Founder · Engineer
Make life simpler.
A hardware attachment that gives first responders visual radio information.
The problem
First responders coordinate by voice. The radio carries the call, the instruction, the update — and every bit of it arrives as audio, in a room that is already loud.
What I do
Fig. 01 — the premise: sound first, then sight.
Two systems built to read tissue: a spatial frequency domain imager in the ultraviolet, and a laser speckle imager.
The problem
Some of what matters most in tissue can't be seen by looking at it. Oxygenation, scattering, blood flow — the quantities that decide an outcome are optical properties, and they arrive as light the sample has already scattered on its way back out.
What I do
Fig. 02 — light in, measurement out.
03 — About
I'm an engineer and a founder. I study biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, where I do imaging research in the Durr Lab, and I run Avenyx Inc., a company building a hardware attachment that gives first responders visual radio information.
Both come down to the same problem. Information that matters rarely arrives in a convenient form — it arrives as sound in a loud room, as light that tissue has already scattered, as something to interpret while you are already moving.
So I build for the moment of use rather than the moment of demonstration: equipment that holds up in the field, and information a person can take in at a glance.
I'm drawn just as strongly to the capital side of this work — venture and finance, where the same question gets asked at the scale of a portfolio: which problems are worth the years they cost. Instrument, measurement, decision. I want to work where hardware, medicine, and capital meet.
Company
Avenyx Inc. — founder
Research
Durr Lab, Johns Hopkins — biomedical imaging
Study
Johns Hopkins University — biomedical engineering
Approach
Three habits, each of them earned by a constraint rather than a preference.
The person this is built for will meet it while moving, wearing gloves, under noise and time pressure. If it only works in a quiet demo, it doesn't work.
Avenyx — first-responder radio
Biomedical engineering begins with the body and the environment — heat, weight, tolerance, consequence — and designs inward. The constraint isn't the obstacle standing in front of the brief. It is the brief.
BME — Johns Hopkins University
As a founder, the difficult part can't be handed off. The hardware, the product, and the decision about what not to build stay in one pair of hands.
Avenyx Inc. — founder
04 — CV
Hardware, biomedical imaging, and entrepreneurship.
Biomedical engineering
Founder
Building a hardware attachment that gives first responders visual radio information.
Biomedical imaging
05 — Contact
I'm glad to hear from people hiring, from investors and funds, and from teams building hardware for the field or instruments for the clinic. Email reaches me directly; LinkedIn is a close second.
Owen Cheung — owc.fyi
Back to home