Maya Gosztyla, PhD, is a co-founder, COO, and Lead Scientist at BrainStorm Therapeutics, Inc., where she established and now manages a cutting-edge research laboratory focused on the development of iPSC-derived brain organoid models for high-throughput drug screening. Under her leadership, BrainStorm’s AI-driven drug discovery platform—powered by scRNA-seq foundation models fine-tuned on human organoid data—won the NVIDIA Award at the 2024 Evolved Bio × ML Hackathon, and the company’s pitch captured top honors at the JPM-25 Women’s Health Pitch Competition.
Dr. Gosztyla earned her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Diego (2019–2024), where, in the Yeo lab at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, she generated and integrated complex multi-omics datasets to characterize RNA-binding zinc-finger proteins, uncovered subcellular RNA mislocalization in iPSC-derived cortical neuron models of myotonic dystrophy, and developed RNA-targeted therapeutics for microsatellite repeat expansion disorders. Her work there was supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Myotonic Dystrophy Foundation, and the RNA Society, and resulted in sixteen peer-reviewed publications and a provisional patent.
She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience and Molecular Genetics, summa cum laude, from The Ohio State University. An experimental and computational biologist at heart, Maya applies machine learning techniques to drug discovery pipelines and has a deep track record in rare neurological disease research—including Parkinson’s disease, Rett syndrome, CDKL5 deficiency, myotonic dystrophy, Niemann-Pick disease, and Alzheimer’s disease awareness and advocacy.
Among her many passions, Maya champions social awareness of Alzheimer’s and strives to accelerate therapeutic development for neurodegenerative disorders. Her top skills include NGS library preparation, stem cell differentiation, assay development, Python programming, and bioinformatics.
