Our Team
We are a small team of chronically ill patient stakeholders with neuroscience, engineering, marketing, and business development experience. Our activities support relevant scientific and clinical research teams with public awareness, proposal writing, and more.
Vijay Iyer
Vijay has worked at the intersection of neuroscience and technology for over 25 years. Trained in Electrical Engineering with an Applied Physics bent (BS/MS/PhD at Rice University), he came to neuroscience for the lasers and stayed for the frontier spirit. He advanced in vivo brain microscopy technology at Cold Spring Harbor Lab and became a Research Software Engineer at HHMI/Janelia Research Campus. As the lead developer of ScanImage software, he enabled hundreds of users and dozens of new use cases of awake, behaving two-photon microscopy, while building integrations and partnerships with multiple microscopy hardware vendors.
Vijay formed an early US BRAIN Initiative startup (Vidrio Technolgies, now part of MBF Bioscience) for ScanImage and served as the initial Principal Investigator on multiple NIH/NINDS grants (R24, R43). More recently, he’s established the neuroscience function at a global scientific software company.
Once competitive in running and strength events, Vijay’s athletic and otherwise active life ended in 2021 when he was diagnosed with ME/CFS amidst a period of sharp decline. His partial recovery in recent years sparked the ideas behind Ansyme.
Divya Breed
Divya (she/any) is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She holds degrees in Computational Neuroscience from Caltech and Signal Processing from UC San Diego. She worked for 25 years as an electrical engineer in various applications including machine learning, medical devices, and high-speed communications.
Divya is also a Nebula, Hugo, Ignyte, and Locus Award nominated author of science fiction and fantasy, writing as S.B. Divya. Her novel, Machinehood, debuted in 2021, and her most recent book, Loka, was published in 2024. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she is a former editor and host of Escape Pod, a weekly science fiction podcast.
In January 2021, Divya contracted COVID, and a few months later, she became disabled by Long COVID in the form of ME/CFS, which persists to the present. She functions at about twenty percent of where she was and can no longer work full-time, but she continues to write at a slower pace.