Courtesy of Grambling State University
Portia Taylor Singh has always been all about goals.
That includes life goals, academic goals, and even athletic goals like helping the Grambling State University soccer team net its first Southwestern Athletic Conference championship in 2004.
Singh has scored in reaching every goal set for herself, including earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from GSU and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She currently serves as an Adjunct Faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology and Technology Commercialization Lead in the Healthy Home Lab.
She has more than a decade of experience creating and deploying technology to support older adults and their informal caregivers and spent 8 years at Philips Research North America leading the Connected Aging team before transitioning into product management in the Philip Lifeline business, leading their digital consumer and AI product portfolios.
Recently, Singh returned to Grambling State, where then known as Portia Taylor she helped play a foundational role for the GSU women’s soccer team and was a member of the Orchesis Dance Company while working on her undergraduate degree, to talk to current GSU Engineering Technology students about her journey after graduation.
“I was invited by the Office of Sponsored Research under a grant that they had,” Singh said. “My talk was really all about digital health technologies and how those upcoming and evolving technologies impact us and allow us to accomplish. I talked about some of the opportunities in the digital health field and the fact that a large and diverse set of skills are needed to try and tackle some of the health care problems we face today.
“And I talked about how digital technologies make it into the consumer markets, so I gave them some statistics around the digital health landscape and gave some specific examples of consumer applications, health monitoring devices, smartphone technologies and AI — areas I’m involved in — and talked about where I see some opportunities are headed.”