Jess Campitiello, Author at Cornell Tech

By Kathy Hovis

A $5 million gift from Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 and Barry Zubrow will support two vital university programs, one in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the other at Cornell Tech in New York City.

The Jan and Barry Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalism Fellows Fund in the College of Arts and Sciences will provide support for the Distinguished Visiting Journalist Program in A&S. The program launched last winter and brought Marc Lacey ’87, national editor of The New York Times, to campus for talks and meetings with faculty and students. Lacey also moderated a webinar hosted by A&S on Sept. 16, and plans to make a return visit.

The Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 and Barry Zubrow Fund for Faculty Development at Cornell Tech will be used to support the recruitment and retention of exceptional faculty and postdoctoral fellows, as well as for startup funding for new faculty.

The Zubrows said they made this commitment now “because we want to support two areas of excellence at Cornell which we believe are critical to civil society. First, we want students to understand the importance of outstanding journalism in advancing our democracy. Second, we hope to further the exciting discoveries at Cornell Tech, which will improve the way we live, work and learn.”

The visiting journalist program recognizes excellence in journalism and provides opportunities for select journalists and the university community to engage with each other. The program allows students to delve into the world of journalism and its role in protecting some founding principles of our country – freedom of speech, truth and accountability – while also advancing the college’s priority on public engagement.

While on the Ithaca campus, for periods of two to eight weeks, visiting journalists interact with faculty, researchers and students in a variety of organized and informal settings, such as moderating and participating in panel discussions, making presentations in classes, exploring research laboratories and special collections, and joining students or faculty for informal discussions over dinner or coffee.

“The Zubrow Journalism Fellows will inspire our students interested in journalism and the media,” said Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences. “At the same time, the visiting journalists will enjoy meaningful engagements with the Cornell community and get to know the latest research and creative works emerging from the university.”

The Distinguished Visiting Journalists program also has been supported by gifts from Jay Branegan ’72, Rose Gutfeld Edwards ’78 and the Dr. Guinevere Griest Fund for Public Engagement.

At Cornell Tech, the new fund will offer Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech, funding to tackle his top faculty priority: doubling the size of the campus’ 30-person faculty body over the next five years.

“Deep technical expertise in fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and trustworthy and human-centered computing will power the next decade of high impact and transformative work,” Morrisett said. “The Zubrow Fund for Faculty Development will enable Cornell Tech to advanced our deep research expertise and create the academic environment necessary to drive such transformative change.”

Cornell Tech has attracted elite faculty, who are enticed by the social-impact mission of the campus and its world-class technical depth in the heart of New York City. The campus recently announced three new professors: Tommaso Bondi, Omar El Housni and Omid Rafieian. The Zubrows’ support will help the campus capitalize on this momentum, providing strategic support to help Cornell Tech expand its mission to advance ethical, inclusive, accessible technology research and education.

These new gifts add to the numerous ways the Zubrows support Cornell – two endowed professorships in the College of Arts and Sciences; two undergraduate scholarships; a fund for the dean of A&S; and the endowment of the head coaching position for Cornell softball.

Jan Rock Zubrow also is on the Arts and Sciences Advisory Council and the Cornell Tech Board of Overseers, and is trustee emeritus of the Cornell University Board of Trustees. She served as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Board, chaired the search committees for Cornell’s 13th and 14th presidents and was co-chair of the board’s Task Force for Cornell Tech. She also was a founding member of the President’s Council of Cornell Women.

She is a leader of nonprofit organizations active in education and international development. She serves as chair of the board of Women for Women International, an organization that provides vocational and life skills to women in war-torn countries. She is also on the board of New Leaders for New Schools, an organization that trains educators to be transformational school leaders who can help bridge the achievement gap in the nation’s inner-city schools.

Prior to her nonprofit work, Zubrow had a career in health care venture capital and consumer marketing.

Barry Zubrow serves as a director on numerous for profit and not-for-profit boards, including CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) and MIO Partners (the McKinsey Investment Office). He previously served as the chief risk officer for JP Morgan Chase & Co. and chief administrative officer for The Goldman Sachs Group. He is a graduate of Haverford College and University of Chicago Law School and Graduate School of Business. He served as chair of the Board of Haverford College.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.

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When Michael Kosnik and Samson Schirmer — both Johnson Cornell Tech MBAs, ’20 — flew to Tel Aviv in January for an international hackathon addressing issues in public health, there was no way to predict the how their gold medal project, enroute, could improve the way hospitals might cope with the rising COVID-19 pandemic.

As medical professionals around the world face the uncharted waters of a global health crisis, enroute has found a way to make hospitals’ simultaneously over-capacity and under-resourced hallways easier to navigate.

Getting Hospital Transportation Systems on the Right Track

Described by Kosnik as the “Uber of intra-hospital transportation,” enroute provides full visibility of how patients, personnel, and equipment move throughout the hospital in real-time through an app-based platform that integrates into a hospital’s existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Then, using specialized algorithms, enroute automatically assigns transporters to equipment and patients, culminating in a smooth, trackable process.

