Academics Arts and Humanities

By Janette Neuwahl Tannen [email protected] 04-07-2026

When Julia Mauro was a junior in college, she noticed that she was struggling to find joy and purpose in life. She called her institution's counseling center for help but was put on a waiting list. It took five weeks to get a call back.

Fortunately, her parents were able to get Mauro into a private therapist quickly who treated her for depression.

But Mauro knows that many other students need more immediate help. Since then, she has volunteered for a crisis hotline and worked in an intensive outpatient facility. Mauro also learned that mental health is one of the top reasons students withdraw from college, costing universities billions in lost tuition.

"Often in college, there's such a pressure to seem like you are doing well that something you'd normally pick up on doesn't register until it's really bad," said Mauro, currently a master's candidate in counseling at the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development.

To help detect these issues faster, Mauro created Aura Insights, an app that offers a quick assessment of a person's mental health, color codes the severity of their condition, and alerts a University mental health professional when a student is in critical need of help. She is now piloting Aura with athletes at the University and has received positive feedback.

"Universities do not need another wellness app, they need the infrastructure to make sure that no student falls through the cracks," Mauro added. "So every student gets the right support at the right time."

For her ingenuity, Mauro recently received a $100,000 grant to expand her startup. Aura was one of five different startups founded by University of Miami students that earned their first major seed funding this spring as part of the University Student Startup Accelerator, also known as USTAAR. Founded in 2024 with a generous donation from alumni Angel and Victor Alvarez, USTAAR has so far offered small-scale Ignite or Catalyst awards to nearly 70 student startups. These groups spend months working with USTAAR staff and local mentors to develop a prototype before the spring pitch competition. Currently, 14 startups have earned the major $100,000 investments. These are determined by a panel of judges who are entrepreneurs, as well as local business and community leaders, some of whom are on the University's Board of Trustees.

This year's pitch competition was held in the Donna E. Shalala Student Center ballroom, where the 11 student teams competing represented nine of the University's 11 schools and colleges. The event demonstrates that many of the business ideas presented were collaborations among a variety of students, a trend the University hopes to cultivate, said Joel H. Samuels, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost, who opened the pitch competition.

"It's imperative for us as a University to be preparing our students for a world where there's a space for creativity and an expectation for adaptation, to really take their ideas to a different level," Samuels said.

Suisquia team members Eitan Pritzker (left) and Levi Gell (right)

Another student startup awarded funding was Suisqua, touted as the world's first AI-powered, automated fish tank. First-year business student Eitan Pritzker and sophomore marine affairs major Levi Gell said the idea came out of their mutual love for home fish tanks, but Pritzker noticed his pet of choice was problematic when he was deployed overseas as a member of the military and returned home to find his fish dead. Yet the pair soon learned about the cost of maintaining tanks, how often parts break, and how most existing AI apps cannot control the entire tank but focus on just one part.

"We encompassed all the solutions to those issues in one sleek design, with our filtration and technology housed in the rear of the aquarium," Pritzker said. "We also made an app that links to your fish tank. Say you're in Tokyo on business and want to check in to see how your fish are doing. You can see a live feed of your fish, the tank's temperature, and another six features that are crucial to fish's lives."

Meanwhile, second-year medical students Yasmine Mohseni and Eric Sokhn did not give up when they didn't win USTAAR funding last year but refined their skin cancer detection app and earned the support of judges this year. Called SkinSmart, the app uses a phone camera so patients or health care providers can take images of skin lesions and use the technology to better identify if the lesions are concerning, helping to triage patients for dermatologists and monitor potentially cancerous lesions between appointments.

"We provide real-time AI risk stratification of concerning lesions, helping to improve early detection and prioritize high-risk patients," Mohseni said. "Skin cancer is incredibly common, while early detection leads to a 99 percent survival rate."

Textile team members from left: Somak Shivlani, Ethan Tieu, Alexandr Kim, Katie Dunn and Gabriel Prado.

And Alexandr Kim, a senior studying computer science and business technology, presented his team's solution to a common struggle for families: keeping track of important documents and finding them in a time of crisis. Their product, called Textile, would allow customers to download the program and then upload any sensitive documents without any of those documents leaving the privacy of their own computer. Yet the software would employ powerful, fast search capabilities to scan through thousands of pages in seconds. Therefore, users would not need to worry about sensitive information being stored in the virtual cloud, owned by commercial entities.

"Eighty-one percent of Americans distrust the way that AI companies collect, store, and manage their data, so let's think for a second what the value would be for solving some of these challenges," said Kim, later adding: "We want to build powerful software for regular computers, so that we can answer this data privacy question."

In addition, AIDmd, a platform powered by AI to save doctors from hours of documentation, also received $100,000 in funding. Founded by a team of medical students, software engineers, and computer scientists, the idea is to make patient documentation, diagnosis, and billing easier and more efficient by quickly integrating information from all the different electronic health records and health care facilities the patient has visited.

"Your data as a patient is fragmented across the years, with physicians forced to spend enormous time searching through and piecing together your medication, labs, imaging, and then manually translating that into decisions and actions," said Vagif Kazimli, an M.D./M.B.A. student at the University, as well as the startup's CEO. "Now imagine doing that for more than 30 patients a day."

Kazimli and his teammates explained that they already have 24 physicians piloting their technology, so the grant will allow them to scale up.

"I see potential implementations of this every day when I am doing rounds in internal medicine at UHealth," he added.

USTAAR director Suhrud Rajguru was thrilled with the teams who presented this spring and noted that they were chosen from more than 90 applications-indicating interest in the program is growing.

"As a founder myself, I've gone through many of the struggles that these startups have. So we have built a program that provides hands-on mentoring, community partnerships, networking opportunities, and seed funding," said Rajguru, a professor of biomedical engineering and otolaryngology, whose own startup, RestorEar, uses cooling technology to reduce hearing loss and the negative impacts of tinnitus. "I am incredibly proud of every single one of our student startups for their diligence and professionalism as they participated in the accelerator and presented their pitches. As the U moves into its second centennial, USTAAR is committed to empowering tomorrow's innovators today."