Igniting change in cancer screening: Alumnus Dr. Efraín Torres’ entrepreneurial journey to servant leadership

Few fires burn as fiercely as the one driving Dr. Efraín Torres, a 2019 Marquette biomedical engineering alumnus and CEO and co-founder of Adialante, a startup focused on disruptive, accessible MRI technology to bring cancer screening technology into more clinics around the world. Now a member of the exclusive Y Combinator startup accelerator, Torres' path from Marquette's Opus College of Engineering to entrepreneurship reflects a deep commitment to serving others.

In joining Y Combinator - with its acceptance rate of 1% or less of applicants and reputation for funding companies like Airbnb, OpenAI, Dropbox and Stripe - Torres and his team are all in on their vision for Adialante to expand access to annual cancer screenings, meeting patients where they are in clinics across communities. Along with a $500,000 investment, the team is already a few weeks into Y Combinator's three-month program to fast-track their work alongside a community of advisers, founders and Y Combinator alumni.

Torres now finds himself busier than ever and deeply reflective about a journey that began long before he even knew what a startup was.

Early embers of a servant leader

Hailing from Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, Torres grew up supported by a loving family and a vibrant immigrant community while also navigating the realities of gun violence, poverty and unequal access to education and health care. By the time Torres reached high school at St. Ignatius College Prep, he started to notice the stark differences across communities and the unsolved problems in dire need of a solution. He now traces his work with Adialante back to these childhood observations.

"I'm a first-generation middle school, high school, college and Ph.D. graduate," Torres says, adding that he often found himself as one of the few Latinos in the classroom and surrounded by peers from more affluent upbringings. "There's a very large difference that you feel every day. It really lit a spark in me and started to establish my goal to minimize the differential as much as possible for communities like mine."

Torres applied to college with a passion just beginning to take shape. A high school teacher's comment that "engineers solve problems" was about all he had to inform his next step.

Finding focus and fuel at Marquette

Kate Trevey, Nana Fotsch Director of the Fotsch Innovation and Engineering Leadership Development (FIELD) Center, first met Torres when he joined Marquette's Excellence in Leadership (E-Lead) program, an innovation leadership program for undergraduate students.

"He showed up so eager, earnest and hardworking, and having such a drive to the point we would remind him to take a deep breath," Trevey says, "I also remember a young man that was trying to figure out who he was and how he fit in this world."

Torres' first semesters at Marquette were ambitious, but lacking direction, he admits. He kept journals in which he committed to making each semester more challenging than the last.

"I was aggressive," he says. "I came in fully running."

Everything changed when he found Marquette's E-Lead program. He recalls an interviewer asking him about his "why," and he unleashed his ideas and hopes for the world. It was plenty to be accepted, and plenty for Trevey and her team to work with.

E-Lead's three-step focus on first leading oneself, then leading with others and finally leading innovation offered the perfect scaffold for Torres. By the time he reached the Leading Innovation course, Trevey had only seen flickers of Torres' passions, but the program's discussions on paths of proven innovators seemed to be destined for his ears.

"I had this crystallizing moment in E-Lead discussing incremental and disruptive innovation," Torres says. "We defined disruptive innovation, when something reshapes an entire industry and it's world changing. I vividly remember sitting there and thinking, 'this is what I want to do.'"

Torres credits pairing E-Lead with his biomedical engineering experiences for shaping the work he leads today. He connected the insights he gained from E-Lead with his undergraduate research focused on medical imaging, realizing that his heart and mind yearned to disrupt this incredible technology that, in his estimation, had not yet met its full potential to serve the world.

More than just building the foundational vision for Adialante at Marquette, Torres also built relationships that are key to the company's success.

"I remember this tall guy sitting next to me in class saying he wanted to create a startup after college," Torres says. "I remember thinking, 'I wonder what a startup is?'"

That classmate was Parker Jenkins, Eng '19, current COO and co-founder of Adialante.

Setting the world on fire

After Marquette, Torres pursued a doctoral program in biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota. While there, he discovered research experiences to expand the expertise he needed to move his vision toward reality.

Today, Torres and Jenkins have built a wider team of like-minded innovators, including Marquette undergraduate student Nabil Othman, who recently worked as a hardware and software intern. Together, they are building deployable, clinical-grade MRI technology to be used outside of hospitals, giving patients earlier and wider access to early detection cancer screenings. While they see the technology's potential across diseases, the team is starting with prostate MRIs for urology clinics, increasing access to imaging before patients receive a prostate biopsy to detect cancer tissues.

Amid his success, Torres is quick to credit those around him whose support has made all the difference along the way. He names educators, research mentors, peers, early advisors and family without hesitation. At Marquette, he regularly volunteers as a guest speaker to give back to the programs that shaped him.

Torres also acknowledges that for all his confidence, he is not perfect. On his LinkedIn, he shares his own challenges with health, finding balance, and persisting through a political landscape that threatens his community. His hope is that his words can inspire more people to take control of their stories and persist towards a better world together.

"My story is not one of a perfect person who figured it all out with no bumps along the road," Torres says. "My story is - and everyone's story is - an imperfect story filled of imperfect people just trying to do something."