2026 Highlights
Keynote Speaker Dr. JaBaris Swain, Director of Innovation at Johnson & Johnson MedTech, brought his rare combination of clinical expertise, innovation leadership, and commercialization experience to Demo Day that inspired our founders and attendees.
Prior to judging our seven health tech teams, our panelists, Kathie Jordan, David Jansen, Marty DeGroot, and Craig Gravitz, sat down for a Fireside Chat moderated by Vanessa Chan, Vice Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Penn Engineering to share their experiences, perspectives on evaluating emerging technologies, and insights on what it takes to successfully bring a health tech solution to market.
Congratulations to our 2026 Pitch Competition Winner: the CIRCA team (Alice Abernathy, Courtney A. Schreiber, Anurag Verma, Kiya Gurmessa, Hritvik Gupta) and our Audience Choice winner: the ELONG team (Team: Duy Dao, Thomas Hamilton, Dennis Hiller, Rosa Hwang, Joshua Dienstman).
The inaugural Penn ELITE Fellows, Diego Dávila, Adeola Fagunloye, and Daniel Shackleton, shared their journeys serving as entrepreneurial leads to advance Penn and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia health technologies. Delivered by Venture Lab and Penn Health-Tech, the Fellowship advances innovations toward translation and market readiness.
E. Michael Ostap, PhD, Senior Vice Dean and Chief Scientific Officer for the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania provided opening remarks to kickoff the event. Then ten teams presented their med-tech innovations, sharing their journey in the Accelerator, and competed in a pitch competition.
Congratulations to our 2025 Pitch Competition Winner: the CranioCare team (Alexander Tucker, Shu Yang, Jordan Swanson, and Yinding Chi) and our Audience Choice winner: the MEND team (Riccardo Gottardi, Narintadeach Charoensombut, Dana Ragbirsingh, John Germiller).
The inaugural Demo Day showcased the incredible progress of the Accelerator 2023-2024 Cohort. Congratulations to the Vytrina team, (Shu Yang, Alexander Tucker, and Yinding Chi) for their work in developing a novel scar-minimizing tissue adhesive and our Demo Day 2024 Pitch Competition Winners!
