Einstein Innovators (Part 2: Justin Nwafor, Luis Ovando, and FIRM)
Developing pathways where exposure becomes opportunity
On Tuesday afternoons in the Bronx, roughly 20 high school students walk into the Leo Forchheimer building at Einstein. They’ve just spent their entire day in classrooms at various schools across the borough. They might be tired. They could have gone home to start their homework or participate in a variety of other extracurricular activities.
Instead, they’re learning how to BLAST through the code of life, backcross zebra fish genetics based on phenotypic traits, stain samples for immunohistochemistry, and even how to perform procedures on mouse models to explore the immune system.
This is the FIRM program: Future Innovators in Research and Medicine, and it just wrapped up its second year. It didn’t begin with a mandate or a five-year strategic plan. Instead, two Einstein trainees noticed something missing and decided to build it themselves.
Origins
In 2023, the Einstein Office of Community Engagement (OCE) issued a request for proposals for grants to build community among trainees. This planted a seed for Luis Ovando, PhD, G5, who “wanted to build community and reduce fragmentation amongst MD, PhD, and MD/PhD students at Einstein.”
One way Luis thought about this was to build something that would highlight the value of combining the skills each program focuses on developing, e.g., biomedical research and clinical medicine. Breaking down barriers between degree programs at Einstein is not always trivial, but doing so can pave the way for serving the Bronx community in unique ways.
With this goal in mind, Luis got to work on the grant. On Wednesday evenings, the OCE would host “community diners,” which created spaces for trainees to come together and discuss their ideas for the grant. This is where Luis connected with Justin Nwafor, MD/PhD, G1.
At the time, Justin had been heavily involved with the Einstein Enrichment Program (EEP), where he served as a tutor for high school students on Thursday evenings. Luis pitched Justin the idea for the grant: a workshop/hands-on series that brings MDs, PhD, and MD/PhDs together around a shared mission of helping to inspire the next generation of physicians and scientists.
Over the course of 3 months, the two translated that idea into a successful community grant proposal: funding came through. At this point, the “business plan” was complete, on paper at least.
The grant secured resources, but it didn’t answer the next set of questions: Who exactly are the users? What do they need? How do you recruit them? How do you design something that fits into already crowded schedules, both for Einstein trainees and for high school students finishing long days in class?
In startup terms, the minimum viable product (MVP) had been funded. What came next was stakeholder discovery and turning a prototype into a product. In practice, that meant identifying people across Einstein, finding trainee instructors willing to teach after hours, integrating with an existing pipeline of Bronx high school students, and figuring out how to align all of these pieces.
Only then could FIRM begin to take shape.
Einstein Enrichment Program: Don’t build a bridge if a great one already exists
FIRM did not emerge in a vacuum—it latched onto a program that had already been implemented at the institution.
Fortunately for Luis and Justin, Einstein had already built an on-ramp: the Einstein Enrichment Program (EEP). EEP is a long-running initiative designed to support economically and educationally disadvantaged high school students, many from the Bronx, by exposing them early to careers in science and medicine.
Luckily, Justin was intimately familiar with the program. Before FIRM existed, he had spent over a year tutoring EEP students in chemistry.
“The students are already in school for six, seven, eight hours a day,” Justin said. “They don’t want to come here and hear another lecture. That’s a lost cause.”
EEP was already offering mentoring, tutoring, lab opportunities over the summer, and physician talks, but Justin and Luis thought something was missing.
“What we were really trying to fill,” Justin explained, “was the gap between hearing about science and medicine and actually doing it.”
FIRM would become that missing middle: not another lecture series, not more tutoring, but a hands-on experience that treated high school students like early trainees rather than passive listeners.
Finding teachers: how to build a classroom without a professor
One of FIRM's innovations is that it relies almost entirely on social capital. There is no central office assigning instructors, no formal teaching requirement, no protected time, and no monetary compensation.
Instead, Luis and Justin build each year’s curriculum the way startups assemble early teams: by asking people they trust.
“We choose people who are specialized in that topic,” Luis said. “People we see in the halls, people we know from rotations, from labs, from departmental Works In Progress (WIPs).”
Each workshop is taught by Einstein trainees: MD, PhD, and MD/PhD students, paired intentionally across programs. The result is teaching that feels alive and fueled by a genuine desire to convey the love of a subject.
“The students can feel that passion,” Luis said. “They’re learning from someone who actually loves what they’re doing.”
Faculty still play a critical role: opening lab doors, sharing reagents, and offering space when budgets fall short.
“Funding is low,” Luis admitted. “But faculty are usually happy to help when they know it’s for high school students.”
What does FIRM look like?
FIRM runs for six to seven weeks each fall, pulling a small, selective cohort from the larger EEP program. Students “earn the right,” as Justin put it, to participate.
Each week follows the same basic structure: half lecture, half hands-on.
However, the content is anything but basic. Students begin by learning lab safety and pipetting before moving into microbiology (Gram staining and streak plating), genetics (zebrafish phenotyping and Punnett squares), immunology (live mouse imaging), neuroscience (immunohistochemistry and brain anatomy), oncology, and bioinformatics.
In one session, Justin and Luis crowdsourced laptops from the Einstein library and ran BLAST searches to build evolutionary trees.
