Alumni Profiles Series: Kit Yee Au-Yeung

Dr. Kit Yee Au-Yeung attended Duke University for her undergraduate and graduate degrees in biomedical engineering (BME), then completed a postdoctoral fellowship working in Biodesign at Stanford. During her time at Stanford, she was part of a team that founded iRhythm to develop sensor-patches to detect arrhythmias. Dr. Au-Yeung spent the next seven years at Proteus Digital Health, a company that pioneered ingestible sensors to track medication adherence, followed by six years at Profusa, where she ended her tenure as a vice president. In the following years, her product management career took her to X, the moonshot factory and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company to Google). She is currently general manager for the medical division at SandboxAQ, where she works on a functional cardiac imaging device. She is also currently on the executive leadership team with the American Heart Association. Hear more from her in a recent podcast with Device Talks.

Tell me about yourself.

I was at Duke for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees, so I spent roughly ten years in Durham. I completed my Ph.D. work with Dr. Wolf, who retired in June. My Ph.D. focused on atrial fibrillation (AF), which is an arrhythmia affecting the upper chambers of the heart. I designed and built a telemetry system to study AF in animal models. I met my husband, who was also a BME Ph.D. student, during my graduate program, and we got married at Duke Chapel.

What led you to pursue biomedical engineering at Duke?

I was born and raised in Hong Kong and moved to the U.S. at 16 years old to complete my last two years of high school. I recall seeing parents taking their kids to campus tours, but I actually applied to Duke without even setting foot on campus and decided to come here. It was a leap of faith, and it was a great choice. I knew early on that I wanted to study BME, because I loved biology in high school. Duke was an easy choice given that path of study.  I feel like there is an unspoken motto at Duke: “Work hard, play hard.” When it’s basketball season, there is camping out, and this balances the rigor of academic and scientific pursuits. That worked well for me.

Was it scary to go to undergrad and grad school at the same institution?

It was. To be honest with you, some of the choices were financially dependent. As an international student, it is difficult to find financial support for graduate study. Duke’s Ph.D. program is committed to you from day one. Some other programs require you to pay until you earn your master’s degree. So, Duke was the right choice for me, as I knew and admired several professors at Duke and really liked the work they were doing.

What pushed you toward entrepreneurship?

Early on in my graduate school years, I learned that I was more motivated by immediate and tangible impact over building a set of publications. I remember one course, Devices for People with Disabilities, that was like a hook for me. In that class, you were assigned a client and had to build something useful for that client. It reinforced that I wanted to pursue industry over academia. It helps that Dr. Wolf has been doing cardiology and instrumentation for a long time, so he has really strong connections with companies, especially ones specializing in medical devices. I had the opportunity to spend a summer here in the Bay Area and experience what it is like to work in industry, especially at a startup. That was a formative experience and helped solidify my desire to pursue a path in the medtech industry.

Tell me about being on the founding team of iRhythm.

I was lucky: I was at the right place at the right time. I like to look at the inflection points in my life, which were formative moments. One of those moments was when Dr. Wolf handed me a letter about Stanford Biodesign Fellowhip. That program recruits two teams of four people with different backgrounds. You spend a year at Stanford as fellows identifying and solving an unmet clinical need. We spent the first two months doing clinical immersion, where we shadowed clinicians and doctors to see different procedures. Sometimes, it was a surgical procedure, sometimes a pacemaker implantation, or an outpatient assessment visit like a stress test. Our job was to find the biggest clinical problem and to come up with an idea to address it.

Our team had individuals with very different backgrounds. We had an electro-physiologist, myself as a Ph.D. in BME, an MBA from Stanford Business School, and a mechanical engineer. We had to look at patient impact, create a viable business plan, and build prototype to convey and test our ideas. We also pitched our idea to venture capitalists and startup competitions. That was how iRhythm was born. Through this program, we came up with a patch-based solution that could detect arrhythmia, replacing Holter monitoring that was cumbersome for patients to use—and the rest is history.

I was only with iRhythm in its initial year at Stanford along with my 3 inventors. At that time, I had a lot of imposter syndrome and wondered if I was the right person to continue to build iRhythm, since I had just graduated. Three of the four of us pursued other opportunities instead. I joined another company, Proteus, to learn how to design and run preclinical & clinical studies, but have remained in close contact with iRhythm and with my co-inventors.

Do you regret leaving?

I do not. If I had remained at iRthym in a technical role, I knew I wasn’t experienced enough to make the best decisions for the business, and I would always feel that someone else should be put in the position to accelerate the company and to create positive patient impact quicker.

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Tell me about your work roles.

Right now I am at a company called SandboxAQ, which is a spinoff of GoogleX. I am building a diagnostic device for cardiology, which aims to help physicians triage heart attacks faster and more accurately. Having been in the medtech world for 20 years, building useful medical devices is a passion of mine and it is one way to contribute.

Another way to contribute is serving on the American Heart Association’s executive team. We raise awareness about what the American Heart Association is doing, and through our connections and contacts, we raise money for research and bring more people to the research roundtable. It’s great exposure for me to a wider network of physicians. We see each other every month and work towards the same goal. It’s a different way to contribute. 

Does this additional work add more stress?

At this stage of my career, I prefer my “plate” to have different flavors; each one is designed to fulfill a particular need. Building devices is one, using connections to help a cause that I believe in is another. Another need of mine is mentoring. Having close and productive relationships with my mentees is important to me, so that they do not make the same mistakes I have made. What interests me and what I spend time on is always evolving.

What is the most exciting thing about your work?

Imagining, planning, and building a novel imaging device is fascinating to me. We are lucky to have the partnerships of well-known research institutions like Mt. Sinai Hospital and the Mayo Clinic (and I’d love to add Duke to the mix!). There are a lot of challenges ahead, but building a team, a network of believers to join us on this journey makes it fun and exhilarating.

How do you think about work-life balance?

As a foreign student I certainly felt the pressure to excel in my academic work and in my career because my parents have worked so hard for me to have this opportunity. I wanted to make them proud. This came with the price of feeling anxious, feeling not good enough; at times it was quite lonely.  I am glad that your generation thinks more about mental health compared to my generation.

What are some activities that help you prevent feeling burned out?

My husband and I love doing partner CrossFit workouts at least once a week. We have been doing that since 2016. This is what keeps our marriage alive—doing activities together.

What is the best career advice you’ve received?

The best advice I’ve received is not chasing titles and climbing promotion ladders as a way to progress, but rather choosing problems that you want to solve, or learning a new domain or skill. It is really hard to have that mindset early on in your career, because we are so used to “climbing the ladder,” i.e. first grade, second grade, etc. Instead, find a domain that interests you, be flexible and move around. I really like startups, because you wear multiple hats and you expose yourself to multiple things. You find out what you’re good at (and not good at) really quickly.

The process of elimination can also be very helpful. Early on, I tried working at a startup and at a bigger company, and I quickly realized that I prefer startups. So, crossing that out was useful. I really focused on the skills I needed to excel at startups. So, don’t get too stuck on the ladder, and allow yourself to try different things.

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AUTHOR

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Japneet Kaur Mavi

Ph.D. student, Biomedical Engineering

Japneet Kaur Mavi is a first-year Ph.D. student with Randles Lab in the Biomedical Engineering Department. She received her B.S. in physics with a minor in electrical engineering technology from Purdue University. Her current work with Randles Lab explores using computational fluid dynamics to understand cardiovascular health. Beyond her research, she likes to spend time outdoors hiking, painting, exploring exhibits, attending theatrical and orchestral performances, reimagining mangas, playing sports leisurely, discovering new bakeries, smelling flowers, and finding new activities to add to her collection.