Our Team

Ben Garrett

Director

Ben Garrett is the Director of The Hatchery, Emory University's Center for Innovation. Ben's passion and experiences have centered on the creation and sustainability of nonprofits and social enterprises. He has been a first hire, facilitator, consultant and coach for hundreds of social entrepreneurs. These roles have afforded him the opportunity to do everything from lead strategic planning retreats, raise funds from individuals and institutional grantmakers, invent a cryptocurrency, and explore experimental pedagogies.

Prior to The Hatchery, Ben worked with Acumen as a facilitator for their social enterprise accelerator and as a community animator for their global, online Community of Social Innovators. He also worked with The Civic Accelerator (founded as a Points of Light program and acquired by Acumen), an early player in the social enterprise accelerator and investment industry. Prior to his time in the social impact space, Ben worked with multiple community development nonprofits and churches in both Atlanta and Chicago. He also founded his own consulting firm, Fractal Consulting where he works with changemakers across industries at various stages of their journey.

Ben holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Samford University and a Master of Divinity from the University of Chicago.

José Gomez-Marquez

Senior Director, Innovator in Residence

Jose Gomez-Marquez is Hatchery's Innovator in Residence, where he seeks to lower barriers to life sciences technology development by bridging the maker and health worlds together. He leads the Hatchery’s Proto and Ember programs which interact closely with his research leading Little Devices Lab at Emory. His work includes the Ampli Space Pharmacy initiative, which is making pharmaceutical compounds in space. He also developed the Ampli and MEDIKit platforms, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses around the world to invent their own medical technologies.

His other research projects include crowdsourced diagnostics, paper microfluidics, and reconfigurable systems for extreme environments that can detect pathogens and small molecules. Prior to Emory, Jose started his career at MIT where he spent more than a decade leading and co-founding MIT’s Little Devices Lab with a global footprint of projects including Chile, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Honduras, Spain, Germany and Colombia.  His research has pioneered the use of unconventional materials and processes to generate medical technology in extreme environments and global health settings. These materials include toys, Lego’s, collaborative microbots, antique mechanisms and orbital bioreactors for the International Space Station. These and other technologies have been recognized by CNN, The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science’s Best of What’s New and on display at the Smithsonian, Guggenheim, and the London Museum of Science.

Jose served on the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President Obama’s Council for Advisors on Science & Technology. He was selected to Technology Review’s TR35, which also named him Humanitarian of Year and was named a TED Fellow. He cofounded MakerHealth an MIT spin out that enables homegrown innovation inside hospitals around using institutional Medical Makerspaces.

His recent work in affordable biotechnology automation and ultra low cost reactors is driven by a fundamental belief that everyone can have access to the tools to create life saving devices and materials. 

Christina Steiner

Marketing & Communications Manager 

Christina Steiner is the Marketing & Communications Manager of The Hatchery, where she strives to amplify awareness surrounding The Hatchery within various stakeholder groups. Her role extends to engaging students across all disciplines within Emory schools and colleges, as well as Emory faculty and staff devoted to fostering innovation. Additionally, she spearheads efforts to reach out to the broader Atlanta ecosystem, encompassing members of the business and non-profit sectors, local government, innovators, and entrepreneurs.
 
Prior to her tenure at The Hatchery, Christina’s marketing career included developing, directing, and executing marketing, advertising, branding, creative and communication strategies to elevate brand awareness and increase market share across a variety of industries and organizations. Her experience in the pharmaceutical, entertainment, telecommunications, and advertising industries, many of them in the early phases of startup or distribution, allows her to bring a unique and diverse perspective to her role.
 
Christina holds a B.A. in Spanish from Dickinson College and a Master of International Business from the University of South Carolina. She currently serves on the board of the American Marketing Association, Atlanta Chapter as Co-VP of the AMY Awards, which recognize companies and individuals who’ve made their mark on the Atlanta marketing scene.

Rizky Etika

Senior Program Coordinator

Saya Guscott

Operations Coordinator

Saya Guscott is Operations Coordinator at The Hatchery where she manages all facility-related matters. She joined The Hatchery Team in March of 2022 as the Administrative Assistant and prior to that was a Emory University COVID 19 Test Site Coordinator. During the pandemic, she helped Faculty, staff and students comfortably transition back to campus which was a very rewarding in itself. She is the mother of 2 teenagers and over a hundred houseplants. When she's not keeping busy with the kids she enjoys traveling, hiking and everything to do with nature.