Sara Nadel ’98 and Marshall Cox ’98: Power Couple’s Shared Goals Drive Their Unique Ambitions

This article was originally printed in the Summer 2021 issue of Views from the Hill.

When two dynamic forces converge, the results are unpredictable. For Hopkins “power couple” Sara Nadel ’98 and Marshall Cox ’98, diverging career paths have nevertheless accomplished mutual goals.
Sara is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of StellarEmploy, a start-up that provides a reliable, unbiased way for companies to hire workers who are a good fit, promoting greater workplace satisfaction, less turnover, and on the other side of the aisle, stable employment. Marshall, Founder and CEO of Radiator Labs, is in another sphere altogether, having invented a product that increases heat efficiency 
in buildings, reducing carbon emissions and at the same time, improving quality of life for thousands of mostly low- to moderate-income apartment dwellers.

As they talk side by side about their unique entrepreneurial visions, one realizes quickly that Sara and Marshall are excited about each other’s dreams and motivated by the same ideals: empowering people to live better lives and making the world a much better place.

A Fair Hiring System

StellarEmploy, which Sara founded in 2015, is geared specifically to employers who are seeking to hire large numbers of people for “deskless” hourly wage jobs, for example, a warehouse needing to hire multiple workers to fill positions “on the floor.” 

As hiring gathers speed in the post-COVID economy, companies who employ in high volume need an optimized hiring method that doesn’t require sifting through hundreds, if not thousands, of individual resumes. To accomplish that, many of these companies opt for “automatic filters” that make hiring more efficient by eliminating applicants from the pool who don’t meet basic criteria. Sara points out, however, that these basic criteria are often arbitrary and inherently biased.

One example Sara uses is the college degree—a requirement that pops up often during the online application process. Candidates who don’t check the “education box” are subsequently knocked out of the hiring pool, even though, in many cases, particularly for entry-level type jobs, a degree is not essential to the task. This creates unnecessary barriers to finding a job for the very people that, arguably, need that job the most. It also removes a whole set of people who could potentially be a great fit for a company—not exactly “efficient” hiring!

“Relying on education knock-out questions isn’t just sloppy hiring. It’s biased,” wrote Sara in a July 2020 commentary for webzine Quartz at Work. “Finishing high school and attending or completing college is driven as much by geography and the economic situation of one’s parents as by one’s intellectual horsepower. And when companies only hire applicants who meet an unnecessary education requirement, they put an unfair burden on minority applicants.”

Sara says she first became interested in creating successful career pathways in frontline jobs when she worked several food service jobs while traveling during a year off between Hopkins and college at Stanford University. “Education, SAT scores, had nothing to do with success in these roles,” she says, “and the people who excelled eventually became managers, directors—it’s possible to carve out a terrific career path starting in these roles.”

Marshall adds, “At my company, you put a job application out and a billion applications come. I need filters, but those are enormously discriminatory. The mission for Sara is to show that algorithmic evaluation of employees doesn’t have to be biased. You can make algorithms fairer than people.” 

Comfort, Efficiency & Environmental Stewardship

Marshall’s company, Radiator Labs, produces Cozy™, an insulated, “smart” enclosure, designed to fit over the old-fashioned column radiators that populate thousands of buildings in cities across the country. For anyone who has ever experienced this type of radiator, “unrelenting” might be a descriptor. There is little way to control the amount of heat that pours out, which is uncomfortable, not to mention inefficient. Cozy solves that problem by trapping heat in the radiator when rooms are comfortable, and blowing it out with a fan when the room cools down. This “thermodynamic manipulation” pushes heat to where it’s actually needed in a building. It not only increases comfort and well-being for thousands of people who live in buildings with radiator-style heating systems, but it also saves energy.

The idea for Cozy grew out of Marshall’s personal experience while living in an apartment in the Morningside Heights section of New York City with his brother, who would often complain about the heat. “I built the first version (of Cozy) to shut him up,” he jokes. After finding a few investors and filing a patent for his invention, Marshall entered and won the Clean Energy Prize at MIT, which came with seed money totaling $220,000, enabling him to launch his company. Cozy is now installed in about 100 buildings in New York City, and that number continues to grow. 

Both Marshall and Sara have experienced even more adventures, changes, and challenges in their lives as of late: two young children, a 2019 grandparents-inspired move back to Connecticut after years living in New York City, telecommuting, and sharing parenting responsibilities all under one roof. It’s a lot to juggle, but the shared mission that fueled their fires continues to burn brightly.

A passionate environmentalist not content to sit on his laurels, Marshall is now on to another project he says can reduce carbon emissions by 50%: Hybrid Electrification. The system works in tandem with radiators in apartment buildings to electrify heat, and is based on a simple, inexpensive type of heat pump that can be easily and cheaply installed in any window. “It is like your air conditioner that has a reverse,” he explains. The pump efficiently provides sufficient heat when needed for 80% of the winter, and the radiators kick in for the last 20%, making an enormous dent in carbon emissions for far less cost than any alternative. Marshall is working with several large organizations on the project, partnering with stakeholders focused on serving low- to moderate-income communities.

For her part, Sara is excited about being able to help people struggling to get jobs, and companies needing to hire workers. “It’s been a really exciting time because the economy is recovering,” she said. “Sixty percent of (entry-level) workers had been laid off during COVID. We are now helping companies rebuild.” She added that StellarEmploy announced a strategic partnership with the research lab Learning Collider, and will be working with academics who are focused on using algorithm technology in an unbiased way, to get America working again.