Right now, Mehra spends much of his time on experimentation and benchmarking with small tests to keep MorphLabs headed in the right direction. He has also been working closely with testers, collecting data to ensure the technology is safe and effective before it becomes officially available for public patent use.
“We’re learning a lot about the regulatory space as we go and working with professionals and consultants to ensure we’re on the correct path,” Mehra said. “It is a long road to get something through regulation, the FDA, and out to market. A lot of our current work centers on taking the technology we have and making sure it translates to a broader group beyond a small patient subset.”
Reflecting on undergrad
Mehra’s undergraduate experience was impactful, helping transform him into the leader he is today. He initially applied to Virginia Tech on a whim, but fell in love with campus when he first visited.
Industrial and systems engineering (ISE), he said, gave him the freedom to explore. Prior to MorphLabs, Mehra planned to become a strategy consultant and saw many of his peers go into manufacturing, software engineering, or product work. But what he learned has been equally helpful in entrepreneurship.
“My ISE background has helped me in two main ways,” Mehra said. “There is a supply chain and logistics element to our business, where classes like Production Planning and Inventory Control inform us. It also ingrained in me a systematic operational approach to designing processes, pipelines, workflows, and experiments. That approach was communicated implicitly through simulation and operations research classes.”
Mehra recalls his Virginia Tech years fondly, crediting much of his educational success to Michael Madigan and Rohit Kannan, both professors in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, as well as Associate Professor Joseph Wells in the Department of Mathematics.
“Your reasoning and ability to break down systems and figure out what an optimal set of constraints are in any situation will always remain an immensely valuable skill,” Mehra said. “That is something that comes across in the ISE major very effectively.”
During his time with the ISE department, he also served as president of the Virginia Tech’s Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) chapter.
“I learned a lot about dealing with both optimal and difficult situations where you have to communicate and set expectations,” Mehra said. “My peers in IISE did a lot for me too. Aziz Malouche, who ran IISE before me, was one of the most emotionally intelligent individuals I’ve ever met and someone I learned a lot from.”
