Company leader
Jane Chao, PhD
Co-founder, President and CEO
Ceribell
Chao is trying to make EEG a routine vital sign, so that every critically ill patient can have brain activity checked at the bedside within minutes.
Growing Up in China
Jane (Xingjuan) Chao is the co-founder, president, and chief executive of Ceribell, a Sunnyvale, California, company whose headband EEG system lets hospital teams check critically ill patients for silent seizures and delirium. She has run the company since its concept stage and took it public in 2024, an uncommon path for a medtech founder.
Chao was born in a small city in China and was the first in her family to attend high school and college. She told a Fogarty Innovation audience that many of her teachers said she would never be as good as the boys at science, which pushed her to work harder, and she became one of two girls in a 25-student accelerated science program.
From Peking University to Film School
She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Peking University and then a PhD in biophysics at Cornell University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, according to her Ceribell biography. During graduate school she decided an academic career felt isolating, and she spent a year studying cinematography and directing at the Beijing Film Academy.
Chao credits that detour with her leadership style. "As I started the company, one of my strengths has been my ability to connect clinical technical elements to the empathy you need to lead effectively," she said at the Fogarty event. "If I hadn't gone to film school, I probably wouldn't be able to do that as intuitively."
McKinsey, Novartis, and Genentech
Chao joined McKinsey & Company in 2007 without ever having taken an economics or business class, and stayed until 2013. She calls those years her "paid MBA." She then worked as a senior strategy manager at Novartis and as principal manager of portfolio management strategy at Genentech.
Building Ceribell
Chao co-founded Ceribell with two Stanford professors, neurologist Josef Parvizi and musician Chris Chafe. Their first idea was to turn brain waves into music. The team shifted after Chao saw how long it took to discover a nonconvulsive seizure in a hospital patient, because a conventional EEG can take hours to set up. Ceribell built a headband, a small recorder, and AI software that flags seizure activity at the bedside.
She has been CEO since October 2014 and president since July 2016. Ceribell has since added delirium monitoring on the same headband, which earned a CMS new technology add-on payment in 2026, and it expects 2026 revenue of $115 million to $117 million. "Delirium is difficult to recognize in a busy ICU, and objective bedside monitoring gives clinicians valuable additional information," she said when the delirium product launched in November 2026.
Chao also serves on the board of Magnus Medical, a medical equipment company.
How She Runs the Company
Chao tells other technical founders to sell their own product. "When you start to commercialize your product, please carry the bag, especially if you are a CEO or founder with a technical background like me," she said at the Fogarty talk. "Nobody should be able to sell the product better than you." She also says a growing company has to change how it treats mistakes: "You have to allow small failures, while having guardrails to avoid big failures, so the team can really feel empowered."