The Life Design Lab is thrilled to announce that the team of Dory Bittle, Teja Sathi, Kim Hwang Yeo, and Juliet Zon has been selected as the winners of the Johns Hopkins Map the System competition! Their exploration and presentation of "Breast Cancer—A Death Sentence for Ugandan Women?" stood out for its comprehensive and insightful analysis of the systemic challenges faced by women with breast cancer in Uganda.
About Map the System
Map the System is a global competition hosted by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School. The competition challenges participants to use systems thinking as a guiding approach to understanding some of the most complex social and environmental issues the world faces today. Participants delve deep into a social or environmental issue that matters to them, exploring and researching all the connecting elements and factors around it.
The goal is to present their findings in a way that people can understand, share, and learn from, creating networks to leverage new actions. Map the System is designed to foster a systems thinking mindset among participants and encourages a "learning first" approach to social and environmental change, strengthening skills for changemakers in the field.
About the Team
Dory Bittle is a Master of Science in Public Health student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she studies population, family, and reproductive health. After graduation, she hopes to design, implement, and evaluate global sexual and reproductive health behavioral interventions and programs for adolescents and youth.
Teja Sathi is a mechanical and biomedical engineer with Biomedical Innovation and Design at Johns Hopkins, committed to improving health outcomes for marginalized communities via medical technology innovation. Prior to joining the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design in 2022, Teja was an R&D engineer at W. L. Gore and Associates' Medical Products Division.
Kim Hwang Yeo is a bioengineer focused on advancing health care technologies through cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approaches. He completed his BSc in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley with a departmental citation in 2022 and has trained in MSE in biomedical innovation and design at Johns Hopkins.
About the Winning Project
Breast cancer is the world's most prevalent cancer and the leading cause of cancer death in women worldwide, with 685,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer dying in 2020. In Uganda, the age-standardized incidence is 21.3/100,000, and almost half of Ugandan women diagnosed with breast cancer will die of the disease. These high mortality rates are often explained by women presenting with late-stage disease when treatment is more challenging and outcomes are poor.
The winning team's project, "Breast Cancer—A Death Sentence for Ugandan Women?" sought to understand the broader systemic challenges that women with breast cancer face in Uganda. By combining their experience in Uganda, stakeholder interviews, and secondary research, the team put forth compelling approaches to make meaningful impact on this critical challenge. We congratulate Dory, Teja, Kim, and Juliet on their outstanding work and their commitment to addressing the pressing issue of breast cancer inequity in Uganda. Their project exemplifies the spirit of the Map the System competition, and we are excited to see the impact their insights and solutions will have.
Join Map the System 2025 today— share your interest in navigating the world.
