Medical Technology
Panel Discussion: September 25, 2025
Thursday, September 25, 2025
4-6 p.m.
Aggie Square, Aggie Commons
4480 2nd Avenue, Sacramento
Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be provided.
Space is limited — registration required.
The Innovator Network is coming to Aggie Square in September, with an event focused on novel medical technologies and the startups that grew from them. Our broadest panel of UC Davis innovators yet — including undergraduate founders, a professional researcher, professors and a doctor — will share their stories of what inspired them and the varied journeys they took to get to where they are now.
- Dr. Peter Yellowlees was inspired by his experience as a practicing psychiatrist to develop a telemedicine startup.
- Dr. Soheil Ghiasi, working at the intersection of engineering and medicine, has co-founded a company based on a methodology that more accurately assesses fetal wellbeing during delivery.
- Dr. Julien Bec, similarly spanning the fields of engineering and medicine, has developed a fluorescence device for distinguishing healthy and cancerous tissue during surgery.
- UC Davis undergraduate Simran Lallian and alumna Jaya Athuluru ’25, won numerous competitions to launch a company based on their epilepsy seizure detection device.
Researchers and students from UC Davis and UC Davis Health, as well as members of the medical device entrepreneurship community in Sacramento and Davis, are invited to attend, network, and learn about the panelists’ diverse experiences.
Meet the Panelists
Peter Yellowlees, M.D.
Dr. Yellowlees is CEO of AsyncHealth, a telemedicine company he co-founded to implement and promote the practice of AI-enabled asynchronous telepsychiatry. He is also Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at UC Davis, where he directed the UCD/UCI Fellowship Program in Clinician Wellbeing (2018-23).
Previously, he served as the inaugural Chief Wellness Officer at UC Davis Health (2018-22) and held the Alan Stoudemire Endowed Wellbeing Chair in Psychiatry. He was President of the American Telemedicine Association (2017-18) and has conducted research in the areas of psychiatry, telemedicine and physician health. He has written over 250 academic papers and book chapters and eight books, and presented over 180 video editorials on psychiatry for Medscape. He is regularly invited to speak nationally, internationally and in the media.
Soheil Ghiasi, Ph.D.
Dr. Ghiasi is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis. He has also served as an expert witness and consultant in the areas of computer-aided design and electronic medical devices. His research focuses on architecture and design of embedded systems and utilizes signal processing and machine learning algorithms. His motivation to develop technologies that directly benefit society has also led to a number of innovations in the area of smart health.
He is the Chief Technology Officer at Storx Technologies, a startup that specializes in transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry. The non-invasive technology measures oxygen saturation in fetal blood to assess fetal well-being. It provides a novel alternative to the current standard of electronic fetal monitoring, offering a more direct evaluation of the fetal health for higher precision diagnosis.
Dr. Julien Bec, Ph.D.
Dr. Bec works at the intersection of engineering and medical device development, with experience spanning automotive engineering, academic research, and healthcare technology commercialization. At UC Davis, he serves as Director of Engineering for the Marcu Lab, which studies optical spectroscopy and imaging for disease diagnosis, where he manages the development, manufacturing, and clinical validation of fluorescence lifetime instrumentation for medical procedures.
In 2022, Dr. Bec co-founded HiLight Surgical and serves as its Chief Technology Officer. The company focuses on commercializing fluorescence lifetime-based surgical guidance technology. This label-free technology leverages naturally occurring differences in optical signatures observed between healthy and malignant tissue to enable real-time cancer identification during surgery. HiLight Surgical’s fiber-based approach is ideally suited to a range of endoscopic and robotic procedures. The company has brought in experienced medical technology professionals to support its commercialization efforts. As CTO, Bec manages product development for hardware, software, and disposables while contributing to market research, regulatory affairs, and fundraising.
Simran Lallian
Simran Lillian ’26 is a senior at UC Davis pursuing her B.S. in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior with a minor in Technology Management. Simran’s experiences span digital health, diagnostics, biotech, and research, with a focus on bridging science, business, and law to bring transformative technologies to patients. She is actively involved with the UC Davis Student Startup Center and previously at the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. A highlight of her student leadership has been developing new initiatives such as a Business Consulting and Research division in her term as President of Neurotech@Davis to help students explore careers in healthcare innovation.
Simran is a co-founder of EpiSense, an early-stage neurotech startup creating seizure prediction with a wearable EEG device and machine learning. By analyzing electrical brain activity in real time, the device relays a notification of an incoming seizure so patients can take measures to reduce risk of injury.
Jaya Athuluru, B.S.
Jaya Athuluru ’25 is a recent UC Davis graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Neurological Cognitive Science. As President of Neurotech@Davis at UC Davis, Jaya led a 100+ member club at the intersection of neuroscience and technology. Under her leadership, the club provided students hands-on exposure to projects, entrepreneurial ventures, research publications, and youth education initiatives.
Jaya is CEO and co-founder of EpiSense, an early-stage startup she launched alongside Simran Lallian. Driven by her diagnosis with epilepsy eight years ago, Jaya is dedicated to their mission of bringing seizure prediction to epileptics everywhere. Together, she and Simran have secured over $56,000 in pre-seed funding by winning first-place awards at early-stage startup competitions, including UC Davis’ Big Bang! Business Competition, the Sacramento Kings Capitalize Competition, and PLASMA Accelerator’s Demo Day.