Ellen Fruzyna, PhD
Ellen is the project manager in the Awatramani lab at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Department of Neurology. During her graduate studies at Northwestern in Grant Barish's lab, she utilized molecular and NGS techniques to explore transcriptional regulation in diabetes and MASH.
Monther Abu-Remaileh, PhD
Monther Abu-Remaileh, PhD, is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and by courtesy of genetics at Stanford University. He is an expert in lysosome biology and metabolism, and his team develops and uses multidisciplinary approaches, including metabolomics, proteomics and functional genomics, to study the biochemical functions of the lysosome. His lab is committed to applying these tools to provide molecular understanding of the lysosomal dysfunction in Parkinson's disease, which has been implicated in disease pathology. Dr. Abu-Remaileh earned his B.Sc. in Genetics from Jordan University of Science and Technology and his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then completed his postdoctoral training at MIT.
Johnson Agniswamy, PhD
Johnson Agniswamy is the project manager for team Wichmann. He is part of the Emory Primate Center, NND-Neuroscience, Emory University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Madras. In his previous employments, he worked at Georgia State University, focusing on structural studies on HIV drug resistance and the structure-based drug design of HIV protease. As part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, he has researched structural studies on human immune system evasion by flesh-eating bacteria.
Dario Alessi, PhD
Professor Dario Alessi serves as the Director of the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee. His research focuses on unravelling the roles of poorly characterised components which regulate human disease resulting from disruption of signalling networks. He has contributed to our understanding of several disease relevant signal transduction pathways including PDK1 (diabetes and cancer), LKB1 (cancer), WNKs (blood pressure). Much of Dario’s current work is focused on understanding LRRK2 and how mutations in this enzyme cause Parkinson’s disease.
Silvia Arber, PhD
Silvia Arber, PhD, is a Professor and Senior Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) and the Biozentrum of the University of Basel in Switzerland. She graduated from the University of Basel and performed her postdoctoral work at Columbia University in New York, before returning to Basel in 2000 to establish her independent research group. Dr. Arber’s laboratory is interested in understanding the principles by which neuronal circuits orchestrate accurate and timely control of movement. Using multi-facetted approaches combining many technologies, they study nervous-system-wide neuronal circuits involved in motor control, including how brain circuits interact with executive spinal circuits to produce body movements. Recent work has focused on the motor brainstem to unravel the identity of circuits at the intersection between planning and execution. The work also aims to discover mechanisms involved in circuit plasticity during motor learning and in response to disease or injury.
Rajeshwar Awatramani, PhD
Rajeshwar Awatramani, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University. The focus of his research has been the development and diversity of dopamine (DA) neurons. His lab has described the floor plate origin of DA neurons and is continuing to explore how floor plate progenitors are subdivided to give rise to the diverse adult midbrain DA neuron system. His lab also focuses on understanding DA neuron diversity. Using single cell profiling, his lab revealed the presence of putative DA neuron subtypes. To decipher the functional basis of DA neuron heterogeneity, Dr. Awatramani has developed a powerful set of intersectional genetic tools to access DA neuron subtypes and has found anatomical and functional heterogeneity even within a single anatomical cluster like the substantia nigra.
Enrico Bagnoli, PhD
Enrico recently joined the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee. He completed a PhD in Neuroscience at the National University of Ireland, Galway working on novel organotypic model of prodromal Parkinson's disease. Before moving to Ireland and to the field of Neuroscience, Enrico obtained a Master and Bachelor degree in Bioengineering from the University of Genoa, Italy, working on tunable and biodegradable nanodelivery system for cancer therapy.
