
A surgeon's discomfort became an operator's question: what if the nervous system could speak more clearly during surgery? Two decades later, Luekenga is still building around that answer.
Rich Vogel is the US CEO of Nervio, an Israeli HealthTech startup building the first AI platform designed specifically for intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IONM). A board-certified neurophysiologist with PhDs in both neuroscience and psychology, Vogel is a two-time elected president of the American Society of Neurophysiological Monitoring (ASNM) and one of the most widely recognized voices in the field. He has given more than a thousand talks across clinical, academic, and professional audiences, and now leads Nervio's push to turn raw streams of surgical brain-and-spine signals into real-time alerts that help operating-room teams catch neurologic risk earlier.
David Matthews, PhD, is Chief Business Officer at Beacon Biosignals, the computational neurodiagnostics company turning EEG brain data into AI-powered biomarkers for neurological and psychiatric disease. A computational neuroscientist by training, he spent two decades moving between the lab, the boardroom, and the market - from NIH- and NSF-funded research at the Salk Institute to a partnership at Boston Consulting Group to commercial leadership at digital-health platform BrightInsight. He now drives partnerships and commercial growth at a company betting that the brain can be measured at home, at scale.
Gajus Worthington is a life sciences entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor who turned an idea for circuits that move fluid instead of electrons into Fluidigm, a microfluidics company he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO through its IPO and years as a public company. Today he is Chairman and CEO of Superfluid Dx, a South San Francisco company building a blood test that reads cell-free messenger RNA from the brain to diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier and more precisely. Between those chapters he served as COO of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, co-founded Kaizen Therapeutics and the ML/AI healthcare company StatOS, and became a Managing Partner at WRQ Sciences.