Thirty-one Northeastern students, graduates and affiliated entrepreneurs have been selected as recipients of the university’s 2025 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. Now in its fifth year, the initiative has invested more than $1.8 million in funding to members of Northeastern’s entrepreneurial community as they build and advance their endeavors.
Muskaan “Mukki” Gill, E’26, knows how difficult it can be living with seizures. Her younger brother, Zor, has Dravet syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes random, frequent and prolonged seizures. Seeing how this affected her brother’s life, the 2024 Innovator Awards recipient created ZOR!, an app that will help patients and caretakers track their seizures, along with the help of 16 of her Northeastern classmates. A beta version of the app is expected to launch on September 1, 2025.
Melissa LaCasse is taking aim at the problem of single-use plastic waste with her company, Tanbark, which fabricates packaging using molded fiber, a biodegradable wood-based material.
Michelle DeBlois created ReMo, a web-based platform that puts students and their teachers behind the wheel when it comes to reading.
Rachel Cossar created Virtual Sapiens, an AI tool that helps professionals and teams master their presence and communication at scale, to make people aware of their body language.
Mariana Charakopoulou Travlou is the founder of Nous Health, a digital platform that enables patients to connect with mental health professionals.
Debbie Madueke founded Replast, a recycling company that aims to solve plastic pollution in Nigeria by refining and reforming single-use plastics while contributing to the socio-economic advancement of a low-income population.
Fatema Janahi’s venture, Palm, is an e-commerce platform designed to empower women to express their identities through cultural fashion and uplift local designers across the MENA region.
Claudia Tobar co-founded Kamina, a digital financial platform that provides advisory, access, and assessment support developed specifically for women and non-banked individuals.
Rama Doddi’s venture, RegINTL, is designed to help small- to medium-sized companies map out their particular regulatory landscape—and then provide solutions for navigating it.