Professor Jaspal Sandhu on how research on human-centered design for public health led him to Hopelab
Back in 2003, when Professor Jaspal Sandhu was in his second year of graduate school at UC Berkeley College of Engineering, a chance trip to India rerouted his career.
In Madurai, he visited the Aravind Eye Care System, whose mission is to save people’s sight—especially those too poor to pay for treatment. He was intrigued by Aravind’s high-volume, high-quality work performing cataract surgery and developing new surgical products via its Aurolab division. Upon his return, Sandhu joined a group of Berkeley graduate students who were working with Aravind on global health and what they dubbed “human-centered design”—the notion that design should place the users’ needs first.
Sandhu was quickly hooked on human-centered design. After earning his Berkeley engineering PhD in 2008, he was invited by Berkeley Public Health Professor Nap Hosang to develop a class in the emerging field. Together, in Spring 2011, Sandhu, Hosang, and Berkeley Public Health Professor Kristine Madsen launched Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions, the first human-centered design course in any school of public health.
Since then Sandhu has continued working at the crossroads of design, technology and public health—focusing in particular on youth mental health. He has also continued to teach interdisciplinary design at Berkeley Public Health and from 2016 to 2021 served as faculty lead for the Fung Fellowship, a venture between the school of public health and the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership.
Sandhu is also a board member and professor of practice at the BPH Wallace Center for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health. His focus there has been on reducing racial disparities in reproductive health.
While teaching at UC Berkeley, he has also continued to work in the private sector, often creating partnerships between academic researchers, students and businesses.
In 2009, Sandhu co-founded Gobee Group, which worked as a “go-between”, matching technology company engineers with public health groups to develop products to improve people’s lives. Over the course of ten years, Gobee Group launched two medical devices for newborns and infants. During the 2015 ebola epidemic, Gobee Group worked on the ground with USAID in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. They digitized data which mapped the spread of ebola, giving public health officials a better chance of stopping it.
Gobee also partnered with the Blue Shield of California Foundation to spawn the Reimagine Lab, the first innovation lab for domestic violence prevention.
In May 2022, after closing Gobee Group, Sandhu became Executive Vice President of Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor, that works to support the mental well-being of adolescents ages 10–25, especially BIPOC and LGBTQ+ young people.
Backed by The Omidyar Group, Hopelab funds equity-centered social impact projects that advance mental health.
Sandhu is especially proud of the Hopelab researchers’ annual national surveys with Common Sense Media and NORC, a research center affiliated with University of Chicago, that show that while social media continues to pose risks, it also plays a beneficial role in supporting the mental health and well-being of young people—especially those from marginalized communities.
We spoke with Sandhu in July 2024. He had just closed an exhibit by students in the Art of Public Health, the class Sandhu co-teaches with Somalee Banerjee and acts as an introduction to the ways that art shapes public health practice. It is organized into three modules: communication, advocacy, and community.
BPH: You like to teach hopefulness and kindness—how do you do that? Is it teachable?
JS: It’s such a good question, and I’m buying time with my non-answer. It bridges the work that I do at Hopelab and Berkeley.
Hope is in our name, and hope is intrinsic in what we do in public health. At Hopelab, we believe in equity deeply.
Right now, there’s a lot of the world that doesn’t buy into that, that doesn’t support the rights of young people, of Black young people, of trans youth, of LGBTQ+ youth. The only way to be able to sustain oneself in this work is with hope. You have to have a dose of optimism. That doesn’t mean being pollyannaish or unrealistic about the world. But you’ve got to believe that we can make it better. If we don’t, then we shouldn’t be in this line of work.
So much of it, for me, is about community. At UC Berkeley, hopefulness and kindness have always been a part of how we’ve approached teaching—the way we experiment and create a sense of psychological safety.
BPH: Tell me about your work with the Wallace Center.
JS: I’m mentoring a couple of our doctoral students, and I’m on two dissertation committees in the space of sexual and reproductive health. One of them, Renee Clarke, is looking at different models of postpartum care for black birthing people and moms-to-be. Ifunanya Dibiaezue is studying digital interventions to address contraceptive needs among young people in Nigeria.
BPH: How does your work at Hopelab connect to your students at BPH?
JS: The point of having work outside the university is that I’m able to bring knowledge, experience, and connections to the students and into the classroom. Some of that is through my own teaching, but some of it is guest speakers from Hopelab and friends of Hopelab. I had them come and speak in the art of public health.
And it’s helpful and enriching for me to be in the university environment among students who are pushing the boundaries on innovation. A big part of why my work has become more and more focused on health equity is because the students are pushing me to better places. It’s not because of a mandate.
And sometimes students come and work with me. It happened many times at Gobee and has happened a few times so far at Hopelab.
BPH: Tell me about the companies Hopelab is investing in.
