Driving Health Tech Innovation at Johnson & Johnson
Passionate about innovation and making a positive impact, Touro Graduate School of Technology MS in Web and Application Development ‘21 alum Serdar Ashyrov is helping shape the future of digital healthcare—one line of code at a time.
As Front-End Developer at Johnson & Johnson, Ashyrov combines creativity, technical expertise and a deep commitment to user-centered design to build intuitive, life-enhancing applications for both patients and healthcare providers. He shares how his time at Touro prepared him for the fast-paced world of health tech, the challenges he’s overcome while advancing his career and his vision for using technology to make healthcare more accessible.
What does your role as a Front-End Developer at Johnson & Johnson entail?
My role is all about creating the user-facing side of our digital health applications, ensuring they’re intuitive, accessible, and effective for both patients and healthcare providers alike. A typical day usually starts with a team meeting to sync on project progress and any obstacles we’re encountering. After that, I'll dive into coding, building new features, translating UX and UI designs into functional components, or resolving bugs. It's a very collaborative environment, so my day is often interspersed with code reviews and quick chats with designers or back-end developers to ensure we're all aligned on each project.
Why did you choose this career path and Touro GST?
I've always been fascinated by the intersection of design and technology, and front-end development felt like the perfect way to combine my creative and problem-solving skills. I love the challenge of bringing a static design to life and making it interactive. I chose Touro GST because I was drawn to its hands-on learning model. The opportunity to learn directly from professors who are active professionals in the field was the biggest draw, as they provided up-to-date, practical knowledge that went beyond the standard graduate curriculum.
What challenges did you face transitioning into a corporate tech environment?
The biggest challenge was adjusting to the sheer scale of a large corporation like Johnson & Johnson. In school, you work on self-contained projects, but here you're contributing to a massive, interconnected ecosystem of applications with a long history. My manager has been a huge part of making this transition smoother, and from day one has helped me break high-level goals into actionable tasks to ensure I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I was also encouraged to shadow other teams to get a better grasp of the best and most productive ways to work together. I’ve been given the invaluable opportunity to explore and learn about all facets of our work, while ensuring I never feel stuck or isolated as well. That balance between autonomy and support has been key to building my confidence in my role and has helped me become more proactive and comfortable in contributing to projects with increased scope and visibility.
How do you collaborate with other teams?
Collaboration is a key part of my role, although it looks a bit different than you might expect. Since we don't have a large, dedicated UX team, I take on a lot of design responsibilities myself, creating the look and feel for the applications I build. My primary collaboration is with our back-end developers and data scientists as we work closely to define Application Program Interface (API) contracts and structure the data, ensuring that the information passed to the front end is efficient and accurate for the user experience I'm building.
For example, let’s say we’re building a dashboard for our team. The process usually begins with data collection and cleaning, which is typically handled by our data team or data scientists. Once the data is ready, our back-end developers create the necessary API endpoints and set up database tables to serve that data efficiently. After the backend is in place, I take over the front-end development and design and build the user interface for the dashboard using the API responses. I focus on presenting the data in a clear and interactive way, using charts, filters, tables, and summary views that are tailored to the needs of our executives. I also work closely with the backend team to make sure the APIs are returning the data in the right structure and then we make tweaks as needed.
What front-end technologies or frameworks do you use?
We use a versatile set of technologies to build our applications. The foundation is built on core web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and we leverage React as our primary library for creating dynamic user interfaces. For our development and build process, we use Vite to keep our workflow fast and efficient. A particularly exciting part of my job has been building and maintaining our own internal NPM packages, a powerful tool for managing JavaScript packages, which helps to standardize our development across projects.
What project or experience at Touro helped shape your skills?
It wasn't one single project, but rather a combination of experiences at Touro that truly shaped my skills. My capstone project, which required a huge amount of research into emerging web technologies, gave me a strong forward-looking perspective. This was balanced by several hands-on coding projects using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Node.js that were incredibly practical for building my core development abilities. I also had design-focused projects that were instrumental in helping me bridge the gap between aesthetics and functionality, which is a huge part of my role today.
What’s next for you?
My primary goal is to use my skills in the healthcare and education sectors to develop applications that directly help patients and students. I'm especially passionate about making these tools highly accessible, and I'm also fascinated by the potential of AI to create more personalized and effective solutions. To broaden the reach of these solutions, I'm planning to learn mobile app development. As I continue to grow, I hope I can share my experiences to help support the next generation of developers, because my aspiration is to simply remain a lifelong learner in this ever-changing tech world.
If you could build any app, what would it be?
If I could build any app, it would be a highly personalized learning and support platform for patients with chronic conditions, something like a digital companion. The app would use AI to help users understand their health data in plain language, offer ongoing guidance and support to improve their daily living, and connect them with educational resources and support communities. It would be voice-accessible, multilingual, and designed to work well even on low-end mobile devices to ensure accessibility across underserved communities.