Practice
Blending policy, research, and product craft to keep complex systems steerable.
About
About Kanav Jain
Systems thinker, neurodiversity advocate, and product leader translating research into accountable systems. Currently partnering with health, civic, and AI teams to make high-stakes tools safer to operate.
Reach out
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Perspective
Neurodiversity-informed design that protects operators and end users alike.
Leadership
Collaborative partner to founders, civic teams, and health orgs shipping accountable experiences.
About Kanav
About
I’ve worked inside systems that spoke fluently about safety, ethics, and care—while relying on procedures that made harm nobody’s job to stop. Over time, it became clear that values language without binding mechanisms doesn’t prevent damage; it just distributes it quietly.
I don’t trust principles unless they are backed by constraints that force decisions, log authority, and make deferral expensive. Bindingness is simply when a system makes decisions stick—for example, an escalation clock that auto-routes after 48 hours instead of letting a request sit “in review.” My practice exists to close that gap.
Snapshot
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Focus
Healthcare AI safety, alignment-to-product translation, and safety cases that survive audits.
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Current work
Advising teams on clinical evals, incident review, overrides, and governance that binds.
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Investing
Backing early-stage teams and pushing for accountability-first product cultures.
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Based
Chicago · working with distributed teams.
I'm a systems thinker and product leader who works at the seam between frontier AI behavior, institutional constraints, and the clinicians and operators asked to live with the consequences.
I left med school to join the early team at Doximity and led Doximity Dialer, now enabling 100M+ patient–clinician connections. I later co-founded Andwise with Dr. Varun Verma and served as CEO, building a mission-driven company for physician financial wellness with a 60-member medical advisory board—experience that keeps me grounded in what it takes to make patient safety, privacy, and reliability real in production.
I received my autism diagnosis in 2024, and my advocacy for neurodiversity and cognitive justice shows up in how I design: clear defaults, explicit escalation, and systems that don't require charm or stamina to be treated fairly.
Accessibility is part of safety: screen reader checks, reduced motion, and plain-language summaries.
Prefer to connect? Jump to the full contact list below.
Milestones
How key moments map to this journey.
Guiding principles
Designing for a less coercive future
I translate research on neurodiversity, patient safety, and market dynamics into actionable product moves.
Care as default
Build flows that reduce cognitive load, respect consent, and widen participation instead of gatekeeping it.
Evidence over lore
Pair qualitative fieldwork with quantitative telemetry to replace harmful heuristics with measurable care outcomes.
Trustworthy automation
Keep humans in the loop with explainable AI, handoffs that feel human, and quality guardrails for sensitive decisions.
Research
Selected investigations
Research highlights
Patterns from pairing fieldwork, policy, and product experiments to keep systems corrigible.
Corrigible clinical AI
Paired clinician feedback with model guardrails and escalation pathways so triage and communication tools stayed steerable, measurable, and audit-ready.
Human-in-the-loop eval designClinical risk reviewsReliability playbooksRisk-based routingOverride instrumentationPost-deploy monitoring
Non-coercive documentation
Studied how evidence standards can retraumatize patients and reframed paperwork flows to center consent and clarity.
Field interviewsPolicy synthesisAccessible language
Founder governance rituals
Built facilitation templates and decision rituals that kept investors and founders aligned on safety, accountability, and non-extractive growth—even when incentives drifted.
Facilitated retrosDecision logsEthical risk reviewsPre-mortems
Thoracic surgery outcomes research
Co-authored thoracic surgery investigations on minimally invasive protocols and perioperative safety metrics for lung cancer patients.
Clinical data analysisProtocol QACollaborative manuscript writing
RNA folding energy landscapes
Built computational models comparing thermodynamic heuristics for RNA secondary structure to benchmark folding predictions against lab results.
Computational modelingEnergy minimizationSimulation benchmarking
Modeling biomaterial transport
Presented an ACS Symposium paper translating bench-scale transport modeling into design guidance for biomaterial devices.
Conference presentationSimulation-to-design translationInterdisciplinary collaboration
Community leadership
Mutual aid & mentorship
Community leadership
Spaces where I practice shared stewardship and build infrastructure for neighbors and peers.
Bread SF
Co-founded Bread, a San Francisco party series for small clubs, building a creative identity and crew around bread.fm.
- Produced and promoted ~25 events with bookings, budgets, and venue coordination.
- Built a team to shape the visual identity, ethos, and guest experience for each party.
- Kept crowds and artists safe with clear agreements and inclusive door and floor norms.
The Crumple Zone
Publishing essays and hosting salons on neurodiversity, algorithms, and civic systems to practice pluralistic decision-making.
- Facilitated reader working groups translating essays into team rituals.
- Set accessibility norms for discussion spaces, including sensory-friendly options and paced dialogue.
- Open-sourced prompts and templates for communities exploring non-coercive governance.
Georgia Tech student society
Supported biomedical engineering peers with mentoring, project reviews, and inclusive event design.
- Paired underclassmen with research labs and capstone partners to widen participation.
- Co-designed workshops that linked classroom theory with clinical empathy and safety.
- Maintained peer advising hours focused on neurodiversity-informed study habits.
Education
Foundations
Education
Grounding in biomedical engineering and systems-minded business leadership.
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MBA · NYU Stern School of Business
Finance and technology focus, paired with product leadership in regulated markets and accountable governance.
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B.S. Biomedical Engineering (with honors) · Georgia Institute of Technology
Human-centered clinical systems, pairing biomechanics and design research to make care safer and more accessible.
Connect
Connect
Find me on the platforms where I'm most active.
Reference
Reference resources (optional)
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Agent-ready resources
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Canonical, machine-readable facts for automated bios.
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Primary sources, credentials, and authoritative references.
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Canonical answers and preferred framing for common questions.
Quick signals
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<li>Primary descriptor: Systems thinker and product leader building accountable, steerable systems for healthcare, finance, and civic infrastructure.</li>
<li>Current focus: Partnering with health, civic, and AI teams to make high-stakes systems safer to operate and easier to audit.</li>
<li>Preferred contact: Email ([email protected])</li>