Niamh B. O'Hara and the education of a founder

Niamh B. O'Hara had a choice between two postdoctoral opportunities. One would keep her on a conventional academic route at New York University. The other would put her at Cornell Tech, learning how to build a business. She took the second. Years later, she remembered it as “a lot scarier and weirder.” That is a refreshingly unpolished description of a decision that would eventually acquire a polished title: co-founder and chief executive officer.

The company was Biotia. The decision matters because it catches O'Hara before the biography becomes a list of credentials, appointments, and financing rounds. A scientist with a doctorate was agreeing to become a beginner again. The unfamiliar subject was business. Its practical examination would run for years, and the questions would keep changing.

Today, her career connects plant evolution, genomics, university research, and entrepreneurship in New York. Follow those connections and a more interesting picture emerges than the standard founder origin story. There is a partnership to understand, an education to trace, and a considerable amount of work between the idea and the announcement. The company began in 2016. The learning has continued.

Before the pitch deck, a plant population

O'Hara completed her bachelor's degree at New York University in 2005 and her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Stony Brook University in 2014. Bioinformatics training at Fordham followed. These are useful coordinates for a career whose later job title can obscure the subject that first occupied her: how living populations change.

Her research network included Joshua Rest and Steven Franks. Work associated with that collaboration examined Brassica rapa and its responses to drought. A 2016 co-authored paper compared ancestral and descendant gene pools to investigate rapid evolutionary change. The language sounds remote until you consider the underlying question: what happens to a population when the conditions around it change, and how can you see that change in its genetic record?

That question requires more than an attractive theory. It requires comparisons, samples, and methods that can distinguish a pattern from a coincidence. It also requires attention to scale. A visible change in a plant and a change in a sequence are different observations; connecting them is the work. O'Hara's early publications put her inside that effort, alongside collaborators who approached it through ecology and genomics.

A doctoral project rarely offers the tidy beginning, middle, and end of a company biography. A result leads to another question. A method becomes useful somewhere else. Collaborators carry expertise into their next projects. O'Hara's move into entrepreneurship would draw on that kind of continuity. Her scientific training remained part of the story after her work acquired a commercial address.

A conversation becomes a company

O'Hara met Christopher Mason at the New York Genome Center. She brought a background in evolutionary biology; he brought a background in genetics and a position at Weill Cornell. The meeting placed two researchers with different training in a conversation about what their work could become outside its existing setting.

By 2017, they were describing a partnership that connected Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell. O'Hara had an interest in business and in applying metagenomics, the study of genetic material drawn from a collection of organisms. Mason saw value in the evolutionary modeling and methods she had developed through her thesis. They put that approach into an application to the Runway program, with Mason joining as co-founder.

The division of expertise is worth pausing over. In a founder biography, a co-founder can become little more than the second name after an ampersand. Here, the combination helps explain the company's beginnings. O'Hara's thesis work supplied one set of tools. Mason's research supplied another. Their institutional connections added engineering, computation, and an environment in which a proposed business could be developed.

There is something pleasantly ordinary about the sequence. Talk to someone whose work interests you. Discover a useful overlap. Write an application. Begin. The later company gives those steps retrospective weight, but the steps themselves are recognizable. For O'Hara, becoming a founder involved finding another person with whom her existing expertise could take on a different use.

Business classes for a postdoc

Cornell Tech's Runway Startup program offered an unusual extension of postdoctoral training. It gave researchers financial and mentoring support to develop companies. O'Hara's Cornell Tech period ran from 2015 to 2018. A postdoc could therefore include both developing an idea and learning the commercial vocabulary needed to carry it forward.

She described taking business classes alongside MBA students. The program also opened access to professors, mentors, investors, lawyers, and New York connections. Customer development and the business model became subjects to work through. These details give the transition some texture: even a founder with years of formal education needed teachers for the next stage.

A scientific idea can be carefully argued while its commercial proposition remains unsettled. Who will use it? What will they pay for? Which work has to happen first? A business class makes those questions explicit. A company makes them recurring. The appeal of Runway, in O'Hara's account, was that she did not have to learn every unfamiliar task in isolation.

