2024 PEP and PIP winners: Where are they now?

In May 2024, three teams of soon-to-be graduates were awarded the annual President's Engagement Prize and President’s Innovation Prize. The donor-supported Prizes are the largest of their kind in higher education and are awarded to students undertaking post-graduation projects that make a positive, lasting impact in the world. Each winner received a $50,000 living stipend and $100,000 to support the development of their teams’ projects.

The winners of the 2024 President’s Engagement Prize were Gauthami Moorkanat and Simran Rajpal for their project Educate to Empower, which addresses the barriers to breast cancer screening across marginalized communities; and Brianna Aguilar, Catherine Hood, and Anooshey Ikhlas for the Addiction CaRE Volunteers (formerly Presby Addiction Care Program), which seeks to improve the experiences of people with substance use disorder during hospitalization. Yash Dhir and Rahul Nambia took the President’s Innovation Prize for Jochi, a technology company that leverages AI to help schools reveal valuable insights from their existing databases.

Nearly a year after graduation, Penn Today caught up with the teams to learn about the status of their projects and to see how they have turned knowledge from their classrooms into real-world applications. 

Educate to Empower

A woman in the United States has a 13% chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime, Rajpal and Moorkanat note. Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death. Yet Black women diagnosed with the disease are about 40% more likely to die of breast cancer, compared to white women.

Since graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences, Rajpal and Moorkanat have been working to establish Educate to Empower as a nonprofit organization, expanding their team, and building partnerships, with educational programs tailored to the communities they serve. 

“Within our programs, we take on the role of facilitating conversations rather than simply just delivering information,” Rajpal says. The most profound moments in these sessions, she says, have come from women having conversations with their neighbors, with church members, or with friends. “When they share their experiences, fears, resources, and advice with each other, it creates a safe space,” Rajpal says. “That’s been the most rewarding part of this journey.”

While Rajpal and Moorkanat will be attending medical school in the fall, they envision the organization continuing with community help and believe the model could be applied and expanded to other chronic conditions that can be curbed with preventative health measures.

“Our ultimate goal is that the communities we work with can take ownership of the program,” Moorkanat says, with Educate to Empower in a supportive role to foster dialogue and disseminate information. “We’re doing the groundwork to ensure that future.”

Addiction CaRE Volunteers

Aguilar, Hood, and Ikhlas had a vision last spring of improving the hospital experience for people with substance use disorders, in part by training volunteers to offer emotional support and resources at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

The three have since established a nonprofit called Addiction CaRE Volunteers and expanded their initiative from Penn Presbyterian to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. They coordinate the activities of 25 volunteers across both hospitals and also communicate with doctors and social workers, conduct research on better help for patients, and fund and facilitate a Friday recovery group started by Eric Ezzi, a certified recovery specialist.

Addiction CaRE Volunteers operates as an in-reach harm reduction group, Hood says. They work closely with Penn Presbyterian’s Addiction Consult Team, directed by Samantha Huo, and Ezzi, who directs them to which patients might need more support. Volunteers visit patients to talk, play Nintendo Switch, watch a movie, or deliver snacks, personal hygiene items, and clothes, Ikhlas says.

“Nurses face a lot of patients’ unmet needs first because they’re dealing with them on a day-to-day basis, and I think that our program helps alleviate some of those needs,” Hood says. Aguilar says the feedback from patients is that it means a lot that student volunteers are taking the time to visit the hospital and talk to them.

Aguilar says the five-hour volunteer training was done in collaboration with Penn’s Center for Addiction Medicine and Policy—whose director is their project mentor, Jeanmarie Perrone—and the SOL Collective, a Kensington-based harm reduction organization.

As Hood, Aguilar, and Ikhlas prepare for further education and work, they plan to continue the initiative by transitioning their roles into work study positions. Ikhlas says they will maintain a role as advisors, continue grant writing, and integrate what they have learned from the program into their medical school journeys. Addiction CaRE Volunteers has received other grants since the President’s Engagement Prize, the largest from Philly AIDS Thrift.

Jochi

Dhir and Nambiar spent last summer building Jochi’s “360.” This is an integrated tool that can monitor student progress and screening by using AI to help academic leaders identify at-risk students, Dhir says—and is a ready-made product schools can buy off the shelf. “We are now focusing on custom-built solutions ahead of the new academic year that leverage AI to reveal institutional insights for strategic school decision making,” he says. 

Working with Penn’s Graduate School of Education, the new approach emerged from the pair’s foundational work to create and build Jochi, which previously featured an online organizational tool for students that allowed teacher and learning specialist collaboration. 

Jochi “simplifies how school leaders leverage existing data,” says Dhir. For example, Jochi products can create a summary of student performance, integrating quantitative data—like attendance, test scores, homework grades—and create narrative paragraphs that are easier to understand than charts and graphs.

Dhir and Nambiar both earned bachelor’s degrees from the School of Engineering and Applied Science: Dhir a systems science and engineering major, and Nambiar a computer science major. Nambiar is submatriculating for a master’s and is expected to graduate in May. They have been friends since they met on campus in January 2021 during a pandemic-delayed student Move-In. They were roommates their second year, and by the third year they were business partners.

The Innovation Prize was one of several Penn awards Jochi earned last year, totaling nearly $300,000, including the $50,000 Draper Bridge Fund Award from Penn’s Venture Lab and $30,000 for the Startup Challenge. Jochi also has a workplace in the Pennovation Center.

“We’re committed to a future where every school decision is informed by deep, actionable insights, ensuring that resources are directed where they can have the greatest impact on student achievement,” Dhir says.