Mark Bevan, PhD
Mark Bevan, PhD, is a Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. His research focuses on the basal ganglia and their dysregulation in psychomotor disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. His laboratory utilizes a range of molecular, electrophysiological, optogenetic, chemogenetic, and imaging approaches. In recent years, his research team has contributed to our understanding of dopaminergic modulation mechanisms and circuit consequences of dopamine loss in Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Bevan received his PhD from the University of Manchester and undertook postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford and the University of Tennessee, supported in part by an Advanced Training Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. In 2012, Dr. Bevan received a Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from NIH-NINDS, and in 2016 and 2018 he co-chaired the Basal Ganglia Gordon Research Conference. Dr. Bevan also directs an NIH-NINDS-funded training program in motor control mechanisms in health and disease.
Candace Bichsel, PhD
Candace completed her doctoral studies at the University of Florida College of Medicine, where she engineered a bacterial-mediated protein delivery system designed to alter cell fate. Her postdoctoral studies, with Nenad Sestan at the Yale School of Medicine, focused on in vitro models of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Nicole Calakos, MD, PhD
Nicole Calakos, MD, PhD, is the Lincoln Financial Group Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology and Chief of the Movement Disorders section in Neurology at Duke University. Dr. Calakos is a physician-scientist who cares for people with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. Her laboratory studies plasticity mechanisms of the basal ganglia circuitry. Her lab has pioneered methodologies to monitor basal ganglia activity and used them to reveal mechanisms for habit learning, compulsive behavior, and the movement disorder, dystonia. Dr. Calakos received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, completed residency training in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and joined Duke as an Assistant Professor in 2005 after completing postdoctoral training at Stanford with Dr. Rob Malenka. She is a fellow of the American Society of Clinical Investigators and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Hong-Yuan Chu, PhD
Hong-Yuan Chu, PhD, received his PhD degree in neuropharmacology from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (China) in 2010. He then relocated to the United States to conduct postdoctoral research with positions at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, MD) and the Department of Physiology and Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson’s Disease Research at Northwestern University (Chicago, IL). In 2019, Dr. Chu was recruited to the Department of Neurodegenerative Science at the Van Andel Institute (Grand Rapids, MI), where he is currently an assistant professor. His laboratory uses multiple technologies to understand how progressive dopaminergic neurodegeneration alters the connectivity and function of cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits, and how such changes contribute to the motor deficits in Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Chu holds an R01 research award from the National Institutes of Health and the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2020).
Rui Costa, PhD
His laboratory develops and uses genetic, electrophysiological, optical, and behavioral approaches to investigate the neurobiology of action in health and disease. He uncovered that direct and indirect striatal pathways are concurrently active during movement initiation, that this activity is action-specific, and needed for proper movement — challenging the classical “go/no-go” model of basal ganglia function. He also demonstrated dopaminergic neuron heterogeneity by showing that a subpopulation is active before movement, and critical for initiating and invigorating future movement. These findings have implications for movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease. He has received several awards such as the Ariëns Kappers Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Young Investigator Award from SFN and is an elected member of EMBO and the National Academy of Medicine.
Stephanie Cragg, PhD
Stephanie Cragg, MA, DPhil, is Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Christ Church College Oxford. Her research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms that govern dopamine transmission within the basal ganglia, spanning the interacting circuits and underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms. She has a strong focus on identifying dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease, through investigations in a range of parkinsonian models: transgenic, toxin-, or aggregation-induced. Dr. Cragg and her team have technical expertise in the use of electrochemistry, electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, and conditional genetic targeting, as well as optical and imaging technologies to probe the mechanisms governing dopamine transmission. Dr. Cragg is an Associate Editor of the open access journal npj Parkinson’s disease and is a founding Investigator of the Oxford Parkinson's Disease Centre.
Yang Dan, PhD
Yang Dan, PhD, is Nan Fung Life Sciences Chancellor’s Chair Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied physics as an undergraduate student at Peking University and received her PhD training at Columbia University. She did her postdoctoral research on information coding in the visual system at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School. Her recent interest is to understand neural control and function of sleep. Using state-of-the-art techniques to target genetically defined cell types for recording and manipulation, Dr. Dan’s team has identified key circuits for the generation of both REM and non-REM sleep. Recently they have also begun investigating the function and homeostasis of sleep.
