Cecilia Arlehamn, PhD
Cecilia is a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Infectious Disease, La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), US. She studied inflammasome activation by bacterial products as a graduate student with Thomas Evans at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Cecilia obtained post-doctoral training at LJI under Dr. Alessandro Sette to understand the role of T cells in the context of tuberculosis infection. She has since dedicated her research to the identification of T cell epitopes and the characterization of T cell subsets. Among her awards is the Tullie and Rickey Families SPARK award (LJI) and the Collaboration for TB Vaccine Discovery Early Career Scientist award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dylan Barbera, PhD
Dylan is currently a Project Manager for the Kaplitt team at Weill Cornell Medicine. Prior to this role, Dylan completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. Dylan worked primarily in the visual system seeking to elucidate the mechanisms underlying computation in the early sensory cortex. During this time, Dylan developed a data-driven feedforward model of masking in the mouse visual system. After completing his Ph.D., Dylan briefly worked as a consultant for early-stage biotechnology companies.
Katherine Chavez Velasquez, BSc
Katherine is a Research analyst in the the Liddle Lab at Duke University.
Janelle Drouin-Ouellet, PhD
Janelle Drouin-Ouellet is a Neuroscientist and Canada Research Chair in Direct Neural Reprogramming. She is an expert in patient-derived in vitro models of Parkinson’s disease and cellular aging. Her expertise in cell culture systems includes direct cell reprogramming to dopaminergic neurons and astrocytes, iPSC-derived 2D systems of monocytes, macrophages and microglia, as well as iPSC-derived 3D brain organoids.
Senthil Gounder, PhD
Currently, I am working as a Research Scientist/Lab Manager in the Department of Gastroenterology at Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, USA. I collaborate and co-ordinate multiple projects in academia and industry. I received my doctoral degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences (Pharmacology and Toxicology) from the Harrison School of Pharmacy at Auburn University, Alabama. I have over 17 years of research experience in neurodegenerative disease and disease modifying-drug development. My current research experience emphasizes the nigrostriatal dopamine pathway, gut-brain axis, microbiome, and target-based drug development to prevent or halt Parkinson’s disease progression. Notably, my completed projects are now moving forward with Phase I and II clinical trials (Nilotinib, K0706, and Ikt-148009). I have over five years of experience with a proven record of leading multiple projects from planning to execution, overseeing, and following up with project milestones.
Rodger Liddle, MD
Rodger A. Liddle, MD, received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University and postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He has served on the faculties of UCSF and Duke University. At Duke, Dr. Liddle has held numerous leadership positions, including Chief of the Gastroenterology Division. Dr. Liddle’s research focuses on enteroendocrine cell biology and pancreatic pathobiology. His laboratory discovered neuropods that connect enteroendocrine cells to nerves and provide a connection between food and microbes in the gut and the nervous system. He also discovered that enteroendocrine cells contain alpha-synuclein. Dr. Liddle is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians. He has served as Associate Editor of Gastroenterology, the American Journal of Physiology, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and JCI Insight. He recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Pancreatic Association and has also served as its president.
Roberta Marongiu, PhD
Roberta Marongiu, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in Neurological Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine. She received her PhD in medical genetics and neuroscience from the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of California, San Diego. She then completed her postdoctoral studies in neuroscience with focus on viral-vector- mediated gene therapies for Parkinson’s disease (PD) at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her research contributions to Parkinson’s disease include the identification of the first PINK1 pathogenic mutations; evidence of a direct link between mitochondria, autophagy, and the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s; and the identification of the p11 gene as first potential target for treating both PD motor symptoms and dyskinesia. As a young investigator using novel genetic, viral, and animal model approaches, her current research focuses on the identification of the molecular mechanisms underlying the role of sex and menopause on brain disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Catherine Oikonomou, PhD
Catherine is a Project Manager in the labs of Drs. Viviana Gradinaru and Sarkis Mazmanian at Caltech. She received her PhD from the Rockefeller University, where she studied cell cycle control in budding yeast with Dr. Fred Cross. She then joined the lab of Dr. Grant Jensen at Caltech, exploring microbial cell biology with cryo-electron tomography. With Dr. Jensen, she co-authored an open-access multimedia textbook, the Atlas of Bacterial & Archaeal Cell Structure.
Haydeh Payami, PhD
Haydeh Payami, PhD, is Professor of Neurology and Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. An immigrant from Iran, she received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was trained as a mathematical geneticist. She is the founder and lead investigator of the NeuroGenetics Research Consortium (NGRC). Her work initially focused on the genetics of disease. Later, she expanded her search to include interaction of environmental risk and protective factors with human genome. Currently, she studies the interaction of gut microbiome, human genome, and environmental toxicants. Her aim is to put all the pieces together in the big picture, in order to identify the factors that trigger Parkinson’s disease pathology, biomarkers for early detection, and leads for improving treatment.
Nicola Segata, PhD
Nicola Segata, Ph.D., is Professor and Principal Investigator in the CIBIO Department at the University of Trento (Italy) and Principal Investigator at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan (Italy). His lab (http://segatalab.cibio.unitn.it/) comprises more than 25 researchers and employs experimental metagenomic tools and novel computational approaches to study the diversity of the microbiome across conditions and populations and its role in human diseases. The projects in the lab bring together computer scientists, microbiologists, statisticians, and clinicians and are focused on profiling microbiomes with strain-level resolution and on the meta-analysis of very large sets of metagenomes with novel computational tools. The lab of Professor Segata is supported by the European Research Council and by several other European agencies.
Bernard Thienpont, PhD
Dr. Bernard Thienpont is a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Leuven, where he heads the Laboratory for Functional Epigenetics. He studied cardiogenetics as a graduate student with Koen Devriendt in Leuven, cardiac epigenetics as a Marie Curie fellow with Llew Roderick and Wolf Reik in Cambridge, UK, and cancer epigenetics as an FWO fellow with Diether Lambrechts at the VIB, Belgium.
Eileen Torres, PhD
Eileen completed her undergraduate degree in neuroscience at UCLA. During that time, she established her interest in research while working with Marie-Francoise Chesselet on the Thy1-aSyn model focusing on non-motor symptoms. She then earned her PhD at Oregon Health & Science University, where she assessed the role of apolipoprotein E isoforms in the risk and disease progression of PD and AD.
Ngan (Kim) Tran, BA
Kim is a project manager and clinical research coordinator in the Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She received her BSA from the University of Texas at Austin in Biochemistry.
Louise Urien, PhD
Louise obtained her PhD in 2015 in the team of Dr Aziz Moqrich, France, after discovering a new subpopulation of primary sensory neurons transmitting mechanical and chemical pain signals. She pursued her work on pain by joining the team of Dr Wang, at NYU, USA where she used in vivo electrophysiology to understand pain anticipation in the brain. She continued her investigations by working on contextual fear conditioning in the team of Elizabeth Bauer at Barnard College. She decided to move forward as a project manager to help coordinate the research between the teams and decipher the relative vulnerability to alpha synuclein of specific nodose ganglia subpopulations.
Thierry Voet, PhD
Thierry is Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium). He studied Bioscience Engineering: Cell and Gene Biotechnology, and holds an inter-university post-graduate in Human Genetics. Following his PhD at KU Leuven, he pioneered single-cell microarray analyses, and in 2010, he joined the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (Sanger, UK) to explore next-generation sequencing technologies for single-cell genomics. Since 2011, he has been an associate faculty member at Sanger, and a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single-Cell Genomics Centre. In 2014, he became Associate Professor at KU Leuven following a five-year tenure track, and was appointed Full Professor in 2017.
