Meet the team behind Zebrafish Neuro
A small, but passionate, team working to provide the SCI community with resources to promote autonomy, ownership, and innovation in the world of SCI rehab.
Stephanie Comella
Co-founder & CEO
ZN Educator and Coach
& everything else at ZN!
NCPT, specializing in SCI & neurological conditions
Stephanie has worked directly with individuals with spinal cord injury and other neurological disorders since 2011. She blends her formal education in movement science, Pilates, and other mindful movement modalities with neurological science to provide an intuitive, hands-on style of teaching focused on body re-connection.
Stephanie graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2011 with a B.S. in Exercise Biology. She studied sports medicine and exercise-based rehabilitation as an intern with the university's Division I athletes. After graduation in 2011, Stephanie worked for a spinal cord injury & neurological disorder activity-based therapy facility in Pleasanton, CA for four years.
She was first introduced to Pilates in 2014, where she attended a workshop presented by Alejandra Monsalve of Body Wellness Hawaii, which forever changed her thinking about spinal cord injury rehabilitation. Stephanie quickly transitioned to this new model and started a Pilates-based SCI recovery program at a Pilates studio (Absolute Center in Lafayette, CA) in 2015.
Stephanie took three years to develop and write a book about her framework and methods for SCI recovery, co-authored by Theo St. Francis. From the Ground Up was published in 2020 and continues to be read and looked to as a guiding resource by movement professionals and individuals with SCI around the world today.
Stephanie opened a private practice in 2020, working one-on-one with individuals with SCI and other neurological conditions both remotely and at her private studio located in Bend, Oregon. While running the day-to-day operations at Zebrafish Neuro, Stephanie continues to develop a curriculum and teach courses to movement and rehab professionals about her methods around the world.
Stephanie is a Nationally Certified Pilates Teacher (NCPT) and continues to educate herself through courses focused on neurological rehabilitation and healing.
The fun stuff:
Stephanie enjoys spending her summers hiking and paddleboarding on the Deschutes River with her two pups and husband, Tony. She enjoys spending time in her garden, tending to her house plants, and spending as much time outdoors in the sun as possible.
Advisors & Ambassadors
Theo St. Francis
Co-founder & Co-Author of FTGU
Advisor & SCI Athlete Ambassador
C6 incomplete spinal cord injury survivor
During his first semester as an undergraduate at MIT, Theo fractured his C6 vertebra. This immediately propelled him into the world of SCI rehab, where he set out to find restorative therapies that would enable him to return to school and pursue engineering as he had planned.
For Theo, recovery was never solely about walking. Of course, that was always a motivating goal, but most important were 1) to ensure that his brain was not hindered by his body, 2) to independently without making life decisions based on ability and 3) to simply feel in control and like himself again.
Now, all three of those are true. After five years in full-time rehab, working with practitioners across the U.S. and in Canada, and studying anatomy textbooks as if his life depended on them (it sort of did), Theo returned to MIT to pursue Aerospace Engineering, where he graduated in 2023. He fulfilled his dream of living in Brazil for 3 months before beginning his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech with a focus on the science of fluids in low-gravity environments such as in orbit around Earth, on the Moon, and on Mars.