Qian Qian Tang

Cooke Scholar

Qian Qian Tang was in the very first cohort of Cooke Young Scholars, and it transformed her life. The experiences she’s had and the people she’s met have inspired her to change the world.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, she attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a Cooke College Scholar.

“I remember being like this is where I need to be, this is where I belong,” Qian Qian said. “Once I got to Exeter, it just worked. I think that I owe a lot of that to the Foundation.”

At MIT, she first became interested in the intersection of technology and healthcare. She put that interest to good use when she helped launch the healthtech company Kinsa with the idea of building the first real time map to track and stop the spread of disease.

“I got to MIT and suddenly the world was about more than spending 10 years in a research lab, trying to potentially find a cure [for diseases],” Qian Qian said. “There were ways where you could prototype something or test something out and see the direct impact on the patient or the user within 6 months.”

At Kinsa, Qian Qian helped launch revolutionary healthtech products from concept to market in thousands of stores nationwide, including Apple, CVS and Best Buy. One of which was an innovated version of an already commonly used household product – the thermometer.

“I think technology brings these concepts that I’ve always had around healthcare and what it meant to be a healthy person or what it meant to take preventative health actions and it brings it into the modern age. It makes it accessible to more people. I think that is a tremendous world of possibility that I want to explore more,” Qian Qian said.

Qian Qian is now an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School.