Meet the Team
Our team of visionaries is dedicated to creating breakthrough health technologies and wellness solutions that align with your health!
Shraddha Chaugule, PhD
Founder, CEO & Chief Scientist
Shraddha is a polymath and has deep expertise across many areas, including pricing, choice behavior, economic modeling, value-based care design, and machine learning. Shraddha has a PhD in Health Economics from the University of Southern California and has extensive experience working in digital health. Shraddha has several peer-reviewed publications and has collaborated on research with the CDC, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and the RAND Corporation. Shraddha is deeply committed to helping solve complex problems facing health systems today and, more specifically, those arising from racial and socio-economic disparities.
Fun fact:
Shraddha loves arts, music, beaches, museums, and Big Sur sunsets. She lives close to her brother in the SF Bay Area in the angelic town of Morgan Hill, surrounded by mountains and orchards, and her whole life revolves around her two dogs, Cooper and Maya.
Ian Thornell
Founding AI Engineer & Interim CTO
Ian is a D1 rowing athlete out of Boston University with a BS in Computer Science and Physics. He is very applied and has deep experience in developing and launching AI applications. At Boston University, he did geo-spatial mapping to create an AI application to improve his rowing performance. He also developed a reinforcement learning AI application for athletes in rehabilitation. At Astro, Ian is the Interim CTO and the Head of AI.
Fun fact:
Ian is currently pursuing his MS in AI at Oxford Brookes University in the UK and is well positioned to compete in the Olympics for Team USA.
Kristina Lerman, PhD
Research Partner
Kristina Lerman is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the University of Southern California (USC), and a Research Associate Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department. An expert in complex multi-agent systems, Dr. Lerman has received numerous grants on social data and other topics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Information Sciences Institute (ISI) early in her career.
AI Research & Deployment Partnership
AI Titans USC/ISI
Notable achievements:
- Pioneered natural language processing
- Invented DNA computing
- Created the first quantum computing system in academia
- NASA awards for developing space technologies
