Synaptic Bloom is an interdisciplinary effort grounded in the principles of open science, bringing together researchers, clinicians, engineers, and caregivers around a shared goal: advancing our understanding of human development.

Human development can’t be understood through any single lens. Biological signals, behaviour, environment, relationships, and lived experience continuously interact to shape each person’s trajectory. Studying those interactions means connecting fields that have traditionally worked in isolation – biology, behaviour, and environment – into one coherent framework.

But understanding is only half the goal. We’re driven to build: to translate what we learn into products that clinicians, caregivers, and families can actually use, so that better science reaches the people it’s meant to serve.

The people behind Synaptic Bloom reflect both commitments: individuals who have spent their careers working on different parts of the problem, now contributing to a shared effort to connect them into a coherent framework.

Alex Potamianos, CEO, Synaptic Bloom

Alexandros Potamianos

Co-CEO & Co-founder
Alexandros (Alex) Potamianos is a researcher and entrepreneur with over three decades of experience spanning speech and natural language processing, multimodal interactive systems, artificial intelligence and behavioral informatics. His work bridges academic research and applied innovation — from foundational research at AT&T Labs-Research, Bell Labs, and Lucent Technologies, to co-founding Alesman and the emotion AI company Behavioral Signals. Most recently, he served as an Amazon Scholar at Alexa and Amazon AGI focused on multiparty dialogue and building agentic LLMs, before founding Synaptic Bloom.

Alex holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, and an MBA from the Stern School of Business, NYU. He is a Professor at NTUA and a Visiting Professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering, USC.

Splitting his time between Los Angeles and Athens, Alex enjoys kayaking and sailing.
Georgia Maniati

Georgia Maniati

COO & Co-founder
Georgia Maniati is a speech and language technologist and AI strategist whose career spans research, large-scale data operations, and organizational transformation. She holds an M.Sc. in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Athens, and was awarded an Onassis Scholarship.

Georgia began her career in text-to-speech research at Nuance Communications before joining Innoetics, a spin-off of the Athena Research Center acquired by Samsung in 2017. At Samsung's Language AI R&D Group, she built advanced speech and language systems deployed across many languages and applications, spanning data strategy, model development, and multilingual research operations. A strong advocate for AI literacy and the responsible deployment of emerging technologies, she went on to found AI Brains, a boutique studio helping organizations understand and operationalize AI through consulting, training, and structured change programs.

Outside work, she enjoys painting and sketching.
Shri Narayanan

Shrikanth Narayanan

Chief Scientist & Co-founder
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is a pioneer in human-centered information processing and communication technologies, with deep expertise in biobehavioral signal processing and machine intelligence.

Shri holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA and is a University Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), where he holds the Niki and C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering. He holds appointments across engineering, computer science, linguistics, psychology, music, neuroscience, and medicine, and is the founder and director of the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) and founding director of the Ming Hsieh Institute. Prior to USC, he was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research.

A serial entrepreneur in human behavioral AI, Shri co-founded Behavioral Signals and the mental health technology company Lyssn, among other ventures. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Outside the lab, Shri enjoys playing Indian classical music on the veena.