Niki Bayat is the co-founder and CEO of AesculaTech, a biotechnology company designing innovative smart materials to change the way health and consumer products interact with the human body. She is also a chemical engineer with 10+ years of experience in organic chemistry and hold a PhD from the University of Southern California. Her graduate work involved the design, synthesis, and characterization of novel, smart polymeric materials. Leveraging that expertise and a belief in using science to improve lives, she has led her company to the pre-approval stage for their first medical product. She was included in MIT’s 2018 35 Innovators Under 35. Her company participated in YCombinator 2018. Niki was a recipient of the 2015 Research Enhancement Fellowship at University of Southern California, where she earned her MS. She received her bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, where she ranked 8th among more than 1400,000 participants in the National Entrance Exam for Universities in Iran.