Project Hope Selected for Kalyanpur-Maheshwari Grant for Global Health Innovation

Each semester, participants in the Sustainable Health Initiative Venture Development Program (SHI VDP) have the opportunity to pitch their projects for additional funding through the Kalyanpur-Maheshwari Grant for Global Health Innovation pitch competition.

The SHI VDP, housed within the Yale Institute for Global Health (YIGH), supports Yale student and trainee entrepreneurs across the university who share a goal of developing global health ventures. The program provides mentorship, workshops, and peer learning to help teams grow their work, with each aiming to improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries and underserved U.S. communities.

First launched in November 2024, the pitch competition invites each semester’s SHI VDP cohort to present their progress and vision for their project. The winning team receives a $5,000 award that helps propel these early-stage ventures forward.

“What we’re seeing through the SHI Venture Development Program is the power of student innovation when the right support, mentorship, and community are in place,” says Fatema Basrai, managing director of the Sustainable Health Initiative.

This fall’s event, held on November 21st, featured ventures from the SHI VDP’s Fall 2025 cohort, with teams pitching projects such as an AI-driven platform to map naloxone distribution, a therapeutic gaming tool embedding evidence-based mental health interventions, a digital art therapy platform for cancer patients, and a culturally responsive e-health service for Asian American Pacific Islander women.

The winner was decided by a panel of judges and selected based on criteria including engagement with the SHI VDP, milestones achieved, team experience and skills, innovativeness, and pitch clarity.

This year’s winning venture was Project Hope, founded by Samson Wong (Yale College ’27). Project Hope is a peer-to-peer mentorship network for children who have undergone organ transplantation, with aspirations to become the world’s first global mentorship program within the transplant community.

Wong, who studies global health, notes that the organization was inspired by his own lived experience as a liver transplant recipient. “When I was transplanted, the goal was to get patients to survive the next few months, maybe a year or two,” says Wong.

According to Wong, the 20-year survival rate for a pediatric liver transplant recipient is in excess of 80%. “We rarely discuss the psychosocial burdens of transplant, the late nights spent wrestling with our new identity, our changing health, and a whole new set of opportunities in front of us,” he adds.

Project Hope operates through dedicated education, mental health, research, and community engagement departments. The team creates age-appropriate transplant resources, provides resilience-building support, evaluates program outcomes, and maintains an online community for participants. The program is supported by an advisory board of transplant experts and an operations team of fellow transplant recipients with expertise in social work, education, and youth engagement.

Wong hopes that the grant from the pitch competition will support the organization’s expansion efforts, including opening 10 additional chapters. “Transplant is not limited to the U.S., and every transplant system looks different,” Wong states. “Our high-definition fidelity of being able to pick out local mentors, local teams, local leadership, means that we do have the capacity to expand nationally, and that's what this grant is all about. It's expanding our capacity, increasing our ability to engage at a local level, while also supporting a large national umbrella.”

The grant is funded by Arjun Kalyanpur, MD, and Sunita Maheswari, MBBS. The two completed their residencies and fellowships at the Yale School of Medicine before developing their business, TeleRadiology Solutions, together. Their organization aims to provide rapid, around-the-clock diagnostic support by transferring scans from hospitals worldwide to a global network of nearly 200 radiologists, enabled by cloud-based technology and emerging AI tools.

"This global approach is really important for healthcare. Learning from one part of the world and deploying similar solutions in other parts of the world is really the way forward for healthcare in general,” says Kalyanpur.