Nao Gamo, PhD is the Vice President of Business Development at MDC. She serves the interests of all the MDC client companies, and is highly active in the local entrepreneurial community. She is also the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the MDC portfolio company, NeuroSonics Medical, Inc..

Dr. Gamo received her BS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she double majored in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Music. She received her PhD in Neurobiology from Yale University, where she studied the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying prefrontal cortical function, and how they were impaired by stress and psychiatric disorders. As a graduate student, she was supported by an NINDS T32 Training Grant, NIH F31 Individual Predoctoral Fellowship, and Society for Neuroscience Graduate Student Travel Award, and was selected as an HHMI Medical Research Scholar. She then arrived in Baltimore to complete a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Molecular Psychiatry Program at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), where she explored the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and investigated connections between biological findings and clinical phenotypes. She was supported by a Brain & Behavior Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Grant, and an NIMH T32 Training Grant.

In 2018, she founded NeuroSonics Medical, which is developing a novel focused ultrasound device for minimally invasive neurosurgery. The NeuroSonics device is designed to be much less invasive than traditional brain surgery, while overcoming the shortcomings of more recent technologies, such as laser ablation and transcranial focused ultrasound. The company's goals are to reduce the morbidity associated with surgery, while providing a flexible and customized way to destroy brain tissue. Together with Dr. Amir Manbachi of JHU, a co-inventor of this technology, she has raised over $500,000 in grant funding, including a National Science Foundation STTR Phase I award in collaboration with JHU.

Complete list of published work can be found here