Three Fellows Win 2019 Forbes “30 Under 30” Honors

Forbes’ 2019 “30 Under 30” list includes three Hertz Fellows leading the way in healthcare innovation: Megan Blewett, Kyle Loh and Cameron Myhrvold. They are among 600 trailblazers working in 20 industries to receive Forbes’ annual honors.

“Forbes describes this group as ‘a collection of bold risk-takers putting a new twist on the old tools of the trade,’” Hertz Foundation President Robbee Baker Kosak said. “We have appreciated the promise of Megan, Kyle and Cameron’s deep intellectual curiosity, drive and creativity from the moment we named them as Fellows. We couldn’t be more pleased that the wider world is now more aware of their vision.”

Blewett is an associate on the healthcare team at Venrock, a venture capital firm in Palo Alto, CA. She focuses on biotech and therapeutics investments. Prior to Venrock, she was a Hertz Fellow with Ben Cravatt at The Scripps Research Institute, where she earned a PhD in chemistry. Her PhD work explored the mechanism of action of the multiple sclerosis therapeutic Tecfidera and helped form the foundation of the biotech company Vividion. Blewett has a longstanding interest in epidemiology, and while a PhD student, she founded the healthcare analytics company VoxHealth. Through a partnership with Google, VoxHealth data is now a part of Google’s health knowledge graph. Blewett received an AB/AM in chemistry from Harvard University, where she spent nearly all four years working in the lab of chemistry Nobel Laureate EJ Corey.

Loh is an assistant professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, where his laboratory focuses on generating pure populations of desired human cell-types in a dish from embryonic stem cells. They have generated human bone progenitors, heart progenitors and liver progenitors in a dish, each of which are capable of regenerating their respective human tissues in mouse models. The long-term goal is to use embryonic stem cells to generate a limitless source of human cells to transplant into patients in need of cell or organ transplants. Ongoing work in the laboratory is focused on preventing patients’ immune systems from rejecting immunologically-foreign, embryonic stem cell-derived tissues. Loh received his PhD from Stanford University. He continued at Stanford as the Siebel Investigator and later, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Developmental Biology and the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine. His laboratory’s research is supported by the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and private philanthropy.

Myhrvold is a postdoctoral fellow in the Sabeti lab at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, where he and Catherine Freije are using a technology based on CRISPR enzymes to detect germs, as only 10 percent of viruses can be detected by FDA-approved diagnostic tests right now. They are hopeful that similar technology might lead to new medicines. Myhrvold received a PhD in systems biology from Harvard University. In 2011, he graduated from Princeton University, majoring in molecular biology with a certificate in quantitative and computational biology.

The Hertz Foundation is proud to highlight this outstanding professional accomplishment as one of many received by the nearly 1,200 Hertz Fellows. In total, Hertz Fellows hold more than 3,000 patents and have founded more than 200 companies. Even those early in their careers are being acknowledged as very promising. In the last two years alone, eight Hertz Fellows, including Megan, Kyle and Cameron, have been named among the Forbes “30 Under 30” in Science. This is a well-deserved acknowledgment of the extraordinary work they’ve done.