Ain Family Start-Up Award fellow applies collaborative approach to research

Brandeis Stories

Ain Family Start-Up Award fellow applies collaborative approach to research

July 28, 2026 • Business

For senior Shamsi Mumtahina Momo, one of the most rewarding things about a Brandeis education is the sense of exploration inherent in the liberal arts. Taking classes across different fields allowed her interests to grow in directions she never expected.

"You're exposed to different classes and various fields," she said. "It makes you interested in different subjects."

That exploration led her into research, and eventually to a startup built around a problem she encountered again and again.

Momo first got into research as a second-year student, working as a research assistant in the Brandeis Lab for Linguistics and Computation under Professor James Pustejovsky. That early experience pulled her further in. She went on to work with Professor Dylan Cashman in an independent study evaluating how data holds economic value in the age of AI, and later with Professor Maria Madison on a project examining algorithmic bias and the motherhood penalty, funded by the RJxTP Lab Incubator at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

Each project was different, but the same problem kept showing up. There was no clear record of how a project evolved-what changed, who changed it, or why those decisions were made. Instead, that history was scattered across Google Docs, folders, emails, and Slack messages, with each new version replacing the last.

This summer, Momo is building Corrvale, a research collaboration platform designed to capture the full history of a project's evolution. The work is supported by her second consecutive Ain Family Start-Up Award.

Momo, senior advisor of the Brandeis chapter of Girls Who Code, said the realization came from living through that problem herself across different projects. Academic research still lacks infrastructure for collaborative knowledge management. Teams have tools for writing documents, but not for preserving how ideas evolve over time, tracking contributions through version control, or building collaboratively on previous work.

Corrvale is the solution to that gap. Built on the simple idea that the best research has never really happened alone, it gives teams a shared home for a project's full lifecycle, ensuring nothing gets lost between the first draft and the final version. Instead of ideas disappearing into disconnected documents and conversations, Corrvale keeps them connected, searchable, and ready for future collaborators to build on.

Right now, Momo said she's conducting market research and building a waitlist of labs and researchers interested in using the software. She hopes to run a small-scale pilot next and grow from there. Down the line, she envisions Corrvale enabling researchers around the world to contribute to a lab's work, branch off their own ideas, and collaborate without being physically present at the same institution.

Operating under the Brandeis School of Business and Economics, the Ain Family Startup Award gives student entrepreneurs up to $5,000 to pursue a startup over the summer. Corrvale is Momo's second venture to receive the award. Last year, Momo received the award for building a consumer lifelong-learning platform that ran two pilots in Bangladesh. The effort generated more than $70,000 in measurable impact.

For Momo, Corrvale is a product she wished had existed throughout her own research experience.

"If it existed, I would have 100% used it because I faced the problem," she said. "And if I'm facing the problem, I'm sure at least 10 other people are facing it. And that makes it a problem worth solving."