"If I really wanted to be an eved Hashem, I couldn’t afford to think small about myself"
What Yehudit’s professional path was unusual and inspiring. Following medical school, she was accepted to an exclusive program called Singularity University, which provides broad, interdisciplinary exposure to a number of fields, including biotechnology and bioinformatics, nanotechnology, medicine, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive computing. With a $25,000 scholarship from Google, she got a chance to hear first-hand from tech giants such as Larry Page and Vint Cerf, as well as a number of top scientists and entrepreneurs. She then embarked on a two-year biomedical scientist post-doctoral position at NASA Ames, a major research center in Silicon Valley, working on medical devices supporting long-duration space missions. After gaining years of experience in ultrasound research, Yehudit decided to leverage her engineering background, international perspective on impactful medicine, and fierce entrepreneurial spirit to launch MonitHer — a startup that would revolutionize one of modern medicine’s most perplexing challenges.
Where Raised in a spiritual, though non-Jewish home in Boise, Idaho, Yehudit made a dramatic turnaround, eventually landing in Jerusalem. As you’ll see from her story, she had some pivotal stops along the way, including mingling with tech elites in Silicon Valley and conducting medical relief missions all over the world.
Why While attending the WeWork Creator Awards in Jerusalem two years ago, I was overwhelmed by what happened that evening: An obviously frum, modestly dressed woman was passionately presenting her medical device startup in front of 5,000 people, including WeWork’s famous founder, Adam Neumann — and she was awarded the coveted grand prize of $360,000! Who was this woman? What was her journey? How did she work at NASA and end up living in Meah Shearim? I would later discover many fascinating details of Yehudit’s journey, and it’s a privilege to share them with you.
I was born and raised as a Quaker cowgirl in Idaho, but I always had religious questions and was a searcher, even as a kid. At one point my cello teacher, who wasn’t Jewish, gave me the music to Kol Nidrei. Without knowing it was a Jewish piece or that I was born on Yom Kippur (which I discovered many years later), I got goosebumps all over my body. This is the short version of how I was introduced to Judaism.
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