Page 12 - Inventing Tomorrow

He began to step out of the shell of
a self-described “introverted, nerdy, geeky guy.” He volunteered as an orientation leader for Welcome Week, served on the CSE student board, and founded a student cribbage club (fundraising shirt: “Your crib or mine?”).
His interests shifted toward health policy. The time was right. Congress was debating and passing the Afford- able Care Act. As an undergraduate, Holt once negotiated a health care bill from $350 down to $40. This piqued his curiosity. How did the health bill- ing system work? Was there leeway to adjust fees on the customer’s behalf?
He has remained focused on health care ever since. After graduating,
he went to law school. Holt and
his business partner, David Dubé, founded miVoyce.com (formerly cutmedicalbills.com). The service helps consumers navigate the medical bureaucracy and reduce costs. “There’s not a whole lot of incentive on the health insurance company or the provider to truly educate the patient about what’s covered and how much stuff costs,” Holt said.
The startup aims to ll that gap and empower consumers to act as their own advocates. According to Holt,
the average customer saves about 40 percent off their original medical bills. Holt also runs a small solo law prac- tice in healthcare and business law. He now divides his time between his startup and practice.
He still puts his engineering education to work. Instead of devices, he as- pires to build a more transparent, fair
and equitable system for delivering care. “I developed a very strong work ethic,” he said of his CSE education. “I learned how to manage my sched- ule and really prioritize working very effectively. When we had these big projects, I learned it wasn’t about how much time you put in; it was about how effective you were.”
LEON BINITIE-CASSIDY: GOOD CHEMISTRY
Leon Binitie-Cassidy, 26, didn’t know much about Minnesota when he start- ed looking at colleges.
He grew up halfway around the world in Lagos, Nigeria, and the North Star State wasn’t exactly on his radar. His knowledge of Minnesota boiled down to two essentials—the Timberwolves and Kevin Garnett. Then another thing caught his attention—the ranking of the University’s chemical engineering program.
That was enough to bring Binitie- Cassidy from West Africa to Minnesota in 2006. He vividly re- members, sometimes painfully, the demands posed by the engineering curriculum.
“The discipline required to pass any class in CSE and get your degree lives in me to this day,” said Binitie-Cassidy, an engineer with G2 Partners in Hous- ton. “Heaven knows, we had homework, and homework, and homework.”
He also led a busy life. He joined the National Society for Black Engineers, a fraternity, and a service organization called Students Today Leaders Forever. He worked for the University’s Disability Services.
He won an array of awards, including the President’s Student Leadership and Service Award, Outstanding Multi- cultural Ambassador, Distinguished Kappa Alpha Psi Scholar, Scholarly Excellence in Equity and Diversity (SEED) Award, and the Outstanding Service Award from the National Society of Black Engineers.
“I can honestly say that the friends and the connections I made through those experiences have had the great- est impact on the person I am today,” he said. “It helps you understand how to interact with people from different backgrounds. Those experiences made my life richer.”
He worked as an undergraduate research assistant—an experience that proved invaluable in preparing him for the workforce. “It opened my eyes to how research is done and how to analyze and translate trends in experimental data from a lab pilot
scale perspective to a suitable commercial scale perspective,” he said.
12 INVENTING TOMORROW
“The discipline required to pass any class in CSE and get your degree lives in me to this day.”
— LEON BINITIE-CASSIDY