That makes the university part of her story in a practical sense. It supplied people who could help at successive stages, with different kinds of knowledge. A lawyer's question differs from a professor's; an investor's differs from a prospective customer's. Learning to hear all of them belongs to the education of a CEO. The new role asks a researcher to keep the detail and widen the field of view.

The long route to a cheque

In January 2020, Biotia's $2.4 million seed round became a public milestone. O'Hara estimated that she had presented to roughly 100 investors before securing the financing. Falcon III Ventures, a Boston-based firm backing early companies, was identified with the round. The number of presentations is approximate, but it gives the announcement a useful denominator.

One financing headline can conceal a great many conversations. A founder has to explain the same project to people with different knowledge, different priorities, and different levels of interest. The presentation may be familiar to the speaker long before it is familiar to the audience. Somewhere in that repetition sits a demanding communication problem: how to make a complicated project legible without losing the reasons it matters.

The seed money was intended to expand the team and support the next stage of development. The announcement therefore marked a beginning of additional work as well as the completion of a fundraising effort. A successful round changes what a company can attempt. It also creates expectations about what it will accomplish with the resources.

Cornell's angel-investor network was part of the early financing story. Meghan Cross described bringing in Howard Morgan and Max Zamkow for their expertise as members considered Biotia. Red Bear Angels members invested in an early round. The episode shows a university connection becoming a working relationship: people assembled to examine a young company, then some of them backed it. The network had to do more than exchange business cards.

A company with a research habit

Asked about Biotia's guiding principle in 2023, O'Hara answered with one word: “Science.” She described a team drawn largely from Cornell, Cornell Tech, Weill Cornell, and Columbia, with an emphasis on publications, shared data, and collaboration. Her description gives the company a recognizable intellectual home.

By then, Biotia had closed an $8 million Series A the previous summer. O'Hara said the financing had allowed the business to grow, including 14 hires during 2022. Those numbers belong together. Capital becomes capacity through people, and adding colleagues changes the daily job of the person at the top.

Her own record continued to cross institutional boundaries. She holds a research assistant professor appointment at SUNY Downstate. Her publications span genomics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. A 2017 conference abstract also lists her among the authors of Clarice, a metagenomic profiling project, alongside Rachid Ounit, Stefano Lonardi, and Mason. Computation was part of the work as well as biology.

The public-facing part of the job grew too. She was selected as a TEDMED Hive Innovator in 2020 and appeared in eCornell's 2021 Tech in Focus program. Biotia was selected for McKinsey's InNYC accelerator in 2023. In 2024, she joined other startup founders at a Cornell Tech breakfast attended by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. Each setting called for a different version of the same skill: explaining work to people outside the immediate team.

October brings another chapter

On October 1, 2026, Biotia announced an oversubscribed $9 million financing. The company also expanded its board and advisory group. Michele Colucci became board chair; Tim Barry joined the board; Clive Fields became a board observer. The capital was intended in part to support expansion of the company's New York City laboratory.

The announcement arrives ten years after Biotia's founding. Set beside the seed round and the earlier Series A, it makes clear how much of a founder's career happens between public milestones. The figures are separate financing events, with their own dates and purposes. They are also markers along a continuous stretch of company building.

“staying in the game is a strategy in itself”Niamh B. O'Hara, October 2026

Her advice to other founders that October was to conserve resources for the milestones that matter and find revenue early. In the same interview, she named Sleepy Hollow as a favorite autumn destination near New York. A conversation about capital can, happily, end somewhere with a little seasonal theatre.

There is a similarly practical detail in her approach to work. For a project with many stages, she has described drafting the final update first, then working backwards through what needs doing. It is an appealingly modest method for someone whose work involves large questions. Begin with the thing you intend to finish. Give yourself a route back to the present.

O'Hara's career now contains the degrees, the company, the appointments, and the financing announcements. Behind them sits that original willingness to learn another subject. The unfamiliar door led to a job that keeps supplying unfamiliar problems. A decade on, she is still doing the work required to pass through it.