Dr. Mike Ortiz
Founder & CEO, OttnoAI
Professional Baseball
Drafted into the Texas Rangers minor league farm system. Four years of six-day weeks, bus rides between towns, and the daily practice of competing against people who wanted it just as badly. Baseball didn't become a career. It became a framework—discipline over talent, preparation over luck, showing up when it's not convenient.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bachelors in Biology
The transition from the diamond to the classroom required the same thing both demanded: focus. The biological sciences became a lens for understanding systems—how organisms adapt, how complex processes sustain themselves, how failure at one level cascades through the whole.
National Library of Medicine T15 Fellow
Selected as a T15 Fellow for research in computer science and information retrieval in the biomedical domain. The fellowship centered on a fundamental question: how do we find what matters in an ocean of biomedical knowledge? The work lived at the intersection of machine learning, clinical data, and the structures that make medical literature discoverable.
Biomedical & Health Informatics, UNC Chapel Hill
Ph.D.
Graduate of the Biomedical and Health Informatics program. Dissertation research on neurophysiological information retrieval—exploring how the brain's own signals can inform the way we search, rank, and surface biomedical information.
Read the dissertation →Cymantix — Cofounder & CTO
Cofounded Cymantix on the intellectual property developed from the dissertation—translating neurophysiological information retrieval research into applied technology. Conducted research and development for the U.S. Government, building systems that turned academic work into operational capability.
OttnoAI
Built from an unfinished basement in Colorado between diaper changes and bedtime stories for five boys. OttnoAI started because understanding your own health shouldn't require a medical degree. Everything before this—the discipline from baseball, the systems thinking from biology, the research from informatics—it all led here.
Partners
OttnoAI Government Registration
Systems for Award Management (SAM.gov)