New Day Team
CEO - Stephen W. Barns. J.D.
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, New Day Therapeutics
Steve is co-founder and CEO of New Day Therapeutics, an AI-guided telehealth platform delivering daily low-dose oral ketamine therapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Since founding the company in 2023, he has built a team of physicians, nurse practitioners, data scientists, and software engineers to serve veterans first, with a model built to scale to the broader civilian population.
He founded New Day after seeing the limits of episodic care: infusion clinics built around infrequent, high-dose sessions with little visibility into how patients are doing between visits. New Day replaces that model with daily treatment, daily measurement, and a care team that can respond in real time.
Steve leads a platform that tracks patients daily across six symptom domains, combining adaptive check-ins and verified dosing. Machine learning models flag rising risk days before a crisis surfaces, triggering escalation to clinicians, crisis intervention, peer support and EMS dispatch using app-based geolocation.
He is the lead architect of New Day’s clinical decision support system, which surfaces AI-driven symptom trends and risk alerts directly to treating providers.
Steve is an intellectual property attorney with more than 30 years in practice, advising clients on IP strategy, commercial contracts, and partnership agreements.
He serves on the Board of Directors of The Edward Orton Jr. Ceramic Foundation and served nine years on the board of the Center for Disabilities Services of Licking County, Ohio.
Steve holds a B.S. in Materials Science (Ceramic Engineering) from The Ohio State University and a J.D. in Intellectual Property Law from American University Washington College of Law.
Steve’s mission is to reach people with PTSD and depression prior to tragedy, with a particular commitment to the veterans and service members who carry these conditions home.
Steve is based in Granville, Ohio. A soccer player and former high school coach as well as a former Ohio State crew oarsman, coxswain, and coach.
CMO - James F. Neuenschwander II, M.D., FACEP, FASAM
Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, New Day Therapeutics
Dr. Neuenschwander earned his M.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1995 and completed his emergency medicine residency at Johns Hopkins in 1998.
Dr. Neuenschwander is co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of New Day Therapeutics, where he has led clinical strategy and protocol development since 2024 for daily low-dose oral ketamine therapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, anxiety, and depression. He is board certified and a Fellow of the Colleges of Emergency Medicine and Addiction Medicine.
After nearly three decades in emergency departments, he has seen what happens when mental illness goes unmonitored between appointments: patients arriving in crisis after warning signs went unnoticed. At New Day, he helps build a care model designed to catch decline early, before it becomes an emergency.
He is a co-inventor of New Day’s clinical decision support system, which turns daily patient-reported symptoms, wearable data, and dosing adherence into risk alerts for the treating care team.
He currently practices as an emergency physician at Columbus Doctors Hospital and on the US Acute Care Solutions (USACS) Strategic Traveling Ambassador (STAT) team. Since 2010, he has served as Adjunct Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at The Ohio State University Medical Center, where he works in emergency medicine, hyperbaric medicine, and wound care and teaches residents and medical students.
He spent 24 years at Genesis HealthCare System in Zanesville, Ohio, including more than a decade as Research Director for the Emergency Department, and has served as primary investigator on numerous studies.
He co-chaired the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) expert consensus panel on hyperkalemia and served on its consensus panel on hepatic encephalopathy.
His addiction medicine work directly informs New Day’s safety and misuse controls. He is part of an ongoing research and treatment project demonstrating the effectiveness of starting medications to stop opioid withdrawal. He also works with The Naloxone Project to ensure nationwide naloxone availability.
Jim is an avid runner and soccer player. He is a former D-1 track athlete and currently plays on the United States Medical Soccer Team (Masters Division).
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, New Day Therapeutics
Spencer is co-founder and CTO of New Day Therapeutics, where he leads development of the AI-guided platform that delivers and monitors daily low-dose oral ketamine therapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Spencer served four years as an Amphibious Assault Crewman and Noncommissioned Officer. He brings a veteran’s understanding of the people New Day serves first and of why care has to reach them prior to tragedy, not after.
He oversees New Day’s full technology stack: the patient mobile app for daily check-ins, symptom trends, dosing, crisis support, and provider messaging; image-based dosing verification; and the machine learning engine that flags rising risk before a crisis surfaces.
Spencer designed New Day’s cloud infrastructure for HIPAA compliance, separating protected health information from analytic data so the platform can learn from outcomes without exposing patient identities.
He is a co-inventor of New Day’s clinical decision support system, which surfaces AI-driven symptom trends and risk alerts directly to treating providers.
Spencer has a B.A. in Computer Science from California State University, Sacramento.
Spencer is a father of 4 and enjoys fishing and gaming.