About Neurosetta
Neurosetta was founded in February 2021 for commercializing RosetteArray® technology, a human stem cell-derived platform for quantitative high-throughput modeling of early human brain and spinal cord development. The company was co-founded by Dr. Randolph Ashton, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison); Dr. Gavin Knight, a former graduate student and postdoc in Dr. Ashton’s lab; and Dr. Rebecca Willett, Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago.
MISSION
At Neurosetta, we leverage human stem cell technology and neurodevelopmental biology principles to bioengineer rapid, reproducible, and accurate screening platforms for assessing the impacts of chemical, drug, and genetic effects on human neurodevelopment.
VISION
Neurosetta’s state-of-the-art technology can ensure chemical and drug safety and facilitate precision medicine drug discovery to help reduce the prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders and protect human health.
Meet Our Team
Randolph Ashton, PhD
Randolph S. Ashton received his B.S. from Hampton University (Hampton, Virginia, 2002) and Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY, 2007) in Chemical Engineering. During graduate studies under Professor Ravi Kane, Randolph researched how engineering biomaterials at the nanoscale could regulate the fate of adult neural stem cells. He continued to pursue his interest in stems cells and tissue engineering as a postdoctoral fellow at California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and as an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley’s Stem Cell Center in the lab of Professor David Schaffer.
In 2011, Randolph became an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2018, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and appointed as the Associate Director of the UW-Madison Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center. The goal of Randolph’s research is to bioengineer human tissues that can be used as tools or therapeutics to prevent or cure central nervous system disorders. In his research, Randolph melds state-of-the-art biomaterial approaches with novel human neural stem cell derivation protocols to bioengineer brain and spinal cord cells and tissue models in vitro. In 2021, Randolph co-founded Neurosetta LLC to translate his academic lab’s innovations for developmental neurotoxicology, neurodevelopmental disease modeling, and drug discovery applications.
Among his many awards and honors are:
- 2020 Innovation of the Year Award by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
- 2018 Equity & Diversity Award by the UW-Madison College of Engineering for scientific outreach activities
- 2017 NSF CAREER Award
- 2016 Young Faculty Investigator Award by the Regenerative Medicine Workshop at Hilton Head
- 2015 Emerging Investigator by Chemical Communications
- 2013 Rising Star by the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group
- Burroughs Welcome Fund Innovation in Regulatory Science Award
- Draper Technology Innovation Awards from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
- Basic Research Award from the UW Institute for Clinical & Translational Research.
Additional support of his research and commercialization efforts has been garnered from the NIH, EPA, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Gavin Knight, PhD
CO-FOUNDER, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
Gavin Knight received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2011) and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, Wisconsin, 2018). In his graduate studies, under the guidance of Professor Randolph Ashton, he engineered microarrayed cell culture substrates that generated standardized neural rosette tissues, allowing reproducible modeling of the earliest stages of human nervous system development. Gavin continued working within the Ashton group during his post-doc to establish the human RosetteArray® platform as a tool for neural tube defect and neurodevelopmental toxicity risk assessment. As a co-founder of Neurosetta LLC and a scientist at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Gavin directs the scale-up of the RosetteArray technology and oversees the continued testing for translation of human rosette arrays as a platform technology.
Rebecca Willett, PhD
Rebecca Willett is currently the Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her research is focused on machine learning, signal processing, and large-scale data science. Professor Willett studies methods to learn and leverage hidden structure in large-scale datasets, as representing data in terms of these structures allows machine learning methods to produce more accurate predictions when data contain missing entries, are subject to constrained sensing or communication resources, correspond to rare events, or reflect indirect measurements of complex physical phenomena. These challenges are pervasive in science and technology data, and Rebecca’s work in this space has important implications in national security, medical imaging, materials science, astronomy, climate science, and several other fields.
Rebecca has published nearly 200 book chapters and scientific articles in top-tier journals, and has been featured at conferences exploring the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, statistics, mathematics, and optimization. Her group contributed in the mathematical foundations of signal processing and machine learning and their application to a variety of real-world problems.
Rebecca completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005 and was an Assistant then tenured Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University from 2005 to 2013. She was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Harvey D. Spangler Faculty Scholar, and Fellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013 to 2018.
Rebecca’s honors and leadership roles include:
- 2007 National Science Foundation CAREER Award
- Member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group
- 2010 Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award
- Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021
- Fellow of the IEEE in 2022.
- Co-principal investigator and member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for the Foundations of Data Science
- Helps direct the Air Force Research Lab University Center of Excellence on Machine Learning
- Currently leads the University of Chicago’s AI+Science Initiative.
- Serves on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation, the AI for Science Committee for the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, the Sandia National Laboratories Computing and Information Sciences Program, and the University of Tokyo Institute for AI and Beyond.
Kevin Krucki
COMPUTER VISION SOFTWARE DEVELOPER
Kevin Krucki is a talented computer vision engineer with extensive experience in developing advanced algorithms and technologies. He graduated from the University of Dayton for both his Bachelor’s (2013) and Master’s (2015) degree in Electrical Engineering. Kevin began his career at MZA Associates, where he worked on complex projects related to tracking and identifying objects, including developing algorithms for missile tracking and image processing for surveillance applications.
Kevin‘s experience at MZA set him on a path to become a leading expert in computer vision. He continues to apply his skills and expertise in his current role at Neurosetta, where works on developing algorithms for image classification and segmentation. In addition to his work on computer vision, he contributes to web design by creating user-friendly and visually appealing interfaces for the company’s web applications.
Nikolai Fedorchak
CELL CULTURE TECHNICIAN
Nikolai Fedorchak received his B.S. in Biology and Psychology from Iowa State University in 2011 and his Certificate in Stem Cell Technologies from Madison Area Technical College in 2021. In 2016, Nikolai was hired as a Research Specialist for Dr. Randolph Ashton’s Stem Cell Bioprocessing and Regenerative Biomaterials Laboratory. In addition to providing administrative support for the lab, Nikolai has assisted postdoctoral and graduate students in research relating to spinal cord progenitor derivation and transplantation and rosette morphology analysis. In 2018, Nikolai was a co-author on a publication that demonstrated the engraftment of hPSC-derived motor neurons into the developing spinal cord of chicken embryos. Then in 2020, Nikolai published a review article that described current approaches for bioengineering neural organoids in vitro. In 2023, he joined the International Society for Stem Cell Research to further his expertise in the quality standards of stem cell research.
Nikolai joined Neurosetta in 2022 and leverages his expertise in human neurodevelopment by conducting high-throughput screening experiments with the RosetteArray platform. As a Cell Culture Technician, Nikolai spearheads human stem cell culture processes, immunostaining, confocal imaging, and image data analysis.