Given the impact enroute can have in creating a more efficient global health ecosystem, it’s fitting that the startup was first conceptualized during a 24-hour, international hackathon. Aptly called Time to Care, the public health-themed hackathon was hosted by the American-Israeli startup MindState and backed by the World Health Organization. The hackathon was part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute‘s annual iTrek program, a 10-day trip during the January academic recess which provides students of varying backgrounds an opportunity to be exposed to and learn about the growing economy of innovation in Israel with a focus on the established startup ecosystem.

Kosnik and Schirmer were paired with five other teammates — including multinational students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, as well as working professionals in the biomedical engineering and product design space — and told to come up with a product after observing the movement of 1,400 patients as they traveled through Ichilov Hospital, part of Sourasky Medical Center’s 2.7 million-square-foot campus, over the course of a day.

“There were communication and coordination issues that were leading to delays,” said Kosnik, who noted it took an average of 36 minutes to transport patients from one place to another. “These delays don’t just cost precious time with patients. Operations are basically the lifeblood of the hospital, and when there’s an issue with transportation it’s going to impact every department.”

In order to move patients or equipment from place to place on hospital campuses, transporters must be given locations and dispatched efficiently. But according to Schirmer, many hospitals still rely on clipboards and other outdated systems that hamper efficiencies. When a patient has to be moved, say, from ER to Radiology with a broken arm, Schirmer noted a nurse must “make a request, call the dispatch office — which is a small room in the middle of the hospital that operates like a seventies-style dispatch service, each operator holding onto two phones at a time, all day every day.”

In fact, enroute Design Lead Tal Shturm recalled accidentally getting lost in a hospital a few years ago after a scheduled X-ray. “A nurse moved my bed to the hallway, and I was informed that a transporter will pick me up soon. So I waited, and waited,” and then after going to the front desk to check in on his transport status, he was told to keep waiting. “Finally, after almost two hours of waiting, a transporter who passed by noticed me, and casually asked: ‘Are you still here? I’ll take you back to the department.’ It was clear I was totally lost in the system.”

But the team emphasizes that this isn’t the fault of the transporters or hospital staff, who have made a life of helping patients. “It’s about the technology,” said Schirmer. “The IT is outdated.”

With enroute’s algorithms, hospitals could adjust transport priorities based upon urgency without losing track of patients with less-pressing needs. Rather than engendering the confusion of the previous model, enroute strives to create connectivity throughout the hospitals’ ecosystem. The system also provides practical transparency, so dispatchers have a constantly updating picture of staff workload, which could result in more efficient routes and decreased travel per shift.

Adapting to Address COVID-19

After winning the hackathon in January, enroute’s team members knew they wanted to keep working on the product and see if they could expand it from a concept to a viable company. Although Kosnik and Schirmer — enroute’s CEO and Chief Product Officer, respectively—were back in New York completing their last graduate program semester, they maintained communication with their Israeli teammates to expand and perfect its technology.

But when COVID-19 began to dominate world healthcare weeks later, slamming hospitals that were already over-capacity and under-resourced, the team realized that enroute could help hospitals on a larger scale than they’d initially imagined.

“Originally we knew we were dealing with a bad problem, but with the pandemic, it became even worse — we heard about doctors having to wait six hours for patient transport,” said Kosnik, adding that their contacts at hospitals in the US and abroad “asked if we had something to keep track of patients because they were using clipboards to figure out which patients had COVID-19 and where they were held. They were figuring it out on the fly.”

This gave enroute a new perspective on how its algorithms could assist in the fight against coronavirus and other infectious diseases: its technology could track the locations and pathways of contagious and non-contagious patients and staff, and the equipment they require. The data would provide a comprehensive log on where patients infected with COVID-19 have been, and who has come into contact with them, including retroactive tracing in cases in which, for example, a patient who received treatment for a non-related ailment later tests positive for the virus.

The utility and success of this venture haven’t gone unnoticed. The startup was one of four student-led companies to win Cornell Tech’s 2020 Startup Awards in late May, which provides up to $100,000 in pre-seed funding plus access to an international array of tech industry leaders — many of whom immediately started messaging Kosnik and Schirmer while they were delivering their presentation during the awards’ livestream.

What’s Next?

Since graduating from the MBA program in May, Schirmer and Kosnik have been working at enroute full-time, and they have five other team members working on the product on a part-time basis.

“Right now we are building out the technology and plan to deploy a version 1.0 at hospitals this fall,” said Schirmer. In addition to bolstering their coding and focusing on software development, in the last month the team has also been in communication with hospitals spanning from Texas to Boston, Israel, and New York.

Considering that physical logistics have been calculated to account for upwards of 46% of a hospital’s total budget, enroute would free up resources that have already been tapped during the pandemic. And although they hope the international community won’t be hit by a second wave, enroute hopes to be operational by the end of the year to help — whether that assistance comes in the form of decreasing potential exposure to COVID-19 or making sure someone who broke a bone during a precarious quarantined-at-home DIY project gets to radiology and back without getting lost along the way.

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