Jennifer Mayo
Oklahoma State University senior Jennifer Mayo, a health education and promotion major in the College of Education, recently joined University Innovation Fellows, a prestigious national program that empowers student leaders to catalyze more entrepreneurial activity on their campuses.
“We are exceptionally proud of the work Jennifer is doing,” College of Education dean Pamela “Sissi” Carroll said. “She is an intelligent and passionate young woman with a heart for making the lives of others better and an outstanding representative of the students in our college and on the OSU campus.”
Mayo is the owner of Pearl Health, a social venture to develop a new and reusable material for condoms that will be better suited for developing countries. Mayo shared the project on October 24 when she spoke at TEDxOStateU, the university’s independent TEDx event. She is also the first undergraduate student to be selected for OSU’s Riata Faculty Fellows Program, a university-wide entrepreneurship initiative.
Originally from Sulphur, Okla., Mayo spent two semesters living in villages in India and time living in Ghana developing a school and doing preliminary work for a girls’ recovery home. Her experiences sparked an interest in health education.
The University Innovation Fellows are part of a national movement to ensure that students gain the necessary attitudes, skills and knowledge required for them to compete in the economy of the future. These student leaders from schools around the country work with their peers to catalyze even greater levels of innovation and venture activity on their campuses.
Sixty fellows representing 56 universities around the country recently launched a new online platform (http://universityinnovation.org) to share information about entrepreneurship programs at their respective schools.
“I am extremely impressed by Jennifer Mayo, her commitment to solving real world challenges through innovation and her plan for how Oklahoma State University can enhance the entrepreneurial ecosystem to enable even greater levels of student innovation. As a new member of the UI Fellows program, Jennifer joins a national network of student ‘changemakers’ who have studied best practices in engaging more peers on campus in extracurricular and curricular innovation and entrepreneurship activities,” said Humera Fasilhuddin, manger of the University Innovation Fellows program.
The program is run by the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), funded by the National Science Foundation as a partnership between Stanford University and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). Students and their peers are called to dream, design and deliver innovations that solve real-world problems.
