Aaron Yu
Co-founder of Amano; biomedical researcher and iBiomed student at McMaster
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Aaron Yu is a biomedical engineering student at McMaster University and co-founder of Amano, a Founders Inc–backed startup building ultra-low-cost 3D-printed hearing aids for underserved populations. Based in Markham, Ontario, Aaron brings a distinctive research portfolio — spanning cancer genomics, computational neurology, and surgical guidelines review — into a company focused on one of the most underfunded problems in global health: untreated hearing loss 1.
Aaron enrolled in McMaster's integrated Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences (iBiomed) program, which he shares with co-founder Arish Shahab. The program is one of Canada's most selective engineering tracks, blending clinical health sciences coursework with engineering methodology in a structure explicitly designed to train the next generation of medical technology builders. Aaron holds the Engineering Award of Excellence and is on the Dean's List 1.
His secondary school background at Markville Secondary School in Markham included four years on the Honour Roll, DECA, HOSA (Health Occupations Students of America), varsity cross country and track and field (2020–2024), and student council representation — a record of consistent achievement across academic and extracurricular domains 1.
Aaron's research record is unusually deep for a student in the early years of an undergraduate degree. Each project reflects a consistent theme: applying machine learning and computational methods to clinical problems where early detection or quantification could save lives.
McMaster Medical Engineering Design Team (Oct 2024 – Apr 2025): Aaron joined the electrical engineering sub-team of McMaster's MED-T, where he designed and set up a Raspberry Pi–based face tracking system as part of a larger medical device project 1.
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (May – Aug 2025): Aaron worked in OICR's Courtot Lab, developing a benchmark for automated cancer data extraction methods. The work involved building evaluation frameworks for computational tools that extract structured information from unstructured clinical and genomic text — a foundational problem in cancer informatics where automation could dramatically accelerate research pipelines. He presented the work at the University of Toronto Medical Biophysics Summer Student Poster Presentation and won first place 1.
MacHealthICE Residency (May – Nov 2025): Through McMaster's clinical entrepreneurship program, Aaron worked on SupraScan — a predictive model for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a rare and frequently misdiagnosed neurodegenerative disease. The project investigated biomarkers including tau and amyloid beta, identified gaps in current diagnostic technology, and developed a machine learning approach using PET scans and MRI imaging for early PSP prediction. PSP is often misdiagnosed as Parkinson's disease in its early stages, and there are no reliable early biomarkers in clinical use — making this exactly the kind of high-impact clinical gap that Aaron's work addresses 1.
RBC Borealis Let's Solve It (Sep – Dec 2025): Selected for the competitive student cohort of RBC's AI research institute, Aaron built an explainable AI diagnostic tool. This placed him in the same institution at the same time as Arish Shahab, who was separately doing volumetric brain analysis at Borealis — a conjunction that likely accelerated the formation of Amano's founding team 1.
Unity Health Toronto (Nov 2025 – present): Research assistant in neurosurgery and critical care at Unity Health, Canada's Catholic health services network and one of Toronto's major academic hospital systems 1.
EAES Associate Systematic Reviewer (Nov 2025 – present): Aaron is an associate systematic reviewer with the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery, working on the guidelines committee under Dr. Antoniou and Dr. Huo. This is a demanding role that requires applying rigorous evidence synthesis methodology to clinical surgical practice — rare for an undergraduate 1.
In August 2025, Aaron built AlphaBind Mini — a modular machine learning pipeline for protein–ligand binding prediction that combines ECFP4 fingerprints (extended-connectivity fingerprints used in cheminformatics) with ESM2 protein embeddings (a state-of-the-art protein language model from Meta). The pipeline achieved AUROC up to 0.90 and R² scores of 0.6–0.8, with improved uncertainty estimation 1. The project reflects a broader interest in AI for drug discovery that runs alongside his clinical diagnostic work.
Aaron joined Amano as co-founder in October 2025. His framing of the company's mission is direct: "focused on building affordable, accessible medical technologies, our goal is to impact the lives of those living in underserved areas." 1
The hearing device Amano is building draws on the acoustic and machine learning expertise that Aaron and Arish developed through their respective research programs. Specifically, the ML-based sizing approach for matching device geometry to a user's ear — a key differentiator from existing low-cost amplifiers — reflects the kind of applied ML work Aaron had been doing in clinical contexts across his research roles.
When the team announced their arrival in San Francisco for Founders Inc, Aaron posted the technical specification publicly, seeking pilot partners among audiology clinics, ENT practices, and community health organizations. The post reached UCSF Otolaryngology, Stanford OHNS, the Hearing Loss Association of America, and the American Academy of Audiology, reflecting the team's intent to validate within the clinical mainstream, not just in hackathon settings 2.