his PhD under David Walt, he spent more than 20 years turning genomics inventions into products: over a decade at Illumina during its rise as the DNA-sequencing leader, commercial work on Bionano Genomics' Irys nanochannel arrays, and CEO stints at Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio, which he merged into Cantata Bio in 2022. At Stellaromics he raised $80 million in Series B (led by Catalyst4 with Stanford University Ventures) to launch Pyxa, the first commercial platform that reads gene expression inside intact tissue up to 40x thicker than conventional methods.
Mike Zimmerman
Mike Zimmerman is the founder and CEO of Z-Polymers, the Lowell, Massachusetts company behind Tullomer, a melt-spun super polymer marketed as stronger than PEEK and stainless steel yet light enough to print on a desktop 3D machine. A career materials scientist with a PhD in mechanical engineering, he spent nearly 15 years at Bell Labs and Saint-Gobain before founding a string of deep-tech ventures including Quantum Leap Packaging and the solid-state battery company Ionic Materials. He has also taught materials science at Tufts University for more than three decades.
Sebastian Coates
Sebastian Coates is the CEO and co-founder of Tellescope, a HIPAA-compliant, API-first patient communication and CRM platform used by more than 150 digital health organizations. A Tufts computer science and mathematics graduate who once wrote software for the Apple Watch and prototyped blockchain systems for clinical trials at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, he started Tellescope in 2020 with co-founder Derek Strauss to give telehealth companies a developer-friendly tech stack for managing patients across SMS, email, voice, and secure messaging. Notably, he has kept the company lean and profitable rather than chasing oversized venture rounds.
Natalie Miyake
Natalie Miyake is Partner, Marketing at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms. A seasoned communications strategist who grew up in Japan and studied in Madrid before working in New York and San Francisco, she shapes how Sequoia tells its story to the world. With a career spanning crisis PR at Brunswick Group, corporate communications at Twitter during its most turbulent acquisition years, and nearly a decade steering Sequoia's voice across its portfolio of unicorns and breakout companies, Miyake brings a rare mix of global perspective and Silicon Valley fluency to the intersection of finance and narrative.