Olivia Walch

I'm the CEO of Arcascope, the circadian medicine company. We find and rescue drugs that failed because they were timed wrong. We also made the Clairoe app for circadian health and the website jetlag.gy for free jet lag plans. I write about circadian rhythms on my blog, Contraclockwise.

I wrote the book SLEEP GROOVE, which was listed on the 12 Best Science Books of 2025 from the Next Big Idea Club. I'm appointed at the University of Michigan in the Department of Neurology. I've written a lot about circadian amplitude and wearables. My research, as well as the Entrain app (a graduate student project), have been featured by a number of outlets, including NPR, TIME, The Atlantic, and others.

I've been PI on multiple grants from the NIH. I've released several open source libraries for sleep and circadian rhythms along with datasets of gold standard PSG with co-recorded Apple Watch acceleration. I've been involved in several RCTs showing personalized circadian interventions can improve patient and user outcomes.

I won the Peter Smereka Award for best Applied Math thesis from the University of Michigan in 2017. I won the grand prizes at MHacks and HackNTU in 2015. I won the “If You Torture The Data Enough, It Will Confess” prize from BAHFest in 2017.

I coedited the book Political Geometry with Moon Duchin, to which I also contributed. That book, as well as the code that goes along with it, is available here and here. I testified before Congress about digital trade in 2024.

I made the Squigglish! app for drawing wiggly lines, which was recognized in several places. Art by me was included in the Bridges 2017 juried mathematical art exhibition.

I was named America's Next Great Cartoonist in 2010. I draw the webcomic Imogen Quest and contributed several longform comics to The Nib on sleep deprivation and gerrymandering. I participated in the Kone Foundation residency in Finland in 2018 with other webcomic artists.

My shortform comic, You Can Try Again, was published by Silver Sprocket in 2018 (pdf). A comic of mine was cited as inspiration for the Adam WarRock song Prometheus, which I listen to every day.