Maxwell Weng (he/him)

Vitam

Maxwell is a fourth-year at the University of Michigan studying computer science on the pre-med track. Maxwell is the co-founder and creator of Vitam, an online communication tool that is totally personalized to people with Aphasia, a condition where people lose the ability to express language, so that they can reach their dreams and reconnect with their loved ones. Maxwell is a Cohort VIII fellow and is now a peer mentor for optiMize. 

To learn more about Vitam, visit their website.

optiMize is a rocket that can take you and your project to the moon and back. We all start in very different places here on Earth, we have different lived experiences coming in, but optiMize can take all of us out to the next level. That truly embodies the optiMize experience, where we start with such a diverse and inclusive and just amazing cohort of people working to solve all sorts of problems to make our future more just and sustainable. It's that community that you can’t really find anywhere else on campus. The community of people who are all doing different things but who all share that same goal.

The diversity of the people, the participants, and the staff side truly make optiMize unique where you can consider and engage in topics that end up proving really relevant to your project and your work. An example of this was actually this year where we had to find another way of reaching and engaging with our community of people with aphasia, their caregivers, and their speech language pathologists. So we actually launched an aphasia community art project. This wouldn’t have been possible without the engagement and experience of our peers and cohort 

optiMize helped us take what was an idea and really fashioned that product into something that people with aphasia could use day-in and day-out. They helped us get started on this journey that we are still on right now to find our optimal product market fit, to find where we are as an organization, and continue with the care that these patients with aphasia receive. We are still on this journey, but without optiMize we wouldn’t have even known that this is the path that we should take. That’s sort of the optiMize experience. It opens doors, it clears the fog away, to let you see what the path is and what the journey is forward.