Stu Martin is a consultant who works tirelessly to gain investment for crucial healthcare innovation. His passion for science started at Millbrook with physics and biology classes, where he felt consistently supported by teachers who provided solid infrastructure, while he also had a natural inclination for economics and finance.

Aside from his academic interests, he was an avid athlete, and his favorite extracurriculars were baseball and hockey. At Millbrook, he wasn’t mapping out a career in biotech. He was focused on hockey, baseball, and figuring out what genuinely interested him.

Stu went on to attend St. Lawrence University, where he discovered his love of psychology. With the hands-on approach at St. Lawrence, Stu was able to study a wide variety of clinical psychology topics, while doing science-heavy lab procedures at the same time. It was during college that he realized he wanted to pursue both economics and science, so after graduating he went on to Trinity College in Dublin to pursue a combined degree in entrepreneurship, science, and human health. He explained, “The first half of the program was heavy science labs, a lot of pharmacology and drug development science, a lot of nitty gritty science stuff, and then the second half of the program was, okay, how do you turn science innovation into a viable business framework?”

Trinity provided the opportunity to engage in a summer internship, which Stu completed in 2023 with Transition Bio, a biotech startup focusing on novel drug discovery in bio-molecular condensates. There, he worked closely with the company’s CBO and CFO on competitor analyses, accounting, and business strategy. It was the experience that confirmed his desire to continue translating science into business.

As he was about to complete his master’s degree, he joined TiliaHealth FlexCo in the spring of 2025 as a consultant. TiliaHealth creates psychiatric assessments “using immersive, game-like experience, paving the way for personalized treatment plans.” Stu elaborated on their flagship product: “They are developing phone games that measure not just how you’re feeling but also the psychological processes within our brains that produce certain outcomes. If someone has trouble getting up in the morning, this game won’t tell them that because, of course, they already know that. Instead, it could tell someone why that’s happening and what biological process might be driving it.” In the research space, this is what’s known as a biomarker, and in the field of psychiatry, biomarkers have lagged in innovation. Stu hopes TiliaHealth can be the ones who change that.

Understanding how much more he could learn if he was to work in two very different areas of healthcare innovation, Stu added a second job, returning to Transition Bio as a consultant in November 2025. The company focuses on research related to dementia, cancers, and other diseases driven by unstructured proteins. Stu helps the internal science team navigate the complex business implications of their progress so promising research can continue to be funded and forward moving. “The founders have developed an incredible drug discovery screening technology involving machine learning,” he explained, “that can greatly accelerate our understanding and ability to drug proteins that have forever been ‘undruggable.’” His role often involves translating scientific progress into business models or business development initiatives. “Scientists are very smart, much smarter than me,” Stu said. “It is my goal to make sure those scientists can translate their work into words that businesspeople can understand.”

When discussing the future of AI in healthcare, Stu believes machine learning could dramatically speed up drug development and improve how researchers predict patient outcomes. “AI is going to eventually be able to replicate what a human might experience in any given condition with any given parameters—be it environmental, pharmacological, genetically, or otherwise,” he said. “That’s where I see the value both in research and consumer health.”

Stu wants to stay in biopharma and continue to be a part of science innovations. He said, “I would rather force myself to learn something I am truly passionate about and to be put in tough situations than pursue something else just because it’s more stable.” His current advice for a Millbrook student interested in science or business is to explore all paths and find what interests you, so you can absorb as much knowledge as possible.

“Try everything… choose your passion and explore what you’re excited to go to class for.”