Celebration of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
2025 Student Innovator of the Year: Anna Li
Anna Li’s carefully planned life took a 180-degree turn three years ago when she fell headfirst into the deep end of the innovation and entrepreneurship pool.
Impulsive? Maybe. But totally in character for the daughter of immigrants who has seen sacrifice and service modeled her entire life, and an ardent patient advocate who will do whatever it takes to get the job done.
When presented with an opportunity to make a positive impact, the University of Pittsburgh MD/PhD student doesn’t look around to see if somebody else steps forward. She grabs it with both hands with no intention of looking back.
For her determination to empower people to understand and advocate for their own healthcare from a place that is comfortable and convenient for them, initially via an innovative new electronic stethoscope, Li has been selected as the 2025 Student Innovator of the Year by the Pitt Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE).
Born to Run
Li matter-of-factly recounts that she owes her existence to her parents’ monumental decision to leave China with her older brother to escape that country’s previous One-Child Policy after her conception as an “illegal second child”. It’s a psychic legacy that can help explain her compulsion to explore new opportunities.
“I care too much about all the things,” she said. “It’s hard to map. I’m both Type A and Type B personalities. My natural tendency is to be spontaneous and chill. But I have had experiences in my life that have forced me to be a focused and driven,” she said.
One of the prime experiences that has focused her is a close childhood friendship with a young woman suffering from cystic fibrosis while growing up in North Carolina. That experience sparked her interest in medicine and pushing the boundaries of possibility and remains close to her heart.
Starting at age 15, Li began studying the disease. She currently works in the lab of Pitt microbiology professor Vaughn Cooper, where she is engineering bacteriophages to fight lung infections in CF patients as she pursues a joint MD/PhD from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University. She recently returned from the 2025 North America Cystic Fibrosis Conference in Seattle, WA, where she gave a talk on her work.
Li’s refusal to give up on things she cares about also extends to animals, including her beloved canine companion, Winston. As an undergraduate at Duke University, she was helping to train a service dog to assist people in wheelchairs when it was diagnosed with liver disease that wasn’t responding to treatment, leading to the dog’s release from the program.
“I decided to adopt him back, and we got re-certified as a therapy dog team, which was a piece of cake for Winston,” she said. They now visit the hospital regularly, particularly the ER, to cheer up patients, especially those who might not have a support person with them – because she knows how it feels.
“When I first got to Pittsburgh, I had the unfortunate experience of having a ruptured ovarian cyst. I had never experienced that before and still remember how scared I was to be alone at the ER for the first time in my life. A friend – even in dog form – would’ve made all the difference in changing that from a traumatic experience to a comforting one, and that’s what I hope to bring to my patients.”
Inspiration Strikes in the ER
While her research focuses on cystic fibrosis, Li’s entrepreneurial journey began during a rotation in the emergency room. It dawned on her that many patients in the ER could be empowered to take control of their own health monitoring and potentially avoid traumatic and costly ER visits. She quickly devised an idea for an electronic stethoscope that people can use to measure vital signs of the heart and lungs from home.
In collaboration with a friend, Akshaya Anand, a machine-learning graduate student from the University of Maryland, she founded Korion Health and entered the 2022 Randall Family Big Idea Competition hosted by the Big Idea Center, Pitt’s hub for student innovation (part of the OIE).
They were awarded a modest $2,000 4th-place prize, but the value they received from the month-long competition and mentorship extended far beyond that. The experience of crafting her pitch and having her idea validated in the eyes of experienced entrepreneurs gave her the confidence to continue pursuing the device’s commercial potential.
Next up was a pitch competition hosted by the Product Development Managers Association (PDMA) in which she won free first place in the graduate-student category, with the award including consulting hours from local companies such as Bally Design and Lexicon Design that she said “helped me take my half-baked idea and turn it into a prototype to show to investors.”
“This was a high yield for the effort. If it’s something they can hold in their hands it really helps communicate the value proposition,” she added.
From there, things began to snowball. On the same day that she won the UpPrize Social Innovation Competition sponsored by Bank of New York in the racial equity category ($75k), she won the first place prize from the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator ($50k). The resulting publicity attracted the attention of organizers of the Hult Prize Competition, a global student startup competition that receives thousands of applicants each year, who invited her to apply.
“I didn’t know anything about the Hult Prize competition. At first, I thought it was spam,” she admitted.
She had no illusions of advancing to the finals near London, let alone winning the top prize of $1 million: until she did.
Drawing Support from the Pittsburgh Ecosystem
Li is the first to credit the people, in addition to her co-founder, who have helped her get this far and a city that she said has embraced her like a daughter, and wants to see her succeed.
After the Big Idea Competition, as she began working on a prototype of her device, she connected with Brian Beyer, CEO of Pittsburgh AI computer vision company Hellbender.
“I had a basic medical and engineering background, but no audio engineering,” Li said. “Brian listened patiently to me as I vented about the problems I was seeing in patient accessibility and said, ‘I think I can help you.’ He’s been an unwavering support ever since. Actually, he is so kind that sometimes I worry about him.”
