IA Lab for Emerging Health Technology Connects Students and Alumni via Internships

The Innovation Accelerator Laboratory for Emerging Health Technology (IALEHT) at Harvey Mudd College expands career pathways for students interested in biomedical engineering, health data science and emerging health technologies by providing structured support and exposure to the diverse opportunities in this space. This lab connects students to alumni working in health-related fields, provides hands-on research experiences and develops partnerships with institutions such as the Keck Graduate Institute.

Over the summer, IALEHT placed two students in biotech internships with companies run by HMC alumni. Jenny Ngo ’27 interned at ShadowStream, whose CEO is John McNeil ’89, and Ananya Purwar ’26 interned at Translucence Biosystems, whose CIO is Philip Cheung ’96. 

“We are so excited to be able to provide additional paths for our students toward pursuing careers in the biotechnology industry,” says biology professor and IALEHT co-lead Danae Schulz. “One of the things that comes up consistently in our surveys with alums is the desire for more guidance and opportunities around careers in health technology. Summer internships with biotechnology companies are a wonderful opportunity to connect and network with leaders in the industry. They also provide essential experience working directly within the company, which is more difficult to provide in an academic setting.”

A mathematics and computational biology major, Ngo interned at ShadowStream, a cloud service running on AWS (Amazon Web Services) that helps data flow from laboratories worldwide to scientists. ShadowStream’s customers use these results to test hypotheses and plan next steps for drug discovery projects. 

“Jenny’s education at Harvey Mudd let her understand our business from day one, allowing her to focus on the technical problem we needed her to solve,” says McNeil. “Jenny developed infrastructure as code to deploy ShadowStreams for new customers. Each customer’s stream must be completely isolated to protect intellectual property. In just 10 weeks, Jenny learned and applied zero trust theory and toolkits from AWS and JumpCloud to deliver a turn-key backend system for our product. If Jenny were to continue with us, her next task would be to help build a customer-facing decision support tool. This project would involve an entirely new set of technical tools. However, she would excel at this task because she understands the scientific domain, which takes years to learn, and she knows how to learn new technology extremely quickly, a survival skill needed to succeed at HMC, and a skill highly valued by cross-disciplinary startups like ours.”

Purwar, a computer science major, worked as a machine learning intern at Translucence BioSystems, a biotechnology research company whose mission is to provide researchers and clinicians with fast, reliable and complete 3D analysis of their biological samples. Purwar’s project involved creating a machine learning powered pipeline for automatic histology alignment. 

“I worked on researching pre-existing automatic histology models and ended up improving a pre-existing machine learning model to fit the data at Translucence better,” she says. 

Cheung recognized and appreciated “the classic mix of Mudd tenacity combined with intellectual curiosity and awesome problem solving skills” that Purwar brought to the internship. “Within weeks, she had evaluated existing technologies and, by the end of the 10-week session, had prototyped a custom fine-tuned model using transfer learning techniques,” he says. “Her energy and genuine interest in our mission made the summer a highlight and accelerated real scientific programs here.”

Other key IALEHT components include a summer skills institute, new interdisciplinary workshops and capstone experiences and exploration of long-term programs like a 4+1 degree pathway in bioengineering. By positioning health innovation as a natural extension of Harvey Mudd’s STEM strengths, the lab prepares students to lead in areas like medical technology, digital health and health AI.

“I was surprised about the impact that I had on the company,” says Purwar. “I helped automate a task and create a pipeline for biologists at Translucence, which helped speed up the process by at least 50%. Since I want to go into machine learning for biotech post-graduation, this was the perfect opportunity for me this summer.”