Claudia Chitty
PIPS Host Organization: Unravel Health
PIPS Project Title: Data‑Driven Women’s Health: Hormone Analytics and Migraine Prediction at a Health‑Tech Start‑Up
Unravel Health is a women’s health start‑up developing an at‑home saliva-based hormone monitor that measures multiple hormones and biomarkers in minutes, aiming to close the data gap in women’s health and support better diagnosis and management of conditions such as hormonal migraines, perimenopause symptoms and fertility issues.
During Claudia’s placement, she helped run pilot studies on perimenopause and menstrual migraine, including recruiting and supporting participants, managing daily hormone and symptom data, and producing clear, tailored reports that explored possible relationships between each woman’s hormone patterns and her symptoms, drawing on current research. Claudia also streamlined several internal processes by automating the analysis of participant data for report generation, allowing the team to scale from a small group to several dozen participants, and by building an automated analysis workflow for the lab scientist’s assay readouts, freeing more time for experimental work.
During this time, their AI partner handed over their migraine‑prediction project to Claudia, and she was later hired by Unravel Health to preprocess the completed study dataset and adapt their machine‑learning pipeline so it could be trained on this participant data.
This experience strengthened Claudia’s skills in practical data handling, developing reusable analysis pipelines and translating quantitative results into clear written summaries. It also deepened her abilities in project organisation and communication with both the team and participants. Speaking directly with participants gave her valuable practice in explaining complex science accessibly and handling sensitive health topics with care, while close collaboration with the founders and small team provided first‑hand insight into start‑up culture, grant‑funded R&D, and health‑tech product development. Altogether, it clarified her ambition to pursue an impactful, industry‑focused career after her PhD.
