Brown brings expertise in software engineering, wearable technology, and user-centered design to startup building brain-controlled smartglasses

MindX Corp., a startup that is combining neurotechnology, augmented reality and artificial intelligence to create a Look & Think™ interface for next-generation spatial computing applications, today announced that it has appointed Julia Brown as Chief Executive Officer.

Previously, Brown co-founded EpiWatch, Inc., a seizure detection and chronic condition management platform for wearable and mobile devices; and led the design, development, and deployment of over twenty clinical software applications at the Technology Innovation Center, a division of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She co-founded MindX in 2017 along with Emily Caporello, and led the engineering team during the company’s year-long incubation with Camden Partners Nexus, a Baltimore-based venture capital fund.

"Throughout her career, Julia has demonstrated a proclivity for translating concepts into products,” said R. Jacob Vogelstein, a partner at Camden Partners Nexus and Board member at MindX. “We believe she is the perfect person to build and grow this company as it moves from ideation to commercialization.”

MindX’s first product will be a set of smartglasses which use their patented Look & Think technology to enable intuitive, hands-free control of a contextually-aware information display. The science underlying look-and-think control was originally developed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), as part of its neuroprosthetics program. “It’s incredibly exciting to see this technology transition out of the lab,” said Geoffrey Ling, a MindX Board member and the former Director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which was the primary sponsor of APL’s neuroprosthetics research, “and Julia has all of the skills necessary to take it from the clinic to the consumer market.”

“Smartglasses are poised to become the future of mobile computing, but today there is no socially useful way to control a head-mounted display,” said Brown. “Our unique approach to combining ocular and neural signals provides a more natural, human interface than existing alternatives. With our team and our technology, we believe Look & Think can replace point and click as the dominant human-computer interaction paradigm within the next decade.”

Camden Partners Nexus is the venture capital arm of Camden Partners Holdings, a Baltimore-based private equity firm that spun out of T. Rowe Price in 1995. General Partners R. Jacob Vogelstein and George Petrocheilos manage the fund, which invests in biomedical technology (drugs, devices, and diagnostics) companies founded by world-renowned scientists at leading academic research institutions. Nexus was founded in 2016 and has made ten investments to date.