neuroscience
(70)
What Happens to the Pictures That Don’t Make the Paper?
Caitlin Vander Weele began by giving overlooked laboratory images a second life. The founder of Stellate Communications has been finding audiences for science ever since.
Nancy Stagliano and the art of starting again
Eight employees and a plan to move north: Nancy Stagliano’s early CytomX years offer a window into a career built across engineering, science, and the business of getting a company off the ground.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne and the Long Search for a Better Map
A change of mind on a ship to Oxford led to a career tracing how neurons find their way. Now the scientist and former university president is betting that better maps of biology can help Xaira find better medicines.
Jenny Shao Left a White Coat for a Memory Machine
She spent years studying how people remember, then walked away from a mapped-out medical career to ask a stranger question: what would software become if it could carry the history of a relationship?
Scott Gies Took the Scenic Route to Biotech
Before Scott Gies cofounded Zoe Biosciences, he studied genomes, octopus cognition and marine conservation. The connecting idea is simple: follow the evidence, even when it takes the scenic route.
Craig Chambliss Spent 30 Years Learning How a Drug Becomes a Company
Before Neurelis had a commercial product, Craig Chambliss had already learned the industry from the sales call to the acquisition table. His career is a study in patient capital, practical company-building and the unglamorous middle where science becomes infrastructure.
Heungyeol Lee Spent a Decade Turning Brain Science Into a Language People Can Use
Before he built a brain-analysis company with his scientist brother, Heungyeol Lee worked in accounting, advertising and telecom. His unlikely route became the point: make difficult science legible, useful and human.
Craig Hopkinson Turns Deep Science Into Medicines That Reach People
A doctor by training who now runs research, development and medical affairs at one of neuroscience's most watched biopharma companies - and keeps the patient at the center of every decision.
David J. Katz
David J. Katz is Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and self-styled 'Alchemist in Residence' at Randa Apparel & Accessories, one of the world's largest apparel and accessories companies, home to brands like Levi's, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Haggar and Dickies. He blends data, neuroscience, behavioral economics and storytelling to understand and influence consumer behavior across roughly 1,200 employees and more than 20,000 retail touchpoints worldwide. A LinkedIn Top Voice, co-author of the best-selling 'Design for Response,' and a frequent speaker at Shoptalk and NRF, he is a widely cited voice on retail, marketing and the arrival of AI in the store.
David Schofman
David Schofman is the CEO and co-founder of Coro Health, an Austin-based company that builds therapeutic music and multi-faith spiritual streaming programs for senior living communities, hospitals and hospices. A serial entrepreneur who built one of the first online golf retail businesses in the 1990s and later ran global ecommerce for Callaway Golf, Schofman turned to health technology in 2008, translating research on music and the brain into a subscription platform now used across thousands of care communities in the US and Canada.
Joan Shen
Joan Huaqiong Shen is the founder and CEO of NeuShen Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech with R&D centers in Shanghai and Boston that develops treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. A physician-scientist trained in psychiatry and neurology, she spent decades leading central-nervous-system drug programs at Eli Lilly, Wyeth, Pfizer, Hengrui and Johnson & Johnson before running R&D and serving as CEO at I-Mab Biopharma, where she took the company public on Nasdaq and struck a global partnership with AbbVie. In 2026 NeuShen closed a Series A+ round led by Lilly Asia Ventures as its lead compound NS-136 advanced into Phase 2 trials.
Joanna Stanicka
Joanna Stanicka is the co-founder, president and CEO of Axonis Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech developing first-in-class oral medicines that target the brain chloride transporter KCC2 to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain and spinal cord injury. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who began her career in cancer biology in Ireland, she moved from the bench to the boardroom, taking Axonis from a Boston Children's Hospital discovery to a company that raised a $115 million Series A in 2024 and pushed its lead drug, AXN-027, into first-in-human trials.
Kelvin Chan
Kelvin Chan is a co-founder of Nirvana, a New York healthtech company that uses machine learning and data science to turn insurance verification and cost estimation into something providers and patients can trust. He leads product and serves as president. A Columbia-trained neuroscientist who spent years building enterprise data software at Enigma, Chan started Nirvana in 2019 after a frustrating personal experience trying to find out whether his insurance would cover a therapist. The company has raised $24.2M in Series A funding led by Northzone and now powers eligibility checks across digital health platforms and provider offices nationwide.
