MCG students win $25,000 to finance health startup

Four Medical College of Georgia students and two programmers won $25,000 in cash and services to finance their health tech startup during the 2018 Southeast Startup Challenge Summit – an initiative funded by a $550,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

MCG’s Safia Siddiqui, Mike Mallow, Kyle Dymanus and Nathan Dillard as well as programmers David Ray and Aaron White founded R6 Industries with the goal of improving communication during disasters. They’ve recently created DisasterMed, a service platform that monitors occurrences of symptoms in disaster areas to quickly identify an outbreak and stop the spread of the disease.

Master of Public Health alumnus Rabei Alaisami also participated in the pitch competition with a project that aimed at increasing the number of Richmond County families participating in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Supplemental Nutrition Program. This federally-funded initiative helps improve the health and nutrition of low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and postpartum women as well as children ages 1-5.

Besides the pitch competition, the summit brought together entrepreneurs, researchers and public health policy experts to create achievable initiatives to improve public health in Georgia communities. The agenda included a community health panel and a summit expo featuring the 10 startups that participated in the pitch competition.

This free event, which was held in Macon, Georgia, was a collaboration between the Clinical and Digital Health Sciences Department in the College of Allied Health Sciences at Augusta University and theClubhou.se, an innovative workspace in Augusta.