Shan Askarian (Shahab Askarian) · Design, Marketing, Healthcare × AI

UCLA Anderson MBA · Former Director of Marketing Communications, Snapp! (50M+ users) · National design champion · Level-A international freestyle snowboard judge

Story

The path makes more sense backward.

I trained as an engineer: the kind of training that makes you optimize everything. Then design: 1st of 1,002 on the national exam, a national championship. Everyone expected a studio; I chose marketing instead, and spent nine years growing some of the Middle East's largest tech platforms, at the scale of 50+ million users.

People ask which one is the real me: the engineer, the designer, or the marketer. Wrong question. The design championship needed the engineer's discipline. The fifty million users needed the designer's eye.

Now: Los Angeles, UCLA Anderson, and looking into the industry where all of it matters most, healthcare.

Legally Shahab Askarian — Shan to everyone since the mountain years.

Questions? The good answers require coffee →

Teaching

Fundamentals first. Tools second.

Lead instructor, digital marketing bootcamp, Tehran. Teaching marketers to build from first principles, in a market where the standard tools never worked.

Judging

Creativity, scored in seconds.

Level-A freestyle snowboarding judge, national contest founder. Structure applied to taste, with an athlete's season on the line.

Making

The sketchbook never closes.

National champion in industrial design. Still sketching what nobody assigns.

Campaigns

Fifty million people were watching.

Nine years of brand and growth for the Middle East's largest platforms.

Selected work

Multiple disciplines. One habit: measure what others only feel.

Design & Art

Sketchbook, never closed

National championship, industrial design
1st of 1,002, national master's exam
International competition entries, in progress

What I sketch when nobody assigns it.

Enter the studio →

Marketing

Brands at scale

Two brands unified for 21M users
MMM + attribution at 50M scale
Trust, measured, for 45M users
Accessibility for 5M+ users

Nine years, four platforms, one lesson: measure everything.

See the case studies →

Tech & AI — current engagements

Machines that learn. Me too.

AI personalization, piloted in production
Zero to 450K users, q-commerce
Now: AI × healthcare marketing research

This section changes the most. That's the point.

Visit the lab →

What I'm working on

Medicine advances faster than the way it reaches people. I work on the reach.

0 yrs

average time for medical research to reach routine practice

~0%

of chronic prescriptions are not taken as prescribed

0/10

US adults struggle to understand health information

Every one of these numbers is a design problem, a trust problem, or a communication problem. My kind of problems.

Sources: Balas & Boren; WHO; US Dept. of Health & Human Services.

Notes

Thinking out loud, carefully.

AI × Healthcare Marketing

Healthcare marketing is consumer tech in 2010

Money spent blind, no attribution, no personalization. I've lived this movie before. Here's how it ends.

Coming soon

Design

A patient journey is a product nobody designed

It accumulated. Surgery is designed to the millimeter; the journey around it is left to chance.

Coming soon

Points of View

What judging snowboarding taught me about creative work

Creativity can be scored. It has to be, or it can't improve. On structure applied to taste.

Coming soon

The mountain years

“I built and judged national freestyle snowboarding competitions: creativity, scored in seconds, under pressure. Still my job. I just traded athletes for brands.”

Level-A international judge · founded a national freestyle contest, ran it for three years

Now

Based in Los Angeles. Coffee is a great idea.

MBA at UCLA Anderson through 2027. Always curious how things look from your side of healthcare: clinician, operator, builder, student. Happy to trade perspectives and share what I've learned. First coffee's on me.

This season: studying how AI changes the way healthcare grows · taking my design work to international juries · collecting stories from healthcare operators. (updated quarterly)

Askarian@ucla.edu

LinkedIn Resume (PDF)