June 6, 2025

Listen to 4th Annual Endowed DELV Lecture by Dr. Nithya Ramanathan, Nexleaf Analytics

Dr. Ramanathan visited UW on Tuesday, June 3rd to deliver a keynote sharing her work as the CEO and Co-Founder of Nexleaf Analytics, a tech non-profit building solutions for holistic digital transformation for governments across Africa and Asia. Her talk highlighted Nexleaf’s distinguishing traits of centering Ministry of Health needs, and recognizing that data and technology are not silver bullets, but rather must operate in the context of broader human systems.

Dr. Ramanathan’s career has been distinguished by being early or first in applying technology to solve large-scale problems. For her PhD thesis work, she developed and deployed high-tech sensor networks to monitor arsenic levels in groundwater in Bangladesh. As a faculty researcher at UCLA, with support from the NIH, she led a team to develop one of the early smartphone based apps for monitoring diet, stress, and exercise. Upon graduation, she co-founded Nexleaf Analytics, a 501(c)(3), one of the earliest companies in global health to design and manufacture real-time sensor tech in global health, with the aim of adapting cutting-edge technologies to eliminate childhood mortality from vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Watch the full recording here.