Meet Manju Dawkins, MD

Meet the dermatologist, mom, and lifelong athlete who decided needles shouldn't have to hurt so much.

Dr. Manju Dawkins is a board-certified dermatologist and the co-founder and CEO of Thimble. She started at Columbia University as an undergrad, then headed home to Maryland for her M.D. She trained in dermatology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she was named Chief Resident, and went on to teach at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where her students voted her Teacher of the Year - twice.

She has practiced in academic, private, hospital based, and group practice settings in New York and Los Angeles, and today sees patients at Providence Dermatology & Laser Center in Redondo Beach. She's seen a lot of patients. And she's watched a lot of them dread the needle far more than whatever brought them in.

That stuck with her.

Why she built Thimble

Here's the thing most people don't say out loud: fear of needles isn't a small problem. It keeps millions of people from doing the things that keep them healthy. Early screenings. Blood donation. Treatments that save lives. People skip all of it, sometimes for years, because a needle feels like too much.

Dr. Dawkins didn't think that was acceptable. After a personal experience with her daughter's first vaccines, she built Thimble: the first easy, safe, and comprehensive solution to take the pain and stress out of needle procedures.

It started with her own daughter's first shots and it's grown into a mission to change the way healthcare feels, one less-scary appointment at a time.

The science behind it

Long before Thimble, she was studying how to get things through skin. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Albert Einstein's Department of Physiology and Biophysics, her work on nanoparticle-based delivery of bioactive compounds was published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology and Nitric Oxide.

She's also written for Cutis and Dermatologic Therapy, contributed a chapter to Atopic Dermatitis and Eczematous Disorders, and wrote the chapter on skin biopsy in Atlas of Procedures in Neonatology - the reference textbook for procedures performed on newborns.

Her earlier publications appear under her maiden name, Chacko.

Recognition

Thimble has won the American Academy of Pain Medicine and MIT Hacking Medicine Innovation Challenge twice, taking the Grand Prize in both 2023 and 2024. In 2022 it won the VaxUp Innovation Challenge, run by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

Dr. Dawkins received the Skin of Color Society Innovation Award in 2024. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology and an Associate Member of the New York Academy of Medicine.

Where she speaks

Dr. Dawkins speaks regularly on needle fear, pain management, and physician-led innovation. She gave the keynote at the California Society of Dermatology and Dermatologic Surgery annual meeting, and was selected as a clinical stakeholder and speaker for the American Medical Association's Physician Innovation Network at ViVE. She has spoken at the MAGIC Foundation Convention two years running, presented at PIMDCON on what building a company teaches you that medicine doesn't, and joined the Skin Angels panel at LEADderm.

A little more about Dr. Dawkins

She played Division I basketball at Columbia and captained the team her senior year (at 5'2"). She's still in the game off the court, as a founding member of the Columbia Women's Basketball Advisory Board and a member of the Columbia Athletics Women's Leadership Council. And she knows a sore arm after a shot shouldn't keep you off the court.