Introducing the first Wu Tsai Human Performance Biodesign Innovation Fellows

The Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign and the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance are pleased to announce the first Human Performance Fellows, three second-year Innovation Fellows who will implement the biodesign process to identify and address important unmet clinical needs related to thriving at all stages of life.

“In the field of human performance, which is really new, we focus on discovering biological principles to optimize human performance and translate them into better health for all,” said Scott Delp, who directs the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Stanford and is the James H. Clark Professor of Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Orthopaedic Surgery.

Anand Ganapathy, Paola Calvachi and Alexandra Knauer were selected as the first cohort for this new fellowship.

• Ganapathy studied bioengineering as an undergraduate at Texas A&M, earned a Masters of Bioengineering at Rice University, and completed medical school at Baylor College of Medicine. He is a resident in vascular surgery at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California.
• Calvachi earned a Masters of Biomedical Engineering, completed medical school at Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, and studied bioinformatics at Harvard Medical School. She completed a research fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, served as Chief Scientific Officer at Apercu Diagnostics and hosts the Mio-cardio podcast, the first cardiology podcast in Spanish for Latin America.
• Knauer earned a Masters of Mechanical Engineering degree at California Polytechnic State University. She has worked as a product development engineer at Mercator MedSystems and as a mechanical engineer at Eko, a medical equipment manufacturer.

The Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance is comprised of six founding partners: Boston Children’s Hospital, the Salk Institute, University of California San Diego, the University of Kansas, and the University of Oregon. For more information about the alliance, visit https://humanperformance.stanford.edu/.

The Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, co-founded in 2001 at Stanford University by Paul Yock and Josh Makower, is committed to advancing health outcomes and equity through innovation education, translation and policy. To date, more than 7.6 million people have been helped by technologies invented at Stanford Biodesign, and the biodesign innovation process has been widely adopted by universities and training programs around the world. To learn more about Stanford Biodesign, visit https://biodesign.stanford.edu/.