Pietro De Camilli, PhD
Pietro De Camilli is Professor of Neuroscience and of Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received an MD form the University of Milano (Italy), became interested in the cell biology of the synapse during his postdoctoral studies with Paul Greengard at Yale and was subsequently recruited by George Palade to the Yale Cell Biology faculty. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and of the National Academy of Medicine
Daniel Dombeck, PhD
Daniel Dombeck, PhD, is an Associate Professor and AT&T Research Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Northwestern University. He received his BSc in physics at The University of Illinois and his PhD in physics at Cornell University. He carried out postdoctoral research at Princeton University in the Department of Molecular Biology and The Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Dombeck’s lab has pioneered the development and use of sub-cellular resolution functional imaging in behaving mice and discovered rapid movement related activity patterns from nigrostriatal dopamine axons. He was a Chicago Biomedical Consortium Junior Investigator, a Klingenstein Fellow, a McKnight Foundation Scholar, and a recipient of the Whitehall Research Grant Award. He is the associate director of the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience graduate program and the director of the NIMH Neurobiology of Information Storage Training Grant.
Robert Edwards, MD
Robert Edwards, MD, is a neuroscientist recognized for his work on the molecular and cellular basis of neurotransmitter release. He is known for identification of the proteins that transport classical transmitters into neurosecretory vesicles, and for his work on their properties, structure, mechanism, regulation, and physiological role. He has also used these transporters to elucidate the mechanisms for neurotransmitter corelease, identifying pools of synaptic vesicles with distinct properties and endocytic origin. In addition, he has used the transporters to identify proteins involved in the formation of dense core vesicles that store and release peptides. The work has implications for behavior and neuropsychiatric illness. In addition, identification of the vesicular monoamine transporter as neuroprotective has led to work on presynaptic mechanisms in Parkinson’s disease, most recently involving the function of alpha-synuclein and associated genetic determinants of Parkinson’s.
Cagla Eroglu, PhD
Cagla Eroglu, PhD, is Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Neurobiology at Duke University. Dr. Eroglu’s laboratory investigates the cellular and molecular underpinnings of how synaptic circuits are established and remodeled in the mammalian brain by the bidirectional signaling between neurons and glia and how disruption of these mechanisms contributes to the pathogenesis of neurological disorders. Dr. Eroglu received her PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratories and University of Heidelberg, Germany. She completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University in the lab of Dr. Ben Barres. She joined the faculty of Cell Biology at Duke in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016. She has served as a member of Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and translating Duke Health Neuroscience Initiative steering committees since 2019.
Shawn Ferguson, PhD
Dr. Ferguson earned his Ph.D in Neuroscience from Vanberbilt University in 2004 and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies at Yale University. Both of these training experiences focused on specialized membrane trafficking mechanisms that support synaptic transmission between neurons. In 2010, he established his independent laboratory in the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine which focuses on the intersection between fundamental cell biology questions and neurological disease mechanisms He currently holds the rank of Associate Professor (tenured) and has a secondary appointment in Neuroscience.
Andrew (Drew) Fox, PhD
Andrew Fox, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and a core scientist in Neuroscience and Behavior at the California National Primate Research Center. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he continued his postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry. He has over 15 years of experience working with non-human primates to elucidate the neurobiology that underlies the development of brain-based disorders. His lab strives to integrate across methodologies and scale to gain neurobiological insights, and has incorporated data from, automated behavioral analysis, non-invasive brain imaging (e.g., MRI, PET), whole-genome sequencing, single-nuclear RNA-seq,, and viral-vector manipulations, among others. This extensive experience with primate models sets the stage for ongoing Parkinson’s-relevant research using cutting-edge methodologies. The Fox lab’s integrative approach to primate neuroscience is focused on a refined of understanding of the primate brain that bridges across molecular, systems, and behavioral neuroscience.
