Sean Coursey

Profile

After graduating from Northeastern in 2025, I stepped away from a research career to take stock of my life in the wake of my father's passing. That pause gave me room to follow a pull I'd felt building for years: toward entrepreneurship, and toward the freedom and responsibility of building something of my own.

Crawlspace Habitats began with a complaint. My roommate, an avid ant-keeper, was perpetually frustrated by the quality of the formicaria—ant enclosures—on the market. My other roommate, an engineer, and I set out to build him something better. What began as a favor quickly revealed a real gap, and I organized our efforts into a proper LLC. Today I serve as the CEO of our venture.

Our flagship product is the FlexGrid system, a modular formicarium built around a connection mechanism I designed that is now patent-pending. We manufacture everything in-house on our own 3D printers and CO₂ laser cutter, which lets us control quality and rapidly iterate on design from first prototype to finished product. We launched in April 2026 and have been growing steadily since.

As CEO I wear most of the operational hats—finance, legal, web development, and product design among them—and the work draws constantly on skills from my scientific background: rigorous and creative problem-solving, deep mathematical literacy, and a comfort making plans even as I grapple with a litany of unknowns.

My scientific background comprises years of research and academic study. I graduated summa cum laude from Northeastern's John Martinson Honors Program with a combined Bachelor of Science in Math and Physics. I spent three years at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging developing statistical methods for functional PET neuroimaging, work that produced a first-author paper in Imaging Neuroscience and an oral presentation at the 2024 NeuroReceptor Mapping conference. I also spent a stint at CERN's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment optimizing tracking algorithms for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider upgrade, and modeled microtubule dynamics at Northeastern's Liao Lab—a biophysics lab.

In hindsight, the instincts that would lead me to entrepreneurship were there long before Crawlspace had a name. At Northeastern I co-founded NU Clay Cave, the university's first ceramics club; led guided meditation sessions and helped organize retreats with the NU Buddhist Group; and taught beginner classes for the NU Ballroom Dance Club. Each was a multifaceted exercise in leadership—financial, interpersonal, and organizational.

Outside of work, I still compete in ballroom, throw on the wheel, and keep up a steady meditation practice; the same movement, creativity, and stillness that have kept me grounded for years.