Caleb Kumar '13

Alumni Office (AO): Can you introduce yourself?

Caleb Kumar (CK): My name is Caleb Kumar, Breck Class of 2013, and I currently live in Boston. I am developing data-driven health care solutions for the Harvard University School of Public Health.

AO: Thank you! Caleb, can you give us a brief overview of what you've been up to since graduation? 

CK: After graduating from Breck, I attended Stanford, where the proximity to Silicon Valley inspired me to dive into the startup world. By my sophomore year, I made the leap into the startup life, patenting a machine learning technology and founding a company. In 2014, we entered the University Startup World Cup in Denmark and won, which opened doors to funding, allowed us to expand into the European market, and even led to a memorable meeting with Queen Mary of Denmark. This milestone was transformative, setting the stage for my future in innovation and entrepreneurship.

It was great to be a part of a startup, and I was doing very exciting work in molecular diagnostics. And after seven years of going through the cycle of raising funding, growing the technology, creating partnerships with hospitals and small clinics, and trying to build out the technology, we were acquired in 2021. It was an exciting seven-year journey that taught me a lot. During that time, I graduated from Stanford in 2017 and then went to the Stanford School of Medicine for their Community Health and Prevention Research (CHPR) M.S. program. My research there focused on improving opioid-related patient-provider communications using AI. My research started when the opioid crisis started becoming a major problem in America. 

Research usually follows where funding is, so we partnered with a company called HealthTap, and they're essentially like Quora, but for medical questions. They hire physicians who will answer questions from users, and a lot of the questions they answered were opioid-related. Things like how naloxone and different prescriptions work and if you can take two medications together or if they are contraindicated, and, just like Quora, you can give thumbs up to different answers like different responses. It creates a wealth of data related to opioid care and related to patient provider communications. In that work, I did a lot of natural language processing data analysis, and I used that as a base to get into large language models, which is what I'm doing now.

AO: How did you find your passion for the work you do now? 

CK: I think Breck played a pretty huge role in this. When I was 14, I won a pretty major science research competition, which the Breck Advanced Science Research advisor had introduced me to during my freshman year. They encouraged me to apply to the Davidson Fellowship. I felt that in that moment I found my passion for high impact software projects. My project involved a lot of extensive software development, which helped me realize my enthusiasm for high impact software projects and developing innovative solutions.

AO: Tell me a little bit about your experience at Breck.

CK: Yeah, so I did a lot of close work with Mr. Colianni, and I'm a huge fan of his. I don't know how big Breck’s robotics team is now, but I was on the first ever Breck Robotics Team with Taylor McKenna ’12 and Darius Beiganski ’13 and a few other Breck students. Mr. Colianni agreed to be our faculty advisor. I found that the Breck robotics program was able to give us a kind of hands- on collaborative environment where we could apply theoretical knowledge to real-world engineering challenges. I was just a freshman and to actually be able to apply some of the knowledge that you learn in classes was great. Later on, I took AP Physics, AP Biology, and other AP classes in the science fields, and the Breck Robotics Team was a great way to actually apply academic learning to hands- on experience. I think through designing, building, and programming these robots, we really were able to understand the STEM principles at a deeper level and use our critical thinking, problem solving abilities, and teamwork skills. The Robotics Team and FIRST in general really promoted this spirit of innovation. As you're developing a robot, you are experimenting, iterating, and refining your ideas throughout the process. And, actually, now that I'm older, I realize that those are the same principles that Stanford teaches in their design program. So it's kind of like full circle there.

AO: What are a few highlights of your career so far?

CK: I’ll tie this back to my learning at Breck. I took an independent learning course with Mr. Colianni either my junior or senior year, and we explored mobile app development. I learned a lot about developing apps for mobile phones and iPhones, and I actually took this to a research laboratory at the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute and proposed a project there for using an iPhone app to help traumatic brain injury patients. I wanted to develop this innovative accessible tool for traumatic brain injury patients to continue therapy beyond traditional clinical sessions. We did this because we identified a couple of different problems. After you have an injury and you're an outpatient, maybe it's hard to get to the clinic, or maybe your insurance runs out. There are a lot of these different problems, and we thought if we could build this personalized medicine tool that was just on a mobile app that you could use to do guided therapy exercises, we could solve many of these problems. So we developed this iPhone app that utilized the accelerometer and gyroscope within the app to offer real-time visual and vibro tactile feedback. We found that vibration encouraged patients to engage in therapeutic exercise that improved their limb functionality. I look back at the opportunity to take some of my learnings directly at Breck and apply it to a real-world project positively. It was a great solution for enhancing recovery outcomes for a lot of these traumatic brain injury patients. So, that was one way that my learnings at Breck were applied to the real world to help patients, and it inspired my journey to continue to search for ways that I can build products that really help people. It also led to a similar project years later.

