Parastoo Khoshakhlagh is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of GCTx, a pioneering biotech company built on technology she co-invented during her postdoctoral research in Professor George Church's Lab at Harvard Medical School. Her work has been recognized in Nature Biotechnology and GCTx has earned numerous prestigious awards, including grants from the Harvard Biomedical Blavatnik Accelerator in 2017 and 2018, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Innovation Day Prize in 2018, and honors in the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge in 2019 and MIT 100K in 2020. GCTx's technology was also highlighted in a Nature Biotechnology News Feature and on CBS's 60 Minutes.

Prior to GCTx, Parastoo completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Ali Khademhosseini's lab at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. She is also the co-founder and former CSO of Tympanogen, Inc., a woman-led startup developing Perf-Fix™, the first non-surgical, minimally invasive 3D hydrogel patch for healing chronic eardrum ruptures. Tympanogen has received multiple accolades, including the NASA Earth/Space Life Science Innovation Award and the Courage Courageous Women Entrepreneur Prize. In collaboration with NASA and the Center for Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), Parastoo and her co-founder conducted groundbreaking research on hydrogel properties in microgravity, launching their experiment into space on the SpaceX Dragon Cargo Ship in a first-of-its-kind experiment.

Parastoo earned her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Tulane University, where she conducted research in Dr. Michael Moore’s lab, a Langer laboratory alumnus. Her doctoral work led to her co-inventorship on a U.S. patent application that contributed to the founding of Axosim, a startup focused on developing nerve-on-a-chip products for drug screening. In addition, Parastoo has previously received a prestigious award from the NIH, the Avon Foundation and the Center For Advancing Innovation for creating a commercialization pathway for a reconstructive scaffold for breast cancer.