Fathom Cognition
Fathom Cognition a science and technology business developing interactive cognitive assessment solutions for healthcare and business.
Understanding people's mental strengths and weaknesses and how they change over time is vital to treating brain disorders, for accelerating education and training, for selecting the best person for the right job and, in personal life, for each of us to identify and build on our own potential. Our digital assessment solutions target abilities that depend on specific brain systems to provide an accurate assessment of an individual's cognitive status. Grounded in cutting edge neuroscience for precision, validity and reliability they are easy and engaging to use and assess cognition fairly regardless of culture or language.
Our initial focus is on online, mobile and interactive tools for the early detection of dementia in clinical trials and healthcare settings. Our first product suite assesses spatial memory and navigation to identify the earliest cognitive changes in Alzheimer’s disease. Our mission is to bring these assessments to the health sector, initially as tools to enhance international clinical trials and later to support earlier detection in clinics within the NHS around the world.
Our Team
Coco Newton, PhD (COO)
Coco is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur focused on detecting dementia earlier using neuroscience and technology. As part of her PhD in Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, she provided key academic validation of Fathom's navigation assessments in detecting the earliest cognitive changes in middle-aged individuals at-risk of future dementia.
Coco's research includes neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and virtual reality in navigation and Alzheimer's disease. She has used these techniques with international research cohorts and translational science projects. She worked with the citizen science project Sea Hero Quest and co-developed novel navigation paradigms for use across different clinical trial phases. Coco has received funding from the Alzheimer's Society, Alzheimer's Research UK, and the Cambridge Trust Vice-Chancellor Scholarship. She has also completed several accelerators and entrepreneurship programmes at the Cambridge Judge Business School and Milner Therapeutics Institute, including EnterpriseTECH STAR, Biospark and Accelerate Cambridge.
Coco’s experiences in real-world use of different digital and virtual assessments - together with her training in clinical neuroscience and entrepreneurship - enable her to optimise the product-user fit and business development strategy as Fathom Cognition's Chief Operating Officer.
Gary Fawcett (CEO)
Gary is a highly experienced business leader having enjoyed success in different roles across multiple industries (both SME and large corporate) including Barclays Bank, KPMG and Dell Perot Systems. His expertise spans information technology, business consultancy, financial services, engineering and telecommunications. He became a chartered management accountant in 1990, a chartered banker in 1996 and is currently highly accredited in the use of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
Gary's interest in Fathom Cognition was sparked the way it combined opportunities for innovation in software applications and services with the potential to address the huge global challenge of dementia and neurodegenerative disease.
As Chief Executive Officer, Gary leads Fathom Cognition's sales, legal, finance and human resources functions and co-leads on product-strategy, while supporting other team members on marketing and technology.
Tom Hartley, PhD (CSO)
Tom is an experienced psychologist and neuroscientist based at the University of York having gained his PhD in Psychology from UCL in 1996. His research focuses on how different types of information are stored and processed in the brain and he specializes in creating new tests of memory and spatial behaviour. He has published scientific papers on these and related topics for over a quarter of a century. These include eight papers co-authored with Nobel Prize winner John O'Keefe who was recognized for his discovery of the brain's code for space in the hippocampus, part of the brain that is among the earliest affected by Alzheimer's Disease.
Fathom Cognition was conceived in 2019 when Tom was awarded a University of York Enterprise Fellowship for commercial development of mobile and online tests for the early detection of Alzheimer's Disease.
By combining the latest insights from neuroscience with interactive, mobile and online techniques for the precision measurement of human capabilities, Tom leads on creating and improving our cognitive assessment products as Chief Scientific Officer