Honors Link

Brett and his cat celebrating after graduation

Honors graduate Brett Stoddard is no stranger to developing ideas and companies. This summer, he’ll continue to create new opportunities by co-founding a startup in the medical technology space.

“I got into entrepreneurship my sophomore year of undergrad,” Brett says. “I was working on RFID soil moisture sensors in the Openly Published Environmental Sensing (OPEnS) lab. The project I was working on wasn’t finished so I applied for several funding opportunities, including an entrepreneurial/prototyping competition.”

During the competition, Brett was introduced to entrepreneurship, building on his existing background in STEM. He went on to finish his work with the RFID sensors, completing the project as his honors thesis.

“After that project came to a close, I worked with another student on another startup that combined drone imaging and weather stations for monitoring specialty agricultural crops,” Brett says. The team was accepted to the incubator program at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where Brett gained experience in machine learning, client support, and building projects on a budget. He left that startup to complete his HBS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and now is setting out again to build a company and put his engineering and entrepreneurship background to work.

“Now that I’m graduating, I’m co-founding another startup in the medical technology space. It’s based around providing tools for conducting at-home checkups for patients,” Brett says. “This will help doctors better assess patient risk and track lifestyle compliance – an emerging area of interest.”

“The first step for this is building a team around the problem. I’m most looking forward to further honing my leadership skills, general software development ability, and designing a unique user experience.”