“They’re figuring out how the whole tree of life comes to be,” Justin said. “They’re coding. They’re doing real work.”
In another, they watched blood cells move through living tissue under a microscope.
Key Performance Indicators + Outcomes
As a program led by trainees representing every Einstein degree program, FIRM does track outcomes. Students take quizzes, fill out surveys, and at the end of the program, they give presentations reflecting on what they learned and how their thinking has changed. Not only have they had exposure to what a career in STEM looks like, but they also get the chance to learn how to communicate what they’ve done.
But the moments that matter most rarely show up on a Google Form.
I personally saw this firsthand while helping lead the oncology workshop this past November. On one of my slides was the cover of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I mentioned, almost offhandedly, that I had read the book in high school and that it was one of the reasons I decided to pursue a career in healthcare.
Within seconds, every student’s phone was out. Screens lit up across the room as they took pictures of the slide.
That was the moment I realized something important was happening here. Justin had described this phenomenon earlier in our conversation:
“You don’t know what’s going to spark it,” he said. “You really don’t.”
Sometimes it’s a pipette. Sometimes it’s a zebrafish. Sometimes it’s watching blood cells move through living tissue in real time. And other times it’s a book, one that someone a few years ahead of you once read and decided to follow.
In that moment, it became clear that FIRM’s real return on investment (ROI) isn’t immediate or linear, but that it compounds in the background. Exposure leads to curiosity. Curiosity leads to confidence. Confidence, given enough time, becomes a trajectory.
You can’t measure that in six weeks. But you can feel it when it starts.
One student entered the program focused on electrical engineering and left thinking seriously about biomedical engineering. Another discovered an interest in immunology he hadn’t expected.
Others simply kept showing up.
“They come from a full day of school,” Justin said. “It’s four to six in the evening, and they’re taking notes. Asking questions. They want to be there.”
For both founders, that alone feels like a win.
“We’re not losing students because they’re not interested,” Justin said. “They just weren’t exposed early enough.”
Challenges and Detours
FIRM is not easy to run. Both founders are full-time trainees, with planning meetings taking place at night, in between experiments, exams, and clinic.
“The admin work cooks you,” Justin admitted. “You want to do the fun stuff, but someone still has to schedule rooms and chase emails.”
Luis described a more unexpected and subtle pressure: responsibility.
“If an instructor can’t show up, Justin and I step in,” he said. “If there are no resources, we find them.”
The program evolves by trial and error. One year, they formalized instructor roles; the next, they dropped them (only to realize they were essential).
“That was a lesson,” Luis said. “You need structure to keep people engaged.”
Nothing about FIRM is static, but that’s the point.
Future of FIRM
FIRM is still small by design. The goal isn’t scale for scale’s sake; it’s sustainability. It would be a shame if the program ceased to run when Justin and Luis graduate.
Short-term, the team plans to deepen content, add new workshops (including drug development and structural biology), and expand leadership to ensure the program survives beyond any single cohort.
Both founders hope for the same long-term outcome:
“Hopefully,” Justin said, “we’ll see some of them come back to Einstein one day.”
So what is Innovation, anyway?
It wouldn’t be an EIG Einstein Innovators profile if we didn’t end by asking a deceptively simple question: What does innovation actually mean?
For Justin, innovation begins with curiosity, but doesn’t stop there.
“In science, innovation is the peak of curiosity,” he said. “It’s wanting to understand something we already know, or creating something completely new that we’ve never seen before, and then seeing what it allows us to do.”
He pointed to protein design and chemistry as examples of a field finally breaking free from what already exists in nature.
“You’re never going to see an airplane made out of sticks and leaves,” he said. “This is completely new stuff. And that’s where innovation lives.”
Luis framed innovation as:
“For me, innovation sits between discovery and novelty,” he said. “It’s not just finding something new, it’s learning how to apply it. And then using that application to make more discoveries.”
CRISPR, he explained, didn’t begin as a tool. It began as curiosity about bacteria. Innovation happened when someone realized what else it could become.
Seen through that lens, FIRM itself starts to look less like a program and more like a prototype.
It didn’t begin with a strategic plan or institutional directive. It began with two trainees noticing a gap in the Einstein community between students’ training in science and medicine, between exposure and access, and deciding to build something that didn’t yet exist.
FIRM is innovative not because it teaches BLAST, zebrafish genetics, or immunology. It’s innovative because it turns proximity into possibility. It treats exposure as a mechanism rather than an afterthought. It assumes that talent is already there and that the real work is creating the conditions for it to surface.
Innovation, in this case, isn’t a breakthrough discovery or a successful startup launch. It’s the compounding of small moments like a pipette in a student’s hand for the first time, a Punnett square that suddenly explains a Zebrafish’s stripes, and a shift from a mechanical to a biomedical engineer.
You can’t always measure when innovation works.
But sometimes, you can see it: in the flash of twelve phones rising at once to capture a book cover projected at the front of a classroom.
To learn more and get involved with FIRM, please reach out to Justin or Luis (justin.nwafor@einsteinmed.edu and luis.ovando@einsteinmed.edu)
If you have ideas for future Einstein Innovators pieces or would like to help write one, please reach out to us using the button below.