Navigating Healthcare and Academia: Pooja Mathur's Inspiring Journey as a ToU Founding Club Member

Pooja Mathur is a Project Manager in the healthcare sector and one of the ToUs Founding Club students. She lives in Boston, MA, and has professional connections to two primary Ivy League schools. She is currently working at a Harvard Medical School research lab managing clinical trials and has participated in an accelerator program at Yale for a startup she co-founded in public health. She believes, "You’ve got to build your dream brick by brick."

The decision to take part in the Professional Master's program is another brick in her journey.

Pooja studied History and Political Science as an undergrad at Mount Holyoke College. She is passionate about health care, specifically at the intersection of women’s health and technology. She has been working in medical research for eight years, testing new and better ways of diagnosing, preventing, and treating disease. This fits in well with the way Pooja describes her skill set in her words:

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"I have a solutions-oriented mindset and love coming up with creative products that appeal to new markets or are more efficient."

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Pooja’s interests and professional background are perfect examples of purpose-driven impact. Her love of data, and her analytical and creative skills, combined with her passion for building economically and socially just communities, have been shaping how she contributes to a better tomorrow for a long time. When Pooja sees something that could be better — she seeks to understand the problem deeply, so she can create solutions:

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"When I learned about child labor in agriculture and mining across the world, I sought out an analytics internship with a company that helps corporations improve social sustainability across their supply chains."

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The area where she lived was hit hard by the opioid crisis, so she co-developed Opiostop, an app that helps physicians choose alternatives to prescribing opioids. With a heightened focus on public hygiene during the pandemic, she is tackling the issue through a portable device company she co-founded called Bezet, which her team developed while participating in an accelerator program at Yale University. 

Pooja has often traveled in Asia, and while there, statistics that she read on women’s unmet health needs became real.  Back in the US, her growing passion for health justice led her to gain experience as a doula helping women through pregnancy and also volunteer with Planned Parenthood as a sexual health hotline counselor. 

Pooja’s #BetterTomorrow is providing better access to products for women’s health, especially in emerging markets — and has the vision to start a B2C women’s health company. It was the strong focus on entrepreneurship, data, and sustainability that drew her to ToU — where she believes she can create a blueprint for starting this business.

The entrepreneurial focus of the team and the approach of using business to create positive change were at the heart of her decision to join the program, as well as the international and diverse professional backgrounds of the students in the cohorts. She enjoys studying with people from different industries because it leads to unique idea generation.