Our mission is to invent tools that support the development of human capital - and we decided to start with early childhood education.
Oya was founded by Dr Lamont Tang, a father of a 2 year old and a Neuroscientist who did his undergrad at Stanford University and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Brandeis University with former president of Society of Neuroscience, Professor Marder.
While Lamont’s formal training was studying the biophysics of neural circuits and how they can both be stable (e.g during early development) and yet plastic (the ability to learn), it was not until Lamont and his wife had their first son that they were inspired to learn about evidence-based ways to help nurture their son’s development.
When Lamont learned through his wife, Economics Professor Jane Zhang, about the stark effects of socio-economic status on the learning outcomes of children--which can be detected by the age of 18 months--Lamont was further inspired to self-fund and write a grant to pilot a novel, cost-effective, and scaleable technology to both monitor and improve a child’s learning environment.
After positive results from this initial pilot study, Oya Labs was created to help harness predictive technologies to build tools to nurture not only Lamont’s own son, as well as something meaningful and impactful for families around the world.
Oya Labs is now a US based company on a mission to make early childhood intervention more accessible and effective for parents, educators and researchers all around the world. Wordle is Oya Labs first product, a scaleable technology that has been shown to both monitor and improve a child’s learning outcomes.
