Women Break the Magic Ceiling | When Innovation Is Born of a Siege Mentality

This former Duke rower has developed a wearable sensor that enables amateur and professional athletes to avert injury.

When Ivonna Dumanyan began seventh grade at Rossi Middle School in Vineland, New Jersey, she had extra weight on her frame, in part because Dumanyan’s family could only afford cheap, processed foods. One day, her mother, Vlada, emerged from Ross Stores with a pair of track flats purchased off the clearance rack. She wanted her daughter to have agency. “Go run,” Vlada said.
Dumanyan always had a spark; now she could light it. She went on to become one of the fastest runners on her high school soccer team. The right tools, she found, make all the difference.
Now 24, she’s CEO of Fathom AI, a wearable tech and wellness startup based in Durham, North Carolina, that develops artificial intelligence tools and specialized sensors to help athletes avoid injury. She developed the idea for injury-prevention hardware with her fiancée, co-founder and COO Gabrielle Levac, whose Duke University track and field career was halted by a labrum tear. Dumanyan’s own career on Duke’s crew team had also been nipped in the bud by injury. She’d torn her quad and hamstring in high school, and they never healed properly — problems that were preventable with the right training and guidance — and then she separated a shoulder and tore a pectoral while rowing in college. Dumanyan dropped out of school to pursue the idea thanks to a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship before finishing her degree in 2018.

A quarter of a century after its first democratic elections, South Africa is still relying on a siege mentality born during apartheid to fuel innovation.

In 1986, the late P.W. Botha, then president of South Africa, revealed the toll that the international oil embargo was taking on his pariah state. “There were times,” he told the Windhoek Advertiser, “that we had enough oil for only one week.” If necessity is the mother of invention, the isolation of apartheid South Africa had an unintended consequence: It spurred innovation.

The oil embargo encouraged Sasol, a domestic company formed in 1950, to commercialize its pioneering coal-to-liquids technology, itself built on work conducted by German scientists during World War II. The Fischer-Tropsch process, which Sasol honed to a fine art, enabled the country to survive sanctions by extracting fuel, naphtha, paraffin and a range of chemicals from coal.

Today, this and similar technology is used not only domestically but in countries as far afield as Nigeria, Qatar and Uzbekistan. During the Cold War, cut off from international suppliers, South Africa also built a sophisticated aerospace and defense industry, even developing a nuclear weapons program.

It’s no surprise when QB Tom Brady leads a game-winning drive. But the data show New England’s path to victory is the run.

Just as New England Patriots captain Matthew Slater predicted, the overtime coin flip came up heads. Patriots’ ball. We’d seen this story before.

With a Super Bowl berth on the line, it took 13 plays and 4:52 for New England to find the end zone. A 10-yard Tom Brady pass to Chris Hogan here, a 20-yard dart to Julian Edelman there. Vintage Rob Gronkowski even appeared. From there, Rex Burkhead — New England’s goal-line bruiser — barreled into the end zone for a 2-yard game-winner. “America’s worst nightmare is back!” Patriots broadcaster Scott Zolak hollered from the booth. You can say that again.

But on Brady’s final dissection of the Kansas City defense, one player who did the heavy lifting all day was notably absent: starting running back Sony Michel. Brady, as he’s wont to do, will need to shine in crunch time this Sunday. But to win a sixth Super Bowl ring in the Brady-Bill Belichick era, New England needs to keep feeding Michel.