Positive impact
After briefly majoring in physical therapy at a Saudi Arabian college, Alturkestani found her way to Temple University’s then-relatively new bioengineering program in 2015. A year before, her parents—high school principals in Saudi Arabia—had moved her family to Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Alturkestani wasn’t the only one in her family to find home at Temple—her brother Abdulaziz earned his Temple mechanical engineering degree in 2020; this spring, another brother, Abdullrahman, who has suffered concussions while boxing, is entering the Fox School of Business.
As a senior, she was helping with concussion drug research in the Biomechanics Lab of Kurosh Darvish, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, when she began thinking about the need for much quicker diagnosis of the condition. “It was easy to talk to him about it, and he was very supportive,” she said. “He inspired me to start thinking about the need for developing a diagnostic device for mild traumatic brain injuries.”
The following summer, she began working on her idea when she participated in the Temple Fox School of Business accelerator program and was awarded a Lori Hermelin Bush Seed Fund grant for female entrepreneurs.
Then, four years ago, while earning her master of biomedical engineering degree at Cornell University, she founded Conan MedTech Corp. in Ithaca, New York. Her startup’s prototype concussion detector works similarly to some COVID-19 tests. Saliva collected with a swab is deposited in a simple detection device; via an app, results are available in less than a half hour.
“It is challenging to be a female engineer and entrepreneur,” she said. “But we need women in STEM. I want to empower women in the future to do what I am doing.”