Khoury News
Khoury “Women Who Empower” winner designs her own major and drug discovery software
In customizing her degree, Hannah Wimpy blended a technical computing foundation with the healing power of pharmaceuticals. It's no surprise, then, that her new business venture fits that pattern.
Each year, Northeastern University recognizes a cohort of trailblazers through the Women Who Empower Innovator Awards.
Launched in 2021, the awards celebrate bold and creative women looking to create change across the university community and the world by reshaping industries and advancing ideas. It’s more than just an award program, as it provides funding, mentorship, and a platform for innovators to scale their impact. Over five years, the organization has distributed $1.8 million to 133 recipients.
This year, three honorees emerged from the Khoury College community. Among them is Hannah Wimpy, a student entrepreneur whose ventures exemplify the marriage of technology and social impact. Her award is the latest milestone in an academic journey defined by interdisciplinarity and curiosity.
“I came into college and I couldn’t find a major that I liked. None of them fit exactly, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I make one?’” said Wimpy, a Stamps Scholar in the John Martinson Honors Program. “I used to be a pharmacy technician, so I was interested in pharmaceuticals. I also ran my own full-stack development firm in high school. Computational biophysics combines all of that — biochemistry, computer science, and physics.”
Her independent major allows her to take courses ranging from quantum physics to machine learning to biochemistry.
“Most of it is math,” she said. “Some people would hate that, but math is the foundation of everything. I never get bored.”
At Northeastern’s Center for Drug Discovery, Wimpy developed new methods to understand how molecules interact within the body. Later, while on co-op at Harvard Medical School, she created machine learning models of voltage-gated ion channels.
“Ion channels are important for anything from epilepsy to autism — they literally dictate how our bodies function,” she explained. “I became really interested in modeling them so that we could understand them better and make better drugs for diseased ion channels. My work uses continuous Bayesian networks, which help us do things we couldn’t with previous models.”
These experiences inspired her to launch Ionova, a software platform that streamlines the drug discovery pipeline.
“Ionova is an end-to-end drug discovery platform,” Wimpy said. “It’s really a bioinformatics pipeline that automates all the little things that slowed me down as a researcher. Right now, we’re focused on coding and building cloud infrastructure, but our goal is to bring preclinical workflows from weeks or months to just days.”
Ionova helps scientists move more efficiently from hypothesis to experiment by providing computational tools that model molecular behavior.
“It’s by scientists, for scientists,” Wimpy added. “Anything that drives you in business should come from real problems. We’re automating the tedious steps in between, so researchers can focus on the parts that are actually intellectually stimulating.”
This project exemplifies Wimpy’s passion for using computer science to accelerate biomedical breakthroughs. Already, Ionova has begun automating aspects of the discovery process that previously required weeks of manual work. Wimpy hopes the platform will be used by everyone from big pharma to academic labs and researchers, even those without huge budgets.
And as she works to make it happen, she’s glad to have a new community to support her.
“I was on the e-board of WISE (Women Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship), and that was really impactful for me — being part of a community of women entrepreneurs who actually want to do something interesting,” she said. “What’s amazing about Women Who Empower isn’t just the funding, it’s being part of this supportive network. When the awards were announced, everyone was congratulating each other in the group chat. Sometimes it can be really hard to be a founder alone, but this community makes it feel less lonely.”
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