Student Spotlight - Marcus Ihemdi

Marcus Ihemdi has spent most of his life traveling back and forth between the U.S. and the Middle East. He holds a B.S. in computer engineering and a M.S. in engineering management and has had a strong affinity for entrepreneurship since his early years. Marcus believes that opportunities in both the developed and developing world are vast. He is in the midst of launching a startup in addition to his studies in the Yale School of Public Health’s Health Care Management Program.

The budding company, Pearl, is developing a cloud-based biometric authentication platform that employs finger vein scanning, a method that offers several advantages over fingerprint scanning. The technology will first be implemented in biometric payment terminals meant for commercial use. “Deploying the platform in the context of commercial retail will likely prove its efficacy, security and scalability, which will allow us to expand to other more sensitive use-cases.”

Checking biometric identity markers against a database on the cloud has the potential to enable individuals to travel, transact, vote and more without the need for a phone, key, card, passport or any other form of identification. “It is analogous to possessing a universal key that is unique to your person, a key that you are at no risk of losing. Ideally, in its final form, the Pearl platform will be a highly secure and reliable means of authentication that is impervious to forgery or third-party tampering.” The implication here is that aside from merely streamlining in-store transactions, Pearl can create a global standard for authentication that has the potential to protect citizens from unjust elections, aid in the integration of the world’s unbanked population into the global economy, democratize electronic medical records and safeguard any legitimate claim of ownership.

Ultimately, by addressing the disparities created by the global socioeconomic gap, this platform will play a key role in improving the social determinants of health on a global scale. An advantage enjoyed by developing countries, he says, is the phenomenon of “leapfrogging.” By adopting technology more slowly than the West, they leap straight into second or third generation products, which often frees them from the burden of overhauling obsolete technological infrastructure. Marcus aims to leverage this phenomenon in such a context to ultimately improve the lives of underserved populations globally.

In his time at Yale, Marcus has won multiple awards in health care entrepreneurship including the Careers, Life and Yale Prize at the 2017 Yale University Healthcare Hackathon and the 1^st place award at the Yale University Pediatric Hackathon. Marcus and his team also received 1^st place at the 2016 Yale University Hult Prize Campus Competition. He is currently the Hult Prize Campus Director at Yale University.

P.S. Marcus loves Star Wars and thinks that Episode VIII was an absolute disaster. He, however, believes that with J.J. Abrams and Episode IX comes A New Hope.