Portugal: On Purpose, For Purpose | Dr Jessica Boyatt
Dr Jessica Boyatt is clear and direct as she begins to share her story with an audience eager…
Dr Jessica Boyatt is clear and direct as she begins to share her story with an audience eager to better understand her journey to Portugal.
“My project would not exist without Empowered Startups,” she states before providing more context on how the country has become an integral part of her professional pursuits.
Like several of the other entrepreneurs seated among those assembled at the University of Coimbra’s Colégio da Trindade, Boyatt has launched a business and associated R&D project in Portugal through the HQA® Program. As a panelist at the “International Talent for Innovation” conference, she is offering insight into how this rapidly growing network of business leaders, university stakeholders, and research professionals can collectively improve the outcomes for both their respective endeavours and the country itself.
Empowered in Portugal
An accomplished clinical neuropsychologist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Boyatt fell in love with Portugal while attending a conference in 2019. The country’s rich history, magnificent geography, and incredibly friendly people made such an impression on her that she began to investigate avenues that would allow her and her family to spend even more time there.
“I don’t even remember how I heard about the HQA®, but the barriers to entry were not so high that you couldn’t do it, and I wanted to be able to give my kids access to Europe – that was a big part of it,” Boyatt reveals during a conversation about her experience with the HQA® Program. “When I was first talking with Empowered Startups, they said, ‘Well, you know the initial university is in Évora’ and I was like, ‘I love Évora! That’s awesome.’ So, it felt like it was sort of in the cards somehow.”
Following her successful application to the HQA® Program, Boyatt began working with Empowered’s skilled team to open a business based in Portugal, to refine the innovative project she intended to initiate, and to match her with the appropriate researchers and students at the University of Évora for her specific project.
“The Portugal-based people have just been fantastic,” Boyatt discloses. “Filipe (Galego) answers every question no matter how many times I’ve asked it, no matter what my panic level; he’s just terrific. And Paulo Martins has been great from a business perspective, which is something I know but more as a sole proprietor or somebody who runs their own practice, not in the bigger sense. I’m still ramping up on thinking in that way, and Empowered has really helped me do that.”
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
Boyatt credits the Empowered team with stimulating her to examine potential solutions to a predicament that has hampered her field for the entirety of her career.
“There has been a problem in clinical neuropsychology for a long time, which is that you do an evaluation of a patient or a student with a learning disability, and if that person is not a middle class white person from America, you’re comparing apples to oranges, right? And most of the data comes from two places the United States and Canada, actually. Where are the data sets on people around the world? We’ve all got brains, but they develop in different ways depending on where you grow up and what the cultural influences are and what language you speak and all the rest of it. I identified this problem a long time ago,” she explains.
The HQA® Program became the catalyst for Boyatt to investigate a solution. Because the program requires an innovative project to be launched in collaboration with a Portuguese university, Boyatt began to seriously ponder how she might solve this longstanding problem through research and technology.
“The state of the industry in neuropsychology is that things are very siloed, but there is data out there that represents all the people in the world. It’s just there’s no way to get at it. So, that’s the project that we’re working on – creating that.”
Apples to Apples
Having zeroed in on a concept, Boyatt refined it while communicating with her new colleagues at the University of Évora. The scope of her project meant she’d need to collaborate with multiple departments in order to create the product she had envisioned.
“The company is called Apples to Apples, and what we’re doing is we are creating a dynamic digital platform to hold normative data for neuropsychological tests from all over the world,” Boyatt proudly explains. “I’m working with two teams: the psychology team and the IT team. The place I really needed help was with the IT stuff, so we’re building a platform right now.”
With a busy, multifaceted career thriving in the United States, Boyatt connects virtually with her Portuguese team most weeks but travels to Portugal whenever she is able. She has been impressed with the growing research and development group that has been assembled, and, in particular, with the IT team that is navigating the portion of the project with which she is unfamiliar.
“They’ve been super responsive. I’ve got a master’s student who’s actually doing his thesis on a piece of the project, and then two other people, and then another one sort of just showed up and was part of it. I was like ‘Great! The more minds the better’ right?” she smiles.
“We’re meeting almost weekly right now because we’re really trying to do a test run with a Romanian data set that I was able to obtain. It’s a little tricky because I don’t speak ‘database’. I mean, I’ve learned a lot about it, but they’ll ask me questions that I’m like ‘I wanted to do this, but I don’t know how to tell you that in your language’. Not Portuguese but database,” she chuckles. “So, it’s a process of community. It’s delightful.”
Meaningful and Modern
“The goal of the project is twofold. It is to create a dynamic database that the world’s neuropsychological researchers and clinicians can use. Researchers can donate data, clinicians can compare their patients to demographically similar data, you know, improving treatment outcomes and research that leads to different kinds of discoveries. So, that’s sort of the big goal,” she describes. Boyatt is also hopeful the project can serve as an example of how many of the current methods employed within the profession can be modernized.
“The more industry shifting goal is to do a little technological leapfrogging,” she proposes. “Right now, a lot of neuropsychology is still done with paper and pencil, very little digitized, very diverse kinds of ways of doing the tests. So, I feel like this project could also be an example for how we can use technology to sort of leapfrog us into the 21st century rather than being really way back at the beginning of the 20th.”
As she imagines the future of neuropsychology, Boyatt is very grounded in the present with respect to this undertaking. Fundamental to both the HQA® Program and her personal values is the fact the project creates opportunities for Portuguese people and an economic benefit for the country itself.
“I would love to have a really solid working prototype, and to have a really solid working prototype, I would probably need a couple of employees to be managing it, so that would feel pretty successful. This is data from all over the world, right? So, the idea would be to grow it to really be that kind of a platform that combines this local element that’s accessible globally.”
Part of Portugal
As she spoke to the audience and then interacted with the diverse group that had come together in Coimbra, Boyatt’s passion for both her profession and Portugal was apparent to everyone in attendance. What began as an avenue to spend more time in a desirable country has become a part of her life that she is fully invested in.
“You know, lately everybody’s like, ‘Oh, I love Portugal’ or ‘I want to go to Portugal’. But it’s interesting… since the program started but really over the past year or so, I’m getting integrated. It’s not a vacation, it’s not this thing I don’t know anything about, right? I know more and more every time I come,” she confides.
“So, it’s a novelty for the people that I talk with, and there’s this sense in me that it’s like, ‘Yeah, but it’s where I’m working’, you know? It’s where I’m building something, and that’s a cool feeling.”
Learn more about the best EU program for entrepreneurs making an impact, the HQA® Program.
