Beth Kolko is CEO and co-founder of Shift Labs, a Y-Combinator backed hardware company in Seattle that builds affordable and simple medical devices. Kolko founded Shift Labs in order to create new, human-centered medical devices built for rapidly expanding global healthcare markets abroad as well as the growing alternate site care market in the US. Kolko has been a professor for over twenty years, most recently as a Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she ran the Design for Digital Inclusion lab for 12 years, building prototypes for various sectors in emerging markets. At UW she also introduced the Hackademia project to expand HCDE from software to hardware, creating the first makerspace on campus. She has been Director of Innovation at the Makerbot Foundation, a Fulbright professor at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Microsoft Research, and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In her late 30s, she learned to solder which eventually led her to startupland. Shift Labs is inspired by her traveling and/or working in over 50 countries.