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From Western to TIME’s Best Inventions: Asha Parekh named 2025 Young Alumni Award recipient

Western Engineering is proud to announce Asha Parekh, PhD’15, as the recipient of the 2025 Engineering Young Alumni Award.

Established in 2022, the Young Alumni Award recognizes outstanding alumni who have distinguished themselves early in their careers through professional achievements, community service, or a combination of both. Honourees set an inspirational example for Western Engineering students and young alumni, while showing promise of even greater contributions in the future.

Parekh embodies the very essence of this award.

asha-award-insA co-founder and the CEO of FrontLine Medical Technologies, Parekh is an accomplished biomedical engineer and entrepreneur whose work is transforming emergency and trauma care worldwide. With her co-founder, professor Adam Power, she developed the COBRA-OS™ (Control of Bleeding, Resuscitation, Arterial Occlusion System)—a first-of-its-kind, minimally invasive device designed to save lives by providing temporary hemorrhage control and resuscitation. Already approved by Health Canada, FDA, CE mark, TGA and used in trauma and obstetrics worldwide, the device is making a dramatic impact in emergency medicine, offering front-line healthcare workers a faster and more effective tool to stabilize patients and reduce mortality rates.

In 2024, this groundbreaking innovation earned global recognition when TIME Magazine named the COBRA-OS™ one of the Best Inventions of 2024 in the medical technology category. The honour highlights not only the device’s life-saving potential but also Parekh’s role in driving forward innovation at the intersection of engineering and healthcare.

For Parekh, the decision to leap into entrepreneurship was driven by passion, people, and purpose. “My journey from PhD studies to where I am now has very much unfolded organically in a very exciting way,” she explained. Motivated by a desire to work on something translatable to the real world and to truly help people, she and Power combined their skills to tackle a staggering problem: 90% of patients who suffer from non-compressible torso hemorrhage outside of a hospital die before they get there. “We both saw the incredible value that this type of device could offer globally, and we have always been passionate about making that impact a real one.”

Beyond her professional accomplishments, Parekh is a passionate leader in the community. She serves as a board member with  TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario, an incubator for local tech startups, and gives her generous time as a volunteer, food bank supporter, and dance instructor for both adults and children. She is also deeply engaged in strengthening opportunities for women in STEM, contributing her expertise and mentorship through Women in Engineering, Women in STEM and Life Sciences initiatives.

Her connection to Western Engineering runs deep. A proud alumna who completed her undergraduate degree in biochemical engineering, Master’s in biomaterials and PhD in biomedical engineering at Western, Parekh has continued to give back as a guest lecturer, panellist, and mentor for current students. She was most recently featured as the 2024 speaker for the Lynda Shaw Memorial Lecture, inspiring students and faculty with her journey from Western classrooms to medical innovation on the global stage. Reflecting on her education, she notes: “Engineering is the very foundation of everything I do. From problem-solving to teamwork, I truly believe engineering has prepared me to be successful in any endeavour I take on in life.”

Parekh’s career path has included roles as a Medical Innovation Fellow at Western and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Clinical Neurological Sciences at London Health Sciences Centre, before co-founding FrontLine Medical in 2017. Since then, she has grown the company’s reach internationally, participating in leading trauma and emergency medicine conferences, providing training for emergency physicians, and advocating for new solutions to some of medicine’s most urgent challenges.

Western Engineering congratulates Asha Parekh on being named the 2025 Young Alumni Award recipient. Her dedication to engineering innovation, community service, and mentorship inspires our students, faculty, and alumni and reflects the impact Western engineers continue to make worldwide.

Asha Parekh will receive the Young Alumni Award at the 14th Annual Western Engineering Leaders’ Reception in Toronto on November 6th.