Ramses Alcaide
Dr. Ramses Alcaide is the co-founder and CEO of Neurable, a Boston-based neurotechnology company building brain-computer interfaces disguised as ordinary headphones. A neuroscientist trained at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, he turned a decade of EEG research into the MW75 Neuro, a Master & Dynamic collaboration that reads brainwaves to help wearers focus. Neurable has raised roughly $49M, closed a Series A in late 2025, and unveiled a HyperX gaming headset at CES 2026.
Sam Clark
Sam Clark, MD, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Terran Biosciences, a CNS-focused platform biotech he started in 2017 from his medical school dorm room with $10,000. A neuroscientist trained at MIT and Columbia, Clark has built one of the largest psychedelic development programs in the industry, is the named inventor on more than 200 patent applications, and holds the world's first patents for new forms of psilocybin and MDMA. Terran pairs a medicinal-chemistry drug design engine with an FDA-cleared neuroimaging software platform and a pipeline of late-stage assets licensed from Sanofi and Pierre Fabre.
John Ramunas
John Ramunas, PhD, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rejuvenation Technologies Inc., a Mountain View, CA biotechnology company pioneering mRNA-based telomere extension therapy to reverse cellular aging. A serial entrepreneur turned neuroscientist, Ramunas spent his PhD at Stanford's Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology inventing the first safe, nonimmunogenic TERT mRNA drug - a technology now protected by 50+ patents. His company, backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, is advancing a pipeline targeting fatal orphan diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and liver cirrhosis, with the long-term vision of a single therapy taken every few years to prevent age-related disease.
Aagya Mathur
Aagya Mathur is the co-founder and CEO of Aavia, a Brooklyn-based hormone health company whose app helps people with ovaries understand how their cycle shapes their energy, mood, sleep and focus. A University of Virginia neuroscientist turned MIT Sloan MBA and ex-Deloitte consultant, she co-built Aavia out of an MIT bootcamp into a top-charting wellness app that has reached hundreds of thousands of users on organic growth alone, with backers ranging from MIT delta v to a $9.7M+ funding base.
Christin Glorioso
Christin Glorioso, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and serial entrepreneur who is CEO and co-founder of NeuroAge Therapeutics, a San Francisco brain-health company building AI-powered 'aging clocks' for the human brain. Trained at MIT and the Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Medical Scientist Training Program, she spent two decades studying how brains age before leaving academia to turn that research into a diagnostic and drug-development engine. NeuroAge combines MRI brain-volume data, cognitive testing and proprietary RNA blood biomarkers - validated on data from more than 500,000 people - to estimate brain age and dementia risk decades before symptoms. She also founded the nonprofit Longevity Global and led the world's top-ranked US COVID-19 forecasting model in the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge.
Meredith Perry
Meredith Perry is the co-founder and CEO of Elemind, a neurotech company building a wearable headband that reads your brainwaves in real time and nudges them with bursts of sound, marketed as sleep on demand. Before Elemind she was the inventor behind uBeam, the ultrasonic wireless-charging venture she dreamed up as a University of Pennsylvania undergrad and grew into a roughly $40 million, much-debated startup backed by Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Cuban and Marissa Mayer. A trained paleobiologist and astrobiologist who once did research with NASA, Perry holds dozens of patents and now wants to build what she calls an app store for the brain.
MJ Antonini
MJ Antonini is the co-founder and CEO of NeuroBionics, an MIT spinout building hair-thin, flexible bioelectronic fibers that thread through blood vessels to reach deep neural structures - delivering deep brain stimulation without opening the skull. A Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate who trained in both medicine and engineering, he turned a decade of fiber research from Polina Anikeeva's MIT lab into a venture-backed company that raised an oversubscribed $10M seed round to push toward first-in-human trials.
Raj Amin
Raj Amin is the co-founder and CEO of Arcade Therapeutics, a New York science-first game studio building prescription digital therapeutics that embed clinically proven anxiety-reduction techniques inside mobile games. A University of Pennsylvania-trained engineer and Wharton MBA, he has spent more than two decades building venture-backed companies at the seam of healthcare, media and technology - including HealthiNation, the first on-demand consumer health video network, and Mana Health, a health-data interoperability platform later acquired by Comcast. He is a self-described #GirlDad, a drummer and aspiring guitarist, and a Broadway investor who has backed Tony Award-winning productions.