Li said she didn’t have any money, but Beyer and the Hellbender team believed in her and agreed to do the initial work in exchange for a small equity stake.
“Hellbender is so good at creative problem solving, and they are intensely humanistic. It doesn’t feel transactional working with them. Every interaction is a delight filled with inspiration and mutual admiration for our complementary skillsets, not to mention humor and creative problem-solving,” she said.
Another person she connected with through the PDMA competition was Julie Gulick, CEO of industrial design firm Bally Design.
“Anna is brilliant, dedicated, and deeply focused on bringing her product to market. She genuinely cares about the user and is driven to create something meaningful for them. What impresses me most is her resilience — she just never stops working,” Gulick said.
Gulick said her first encounter with Li involved a whiteboard session talking through business fundamentals and product-market fit. Gulick credits her for seeking feedback through every available source, including social media.
“She is resourceful in the way true entrepreneurs are, building a network around her and learning from it on the fly,” she said.
Rhonda Schuldt, director of the Big Idea Center, which invested $25,000 in Korion through its Big Idea Advantage Fund, said Li’s unwavering tenacity to solve challenging problems and bring impactful value to the world epitomizes what it takes to be an innovative and entrepreneurial change-maker.
“It was a no-brainer to select Anna as our 2025 Student Innovator of the Year,” Schuldt said. “Any student who, like Anna, desires to take on big challenges and make an impact is exactly who the Big Idea Center is here to support, and we’re thrilled to honor her.”
“Anna’s approach to taking on big challenges and her desire to make an impact are exactly the qualities that the Big Idea Center is seeking for in students participating in our programs,” she said.
The support Li said she has received from neighbors and even strangers has been just as valuable. For somebody who is used to selflessly caring and advocating for others, she believes she has found a cosmic match in the people of Pittsburgh.
“My realtor Mikal Merlina, who helped me buy a house, was also one of the first to invest (in Korion). He also introduced me to a videographer who volunteered to put up our first promotional video on our website, sent me food from a local company called Harvie when I was stressed… honestly he’s a bit more of a dad than a realtor, but I think that humanism and always looking out for each other is one of the things that makes Pittsburgh so special,” she said.
When she moved into her house, she scouted for bargain furniture on Facebook and ended up with four people who delivered her various pieces of furniture and sundries that she needed.
“My neighbor next door regularly checks in on me, and she just made me chili and helps me walk my dog when I’m out of town,” she said.
“We might not have as much financial capital for startups as we need for startups in Pittsburgh, but the social capital embedded in our community is incredible. I have lived in North Carolina and Seattle before Pittsburgh, and I have never been treated like family by total strangers the way I have been in Pittsburgh,” she said.
Empowering Patients
Korion’s device is plugged into a computer with a USB connector. The accompanying app guides users through the recording of lung and heart sounds that can be downloaded and shared with a doctor.
For use during telemedicine appointments, the device has a flashing LED light so that it can be used under a shirt, with the medical professional guiding the user on where to place the device on the body while the patient remains clothed to maintain their privacy. This simple addition makes a huge difference for those who may be uncomfortable being unclothed on camera or who have trauma that causes them to avoid care.
Li said she is learning through her medical training that one of the most important skills practitioners must learn is to listen to their patients and understand their fears and how to be a partner in helping them make the best decisions for their health.
“A lot of the barriers for healthcare are psychological and cultural, and I think we really don’t talk about those barriers enough and how to bridge them,” she said. She hopes Korion gives patients the confidence to take control of their health via educational tools and analytics. The stethoscope is the first of what Li said could be a suite of home health monitoring devices for Korion.
Next Steps
Li is working to submit Korion’s flagship device, called the SoundHeart, to the FDA in the coming weeks for approval of the digital stethoscope itself, with follow-on approvals in the future for its computer vision-based guided interface and machine learning algorithms.
She is also collaborating with Dr Agnes Koczo, a cardiologist at UPMC Magee, on a study for post-partum women who develop cardiac problems to use the device to monitor fluid overload. Another project with Dr.’s Jared Magnani and Eric Dueweke at UPMC would use the devices for remote monitoring of congestive heart failure.
Her goal is to complete her PhD in the Pitt-CMU Computational Biology Program at the end of 2026, before returning to medical school to finish her last two years of clinical, where she can funnel her learnings back to Korion for future product development.
As she focuses on her goals of graduating and becoming ER doctor and full-time patient advocate, Korion welcomes the Gretchen Jezerc to its leadership team, who brings long-time experience in marketing for electronic stethoscope and growing startups.
When asked about her immediate hopes for the future, she doesn’t hesitate to admit that her biggest goal is to one day take a nap. A girl can dream, can’t she?
For any Pitt students seeking to step into your own change-making journey, check out the Big Idea Center’s upcoming ChangeMaker Series.