JS: We make venture investments and have invested in more than 20 companies now. The idea has always been to invest in early-stage companies that are doing work in some aspect of youth mental health and that have the ability to serve the young people that we care about—whether that’s BIPOC young people or LGBTQ+ young people.
BPH: Can you give me an example?
JS: One of the earliest companies we invested in is called Equip, which focuses on eating disorders. It is a technology-enabled solution that is really focused on improving access to eating disorder treatment.
They have a multidisciplinary care team model, with a physician or other health care provider; and a therapist, a dietician, and mentors.
The gold standard of eating disorder treatment is residential. Residential treatment is very expensive. What Equip has been able to do is use technology to offer the same benefits—without the residential piece, so the young person is achieving full recovery, on whatever spectrum of eating disorder they’re facing, without a disruption to their life, and with a huge cost savings.
You know, with residential programs, there are sometimes complexities with having a number of young people together who are all challenged by eating disorders. So this way, they actually are able to stay in their home environment, they have this virtual care team and treatment plan. Technology enables them to get amazing outcomes at a much lower cost.
Equip is still at an early stage, but it has grown, and it’s doing very well. Equip provides services in all 50 states. They have also cracked the nut with insurance, which is hard to do.
BPH: Tell me about Backpack Health, which is already working with Medicaid, the federal health care system for people experiencing poverty.
JS: It’s a program of digital teletherapy and psychiatry services for young people receiving Medicaid benefits. As we think about reaching underserved young people and communities of color, Medicaid is a huge platform that we’ll want to be able to tap into. We approach that from a couple of sides; investing in companies that are already in Medicaid, and investing in companies that have an interest in getting into Medicaid. We work to really drive demand for companies to explore what Medicaid could look like.
Backpack Healthcare has a really interesting model where they’re engaging residents as therapists, so therapists are essentially training as residents.
In mental health, there’s a shortage of providers. It’s all I’ve heard for the two years I’ve been in this space. In addition to having fully licensed therapists, Backpack incorporates therapists in training who, as supervised residents, are able to provide services. So that’s one way that they’re able to scale and contribute to workforce development.
There are a couple of unique things about them. One is their singular focus on Medicaid. Two is their very dynamic CEO, Hafeezah Muhammad, who is a leader with vision and the ability to create momentum around her ideas.
BPH: And what about TRACE.
JS: We have been in the space of supporting young people who are going through different gender journeys in life. TRACE is for folks who are transgender and non-binary. It’s a mobile app focused on supporting gender-affirming journeys for people, including young people. It’s a closed community that allows young people to be set up in a community of allies and supporters.
There’s an intergenerational component to it as well. Most importantly, it’s a company founded by transgender folks. This is part of our ethos and hypothesis about the world – that it’s important to have company founders who have some level of lived experience with the challenges that they’re trying to solve. That experience makes them much better at creating solutions and seeing them through.
Lived experience can look quite different for different companies and founders, but we really value and seek that out when we’re making investments.
It also applies to some of our work elsewhere in Hopelab. This year we’ve landed on a strategy that supports young leaders.
BPH: Tell me more about that.
JS: You know we do impact investing, but Hopelab also does research. We have a research arm and entire research team, headed up by Dr. Amy Green, who used to be a professor at UC San Diego and was formerly with the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization.
We released a national survey that focuses on young people and their experiences with technology and mental health. We over-sampled with Black youth, Latinx, youth, and LGBTQ+-youth.
BPH: What did you find?
JS: There’s a narrative out there right now that all social media is bad. It’s really easy to demonize. But what we often see is that technology and social media can be highly protective for people from particular groups, in particular marginalized groups. It offers a place of refuge, a place of connection, of understanding, and of support. It’s not just neutral, but actually super helpful to young people, communities, and individuals, who are harmed by the world.
The study, “A Double-Edged Sword: How Diverse Communities of Young People Think About the Multifaceted Relationship Between Social Media and Mental Health,” was co-created with young people, who provided direction and input on the survey content and worked with the research team to prioritize and interpret results.
BPH: What else are you planning in the next year or so?
JS: We’re investing in young people to be at the table, making solutions for young people. It’s very sensible and intuitive. But it’s not something we’ve always done as an organization. One of our big efforts is called the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund. This is one of the first things that I did when I got to Hopelab. We worked with other funders to pull together a pooled fund to support young people who are working to make a better technology future for young people. To date we’ve supported 26 organizations led by young people, and we’ve just launched a second fund to support even more young innovators.
BPH: What's the hardest part of your job?
JS: It’s making sure that we don’t play it too safe. In the social impact space, the nonprofit space, the philanthropy space—it’s different from being in the private sector. It can become very tricky to think about how we deploy resources. Are we in the right place or are we playing it too conservatively? Should we be trying things that are perhaps riskier, but have a bigger upside?
My job is to figure out what that threshold is and where we might push a little bit further, a little bit differently, to create change that matters, because it sure feels like the whole world is pushing against the young people that we’re here to support.