Raphael Certain
Raphael Certain is the founder and CEO of Clarity, a Franco-American neurotechnology company building a wearable virtual-reality headset that delivers personalized light and sound stimulation at gamma frequencies to support the aging brain. A self-taught entrepreneur who pivoted from marine biology to neurophysiology, he turned a master's thesis at the Neurodegenerative Diseases Institute in Bordeaux into a venture-backed company. By 24 he had raised more than $1.3 million, assembled an international team of 20-plus people across Paris and San Francisco, and built partnerships with leading universities in the US and UK.
Robert Schiller
Robert Schiller is the CEO of Impairment Science, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusetts company behind DRUID, a smartphone app that measures cognitive and motor impairment in under three minutes through four game-like tasks. A repeat startup operator who has taken two high-tech companies public, Schiller runs a business built on a simple idea: instead of testing what is in your blood, test how your brain and body are actually performing right now. Under his leadership, DRUID has grown from a viral consumer download into Druid Enterprise, a workplace-safety platform used to gauge readiness for duty across fleets, public-safety departments, and employers.
Samantha Scott
Samantha Scott, PhD is the founder and CEO of JuneBrain, a Baltimore medtech startup building the first wearable, technician-free retinal scanning system. Trained as a biomedical engineer at Stanford and USC, she is turning high-resolution eye imaging plus AI into a way to detect and monitor brain and eye conditions far outside the walls of a clinic. JuneBrain has raised more than $3 million in private capital, won $3 million in NSF grants, holds four issued patents, and is on track for an FDA submission.
Sema Sgaier
Sema Sgaier is the co-founder and CEO of Surgo Health, a Washington, DC public benefit corporation that uses AI and behavioral science to decode the 'why' behind health behaviors. A trained molecular biologist and neuroscientist turned serial entrepreneur, she spent a dozen years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation scaling HIV-prevention programs across India and Africa before co-founding Surgo Foundation, Surgo Ventures, and Surgo Health. She has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, taught at Harvard and the University of Washington, writes op-eds for The New York Times, and is a trained documentary photographer.
Stephen Larson
Stephen Larson is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who co-founded OpenWorm, the open-science effort to build the first complete digital organism by simulating the 302-neuron nervous system of the roundworm C. elegans. He is co-founder and CEO of MetaCell, a life-science software company that helps pharmaceutical firms and research institutions visualize, analyze, and collaborate on complex biological data. Trained at MIT in computer science and AI and at UC San Diego in neuroscience, he sits at the intersection of code and biology, betting that understanding a worm in silico is a first step toward understanding the human brain.
Tiffany Pang
Tiffany Pang is the co-founder and CEO of Outreach Grid (Appledore, Inc.), a software platform that helps cities, outreach workers, law enforcement, and nonprofits coordinate the work of reducing homelessness. A San Francisco native and Yale-trained neuroscientist turned software engineer, she left a Silicon Valley job to build tools that connect the people working on the streets with the agencies that can house and help. Her work earned a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 for Social Entrepreneurs, and Outreach Grid has expanded to communities across multiple U.S. states.
Scott Greenberg
Scott Greenberg is the Chief Business Officer of Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco building small-molecule drugs to stop nerves from dying. He joined in February 2025 to steer business development and corporate strategy as the company pushes its lead SARM1 inhibitor, NB-4746, into the clinic. He arrives with more than two decades crossing the line between finance and biology - a Goldman Sachs banking start, more than a decade at Celgene, an operations leadership role at Roivant Sciences, and a stint as Chief Operating Officer at Aro Biotherapeutics. He studied both Finance and the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania before an MBA at Harvard.
Alex Wiltschko
Alex Wiltschko is the founder and CEO of Osmo, a company teaching computers to read and write smell. An olfactory neuroscientist who spent roughly 18 years studying scent, he led the team at Google Brain that built an AI model predicting how a molecule smells from its chemical structure - work published in Science in 2023 as the Principal Odor Map. Osmo spun out of Google in 2022, and in 2024 it pulled off 'scent teleportation,' digitally capturing a fresh-cut summer plum and reprinting its smell in another room. In February 2026 the company raised a $70 million Series B led by Two Sigma Ventures.
Alice Zhang
Alice Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics (now Verge Labs), a San Francisco biotech she started in 2015 after walking away from an MD/PhD program at UCLA. She built a company that pairs machine learning with one of the largest collections of human brain tissue to find drug targets for diseases like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A Princeton molecular biology graduate, Soros Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Zhang turned her inexperience into what she calls a 'superpower,' raising more than $130 million and partnering with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca before pivoting the company toward selling its data and insights to pharma in 2025.