The Team
Melis Yilmaz Balban, PhD
Founder & CEO
Neuroscientist. Mom of two. Cat lady.
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Dr. Balban received her PhD from Harvard University and studied human stress responses and interventions as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford School of Medicine. She is the leading author on several peer reviewed articles on the stress response in high profile scientific journals.
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Outside of work: tennis, skiing, yoga
Dawna Bagherian, PhD
Chief Scientist
Machine learning practitioner and computational biologist with special expertise in time series data
and custom deep learning architecture
development for structure learning.
Outside of work: volleyball, canoeing, watching horror movies with my dogs​​​
Henry D. Zhu
Software
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Software Engineer with expertise in Android development and distributed systems.
Background prior to Neurosmart includes working as a Software Engineer at Meta on observability (distributed tracing and logging to gain insights onto the performance, reliability,
and efficiency of messaging APIs).
Outside of work: spending time with my
wife and son, skiing, distance running
Arozo Azimi
Researcher
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Research assistant with expertise in memory research and psycho-cognitive testing.
Outside of work: gardening, playing guitar,
unwinding with yoga
Vivian Vu (Yasutake)
Executive Assistant
​Chief wrangler with 15+ years in
fast paced environments.
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Outside of work: traveling, finding good eats, + spending QT with those I love​