We are delighted to share that Maya Gosztyla (Molecular Genetics and Neuroscience B.S. 2018) was recently awarded the 2026 William Oxley Thompson Alumni Award by the Ohio State University Alumni Association. This award recognizes an alum who has demonstrated notable achievement through a career, civic involvement or both before their 36th birthday. We also want to tahnk her for spending some of her short visit at OSU talking to some of our current majors!

Maya completed a senior thesis in the lab of Dr. Mark Seeger, and along the way picked up numerous undergraduate fellowships from OSU. She also was awarded the Goldwater Scholarship and the Astronaut Scholarship, and received a fellowship from the U.S. Embassy of Switzerland that funded her summer research internship in Switzerland. After completing a post bac at the NIH, where she developed a drug-discovery screening platform for a rare childhood dementia disorder called Niemann Pick disease Maya entered a Ph.D program in at UC San Diego. At UCSD she pioneered major technological advancements in human brain organoids supporting accelerated drug discovery for disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The platform she co-founded combines patient-derived brain organoids with AI-based drug discovery to create personalized therapeutics for neurological disorders.

Upon completion of her Ph.D. Maya was named co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Brainstorm, a startup that builds on the organoid/AI platform she contributed to in her Ph.D. She also serves as the central leader for Project EveryStone, a major effort to repurpose existing drugs for treatment of CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder. This rare genetic epilepsy has no FDA-approved treatments and leads to devastating seizures as well as impacts on motor and cognitive development, so this project has the potential to dramatically improve outcomes for affected children and families. Her innovation and entrepreneurship have been honored by multiple awards in pitch competitions including four first-place or audience choice awards at major pitch competitions in 2025 alone, including the first-place award at the Founders Heavyweight Fight Club at San Diego Startup Week, and she was recently recognized as a top 10 biology innovator under 40 in California.

We are so proud of Maya!