As part of Women at Imperial Week, the WHOCC Public Health Education & Training are excited to welcome our guest speaker, Melissa Holloway, Founder and CEO of SmartStart Health. For our International Women’s Day Lady Amalia Fleming Lecture* on Wednesday 12 March 2025 15.00-17.30. Melissa will give a talk titled “Flipping the Script: What happens when patients design healthcare solutions?”. This lecture is part of a series of lectures by women in leadership positions in public health.
In this Lady Amalia Fleming lecture:
Melissa will inspire us with an overview of the impact of patient-driven innovation. With a focus on diabetes, she will highlight kitchen-table projects that have remained open-source, startups that have scaled and exited, and technology-enabled approaches to peer support in low- and middle-income countries.
Melissa will also touch on her work on SmartStart, a patient-centred approach to continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) user education. Supported by Diabetes Center Berne, the proof-of-concept study was completed in September 2023, with results presented at the 84th American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions in June 2024. In 2025, development continues with the creation of an adaptive diabetes education platform. This is being funded by a £185,050 Smart Grant from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation.
Following Melissa’s lecture, Celine Tabche, will interview Melissa to trace her personal path as a woman CEO of a health tech startup. They will discuss her leadership positions, why she chose to take them on, what challenges and opportunities she encountered, and personal lessons learned from her career. They will also talk about her hopes for the future, for a more gender-balanced and inclusive world of public health.
Imperial staff and students are invited to join us to network and connect across disciplines at an inspirational afternoon celebrating female leadership in shaping public health.
Registration
Register to attend in-person at the School of Public Health Building on the White City Campus
Register to attend virtually via Microsoft Teams
Please register before midday 12 March 2025.
Speaker bio
Melissa Holloway found her vocation in diabetes advocacy and health communication as a postgraduate student in history at Oxford University. She is now Founder and CEO of SmartStart Health, a startup developing mobile-optimised diabetes patient education with adaptive learning paths.
Having been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 12, in 2002 she set up a peer support network for Oxford students living with diabetes, which grew to over 40 members. An expert patient blog on Medscape.com in July 2003 led to a job offer with a diabetes-focused consultancy. Since then, Melissa has worked in medical devices, healthcare business consulting, and healthcare advertising. From 2013 to 2018, she helped run a small UK charity focused on patient access to diabetes technology. In 2015 she sat on the committee to develop the first quality standard for digital health apps (PAS 277). In addition to co-authoring multiple published articles and guidelines related to diabetes technology, Melissa is engaged in the patient-driven diabetes innovation community (#wearenotwaiting). Born and raised in Virginia in the US, Melissa lives with her husband and two young children in central London.
*This lecture series has been named in honour of Lady Amalia Fleming, the first female researcher in the Inoculation Department of St Mary’s Hospital London. Lady Amalia (1912 -1986) was a physician, microbiologist, author, resistance fighter, political prisoner, social activist, political exile, member of the Greek parliament, and Head of Amnesty International Greece. She was the second wife of Sir Alexander Fleming and founder of the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center. Lady Amalia was truly an inspirational woman!