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Siblings donate $10 Million to establish women’s health innovation center at University of Pittsburgh
Indian American siblings Vishnu Vardhan and Harsha Vardhini, are co-founders of Texas start-up, Vizzhy, where they apply AI to healthcare.
Launch of Vijayalakshmi Innovation Center / Image- University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh has launched the Vijayalakshmi Innovation Center in Women’s Health Analytics and Research (VIHAR), a groundbreaking initiative leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to advance women’s health care.
The center is funded by a $10 million donation from Indian American siblings Vishnu Vardhan and Harsha Vardhini, co-founders of Vizzhy Inc., with matching funding expected from Pitt's School of Medicine.
VIHAR, named after their mother, Vijaya Lakshmi, aims to create a comprehensive female digital health twin—a virtual model to simulate health strategies. Associate professor Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, who will serve as the founding director, highlighted the initiative's potential to address health disparities globally.
“VIHAR’s mission is ambitious, and it has the potentially profound impact to create the world’s first comprehensive female digital health twin,” Gopalakrishnan said. “This will elevate precision medicine to new inclusive heights.”
The initiative will build on work by Pitt’s Pattern Recognition from Biomedical Evidence (PRoBE) laboratory, founded by Gopalakrishnan. It aims to model women’s health trajectories across diverse ethnic and social contexts.
Chancellor Joan Gabel described VIHAR as “an intersection of health, data science, and generative AI,” expressing gratitude to the donors for their transformative contribution.
Vardhan shared that the inspiration for VIHAR stemmed from his mother’s health struggles during childbirth in India. “Women and girls from Pittsburgh to my hometown in India suffer from a lack of understanding about the issues that uniquely affect their health and wellness,” he said.
Senior vice chancellor for health sciences Anantha Shekhar emphasized Pitt’s leadership in integrating AI with health sciences, stating, “This marks the beginning of a great adventure in creating the next level of AI-driven technologies for healthcare transformation.”
VIHAR is poised to make significant advancements, with Gopalakrishnan noting that it will enable researchers to simulate unprecedented studies. “We won’t just monitor and measure—we’ll transform,” she concluded.
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