Years later, I became interested in electronic health records and interoperability. So I worked on a global health documentation mobile app, and we were able to actually launch this app on the Apple and Android store stores, market the app, and even secured partnerships with overseas health companies. It is basically like an electronic health record to promote health care data management. We were able to decrease unnecessary deaths by improving access to health information. Often in different countries, people rely on paper records, and that is a challenge for people when they call an ambulance or go to the hospital. Our mobile app had all kinds of health information within it, in a secure fashion, and accessible, which was a great way to have people have improved health outcomes because of the ease of access to their medical records and the way they can interact more with their records. 

I  also spoke a little bit about that company that we started at Stanford out of my dorm room that won the  Startup World Cup that was acquired in 2021. That was a lot of fun and was probably the most exciting project that I've worked on in the past. I also have experimented a little bit with building some machine learning pipelines that I started on with some of my friends from graduate school. The projects are a little bit more medicine focused. We worked on a novel approach utilizing AI in this marketplace where legacy solutions provided limited analytical capabilities and limited automation. That work was on the pharmacy pipeline that didn’t have a lot of AI or machine learning or even good software tools for them to use at the time and identify this problem of direct fees or indirect and direct remuneration fees. And we wanted to help these pharmacies streamline their financial processes, and I think those are just some of the projects that I worked on that tie together what I learned from Breck in Mr. Colianni’s class. 

AO: Where do you want to be in 10 years

CK: Steve Jobs said in a speech at Stanford. “You can't always connect the dots looking forward, but you can connect them looking backward.” So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. I know that sounds nice to say but might not seem very practical. But, now that I look back, I can see how things have connected. I think in that moment as a young kid, maybe at Breck or even early on in my career, I would never have guessed how the dots connected in this specific way. When looking at my future, I think I like to listen to what my heart says and kind of follow that wherever that takes me. I will always be leveraging technology to improve health care outcomes and access, but I’m not sure if that will be working on another startup. I really don't know. I'm doing some work on another interesting idea, which is this price discovery platform that utilizes reverse auction principles. We're trying to take a look at price transparency problems in the medical field and insurance. It's a huge black box. So I'm thinking about tackling that and a couple of different areas I'm interested in learning more about. I don't know yet. We'll see what happens. We'll connect the dots when we get there.

AO: Is there anything else I missed that you'd like to share?

CK: I didn't really talk a lot about my learnings from the Breck Science Research Team. I think that was a really transformative experience that allowed me to explore beyond basic scientific inquiry. I spoke about this a little bit before at a science research type of interview. The program teaches you how to apply the scientific method to real world challenges, and I think that fundamentally changed how I approach both professional and personal problems. Knowing how to use the process is super important now, as a researcher and a potential Ph.D. student. Even as a masters student in research, it's important to communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively to a wide range of audiences from lay people to experts. I think that the (now) Advanced Science Research Program really instilled in me the skills of conveying information succinctly under time constraints, practicing elevator pitches on detailed academic presentations, being able to be flexible throughout important 15-minute pitch presentations, and more. There's a kind of resilience and adaptability that is needed for navigating setbacks and unexpected results that I learned as a part of the Science Research Team. I also internalized the importance of collaboration and teamwork in achieving these goals, which helped me succeed in different startups.

I mentor a lot of teams nowadays, and a lot of teams want to know how to win. I actually tell these teams that learning how to win is not the most important lesson to learn. You also have to learn how to lose, accept defeat, and learn from the experience. In other words, the growth mindset and resilience is actually the key core indicators for success. So, I tell a lot of these teams pitching startups to focus more on the art of growth or the art of accepting defeat and learning to grow instead of only winning.