Week 3 of the ISSUP program featured the first three of six site visits to companies across the Orange County area. Over the week, we visited Modulated Imaging, Irvine Pharmaceutical Services, and Edwards Lifesciences.
Modulated Imaging, a startup spun out of UCI’s Beckman Laser Institute, is creating easy-to-use machines that help identify Diabetes patients at risk of amputation-necessary ulcers. Dr. David Cuccia, founder of Modulated Imaging, personally showed us around the place.
Irvine Pharmaceutical Services takes care of everything from physical synthesis of an idea to clinical testing for Big Pharma companies that need help with their endeavors. We got to tour several of the facilities and see the tests in action.
Finally, we toured the expansive Edwards Lifesciences, which manufactures heart valves and is a leader in hemodynamic monitoring. The campus is perfectly designed for tours, with wide windows letting us peek into quality monitoring of heart valves, creation of new designs, and a huge factory-meets-medical-lab where workers hand-stitch the biological component of the heart valves to a metal mesh.
In the Cove, I’ve been busy working with Spencer on mapping out our paid media and content strategy. So far, we’ve created different post segments that have been commonly used on social media channels in the past, and are trying to determine which post segment maps to a desired KPI for UCI Applied Innovation. Both of us, along with Ryan (another intern) have also spent some time on creating persona profiles for user demographics. By coming up with possible pathways for user awareness, engagement, and advocacy of UCI Applied Innovation, we are starting to narrow down where we want our limited budget to be spent across our four main social media channels.
At Chicklabs, I’m busy with a couple projects for companies in our portfolio. This includes continued work on all things Immuno Gum, the results of which I can divulge in a few months. I’m also starting the Insightly CRM implementation with Matt, gathering the necessary info and CSVs from key initial users to make the rollout and switch-over process as painless as possible.
Andrew Jabara 