Danielle (Dani) Bassett, PhD
Dani S. Bassett, PhD, (they/them or she/her) is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. Dr. Bassett is also an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Bassett is most well-known for blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. Dr. Bassett has received multiple prestigious awards, including Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2014), MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER (2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018), OHBM Young Investigator Award (2020), and AIMBE College of Fellows (2020). Dr. Bassett is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications.
Zachary Caffall, MSc
Zac is a Senior Research Analyst with Dr. Nicole Calakos's lab in the Department of Neurology at Duke University Medical Center. He has investigated the molecular pathogenesis of a monogenic form of early-onset generalized Dystonia, DYT-TOR1A, and identified the disruption of the integrated stress response pathways as a common feature of multiple forms of dystonia. Additionally, he developed a high content imaging assay that has lead to creation of drug development program aimed at therapeutics for dystonia and other diseases associated with ISR pathway disruptions.
Elena Gracheva, PhD
Elena Gracheva, PhD, received her PhD from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2008 and performed postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, working on infrared sensation in snakes and bats. In 2012, Dr. Gracheva started her lab at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is also co-–founder of Sensory Physiology Club, an independent outreach program for students from high schools in the greater New Haven, New York, and Boston areas. The main goal of Dr. Gracheva’s lab is to understand the cellular, molecular, and physiological basis of mammalian hibernation. Her lab employs multidisciplinary approaches, including naturalistic animal behavior, electrophysiology, imaging, genomics, transcriptomics, and single-cell sequencing. Her notable contributions to science include discovering mechanisms of cold tolerance and fluid ionic balance in hibernators. Her group will apply these approaches to reveal molecular and cellular signatures associated with Parkinson’s disease.
Viviana Gradinaru, PhD
Viviana Gradinaru, PhD, is Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering at Caltech. Her research group has developed optogenetic, tissue clearing, and gene delivery methods for accessing function and anatomy in the vertebrate nervous system and is now applying them to study circuitry underlying neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Combining neuroscience, protein engineering, and data science, her laboratory has produced microbial opsins that are tolerated by mammalian cells and viral capsids capable of crossing the blood-–brain barrier in adult mammals, which could enable high-precision, minimally-invasive repair of diseased nervous systems. Dr. Gradinaru has received, amongst many honors, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and outstanding young investigator awards from both the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the Society for Neuroscience. Alumni from the Gradinaru laboratory went on to successful careers in academia and industry.
Madeline Klinger, PhD
Dr. Madeline Klinger is an Associate Program Officer at the Coalition for Aligning Science (CAS) and Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), an initiative that accelerates discovery in Parkinson's disease research through collaboration, resource generation, and data sharing. In these roles, she supports communication efforts to establish open science frameworks and efficient research progress. Dr. Klinger received her PhD in Neuroscience from UC Berkeley in 2024, where she collaborated between behavioral neuroscience and chemical engineering teams. Her dissertation research focused on information encoding in the adult vs. adolescent mouse prefrontal cortex and tool development for optical dopamine detection. She strives to apply her background in multidisciplinary research to facilitate effective communication between teams toward impactful scientific innovation.
Russell Ravenel, BA
Russell received attended the University of Colorado Boulder and received undergraduate degrees in Neuroscience and Chemistry. He then worked as a lab manager in Dr. Robert Spencer's circadian neurobiology lab for two years. He is currently a graduate student in the lab of Dr. Michael Tadross at Duke in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology. His research focuses on three main topics; how antipsychotic drugs produce movement disorders, how dysfunction of astrocytes in the striatum contribute to Parkinson's disease, and the development of tools to manipulate endogenous signaling at specific synapses.
Michael Tadross, MD, PhD
Michael Tadross, MD., PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology at Duke University, where he develops genetically encoded technologies to target clinically relevant drugs to specific cell types in the brain. His lab applies these methods to mouse models of neuropsychiatric disease to determine which brain cell types are responsible for beneficial versus harmful effects, providing a roadmap for development of targeted therapeutics. He received a BS in electrical and computer engineering with a minor in chemistry at Rutgers, an MD/Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins,; postdoctoral training in cellular neuroscience at Stanford, and began independent research as a fellow at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus.
Francesca Tonelli, PhD
Francesca is a Senior Research Scientist in the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, University of Dundee (UK). Francesca's studies on LRRK2 contributed to the discovery that a subset of Rab GTPases are the physiological substrates of LRRK2 kinase, and subsequent identification of Rab29 and VPS35 as upstream regulators of the LRRK2 pathway.
Aryana Yousefzadeh, PhD
Aryana obtained her B.S. in Cell and Molecular Biology, and her M.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Tehran in Tehran, Iran. She then moved to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Duke University, where she conducted research under the supervision of Dr. Michael R. Tadross. She is currently a postdoctoral associate in the same lab.
