President & Co-founder of Innolitics
After earning his biomedical engineering degree, David Giese began pursing his doctorate at Boston University with a focus on optical microscopy. Although he enjoyed research, he slowly realized his true passion was coding, so he shifted gears and pursued software development full time.
Now, he is the president of Innolitics, a medical imaging software development company he founded with two other BME alumni—Yujan Shrestha (B.S. 2010) and Andrew Mark (B.S. 2012).
The company began when Mark along with another student Daniel Hensley (B.S. 2010) worked on a startup with a connection through Professor Ken Diller. The two asked for Giese’s help. Later Hensley left to attend graduate school and Yujan Shrestha joined the team. Since then they have hired two more full time employees.
The team typically works on 4 or 5 projects at a time. Currently they are working on projects that range from simulating the effects of radiation therapy plans in cancer patients, to building control software for magnetic pulse sequences, to building custom dashboards on top of hospital’s medical record systems.
Giese has been working with his partner Yujan Shrestha since their time at UT. They both worked together for a year with Professor Mia Markey on algorithms to analyze mammograms and identify particular types of breast cancer. They also worked for a year with John Zhang, now at Dartmouth, to develop a control system for a near field scanning optical microscope.
Giese chose to study biomedical engineering because it touches on so many different scientific fields.
He says the classes he remembers most were Markey’s statistics and James Tunnell’s intro to computing. “As someone who codes and builds software for a living, Professor Tunnell’s intro to computing class was one of most memorable and useful. Learning the fundamentals of how a computer works before moving up to higher-level programming languages, rather than moving from the complex to the simple, was a fantastic way to learn.”
Giese credits UT BME with teaching him how to analyze and solve problems as well as providing him with great personal connections in the field.
“I haven’t used my organic chemistry skills much, but I met a lot of incredible people that I have stayed in touch with—and I learned how to think critically and solve challenging problems.”
Looking toward the future, Giese wants to continue focusing on medical software and growing Innolitics from three people to 15-20 in the next year and a half.
