A husband and wife in Austin. A neuroarchitect who has spent two decades modeling how built environments shape brains, and a Master Gardener who has spent three decades caring for people through the spaces they live in.
Lead author of the published eight-pathway brain-health model in the International Journal of Cognitive Sciences. Author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on environmental psychology, neuroarchitecture, and computational models of how built environments shape cognition, mood, and stress.
Mike's two-decade research program has informed evidence-based design for healthcare, senior living, large workplaces, and now — with this venture — the family home.
Three decades in non-profit healthcare management gave Danelle a clear-eyed view of how environments shape the people inside them. Her certification as a Master Gardener formalized a lifelong conviction: outdoor spaces, well-designed and well-tended, are central to brain health and quality of life.
Danelle leads the landscape and biophilic side of every Brain Healthy Home and Garden project. She believes the highest-leverage interventions for most families happen outside the house.
We had spent our careers helping institutions — hospitals, senior-living communities, large workplaces — understand how their built environments shape the people inside. We produced computational analyses, scoring systems, and renovation plans for organizations spending tens of millions of dollars on capital projects.
And it became impossible to ignore: the place each of those people spent the most time — their own home, their own yard — was the one place no one was offering this kind of help. Not at any price. Not at any level of seriousness.
So we built it. We work with a small number of families each quarter so that every assessment gets our full attention. This is a side of our work we wanted to exist, for ourselves and for people like us.
Mike's model takes your sensor data, your space sequence, and your family profile and produces a quantitative score for each space and each person across all eight pathways. Nothing is left to taste or guesswork.
Danelle translates the analysis into specific, doable interventions. A pollinator bed where the dining-room view falls short. A morning-light reading chair where the daylight pathway needs help. A native shade canopy where the back patio is over-exposed.