Johan Jakobsson, PhD
Johan Jakobsson is a Professor in the Department of Experimental Medical Sciences at Lund University, Sweden and the Director of the Lund Stem Cell Center. He studied gene therapy in the brain as a graduate student in Lund and performed his postdoctoral work with Didier Trono at EPFL focusing on transposable elements.
Laura Castilla-Vallmanya, PhD
Laura is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University (Sweden). She obtained her PhD in Genetics from University of Barcelona (Spain) and has a strong background in studying human genetic variation and rare neurodevelopment disorders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Roger Barker, PhD
Roger Barker is the Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and Consultant Neurologist at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital Cambridge. He is a PI in the MRC-Wellcome Trust Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge and Director of the MRC funded UKRMP Stem and Engineered cell hub. His research seeks to better define the clinical heterogeneity of Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD). This has helped him define the best way by which to take new therapies into the clinic. In this respect he has been heavily involved in gene and cell based trials for patients with these conditions.
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.
Andreea Bostan, PhD
Andreea is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and the Systems Neuroscience Center at the University of Pittsburgh. A graduate of the University of Toronto, she received her doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh. Andreea has used neurotropic viruses as transneuronal tracers to establish that the cerebellum and basal ganglia are interconnected and form an integrated network with the cerebral cortex. She is particularly interested in how changes in the integrated network, which links the cerebellum with the basal ganglia and the cerebral cortex, contribute to the manifestation of neurologic and psychiatric disorders.
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.
Danielle Daft, MSc
Danielle is a Research Manager for the University of Cambridge. Danielle has worked in clinical research for the past 15 years, focusing mostly on research in Dementia and Neurodegeneration.
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.
Ted Dawson, MD, PhD
Ted Dawson, MD, PhD, is the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases and Director of the Institute for Cell Engineering at Johns Hopkins Medicine., He received his MD and pharmacology PhD from the University of Utah, followed by neurology residency at University of Pennsylvania and movement disorders fellowship at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Dawson’s honors include the Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award, the Santiago Grisolia Medal, and a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. He was elected to the Association of American Physicians and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He pioneered the role of nitric oxide (NO) in neuronal injury, elucidated molecular mechanisms by which NO kills neurons, and discovered the parthanatos cell death pathway. His laboratory has made important discoveries on how neurons die in models of Parkinson’s disease, which are enabling clinical strategies for disease- modifying therapies for various neurodegenerative disorders.
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.
Shaline Fazal, PhD
Shaline is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. She has been involved in various projects focused around several aspects of Parkinson's disease.
April Frazier, PhD
April Frazier, PhD, is a Senior Project Manager in the laboratories of Drs. Cecilia Lindestam Arlehamn and Alessandro Sette at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, La Jolla, CA. She has a science background in chemistry and cancer research, but has transitioned to project management and helps her team to investigate T cell-mediated responses against diseases and understanding healthy T cell responses.
Molly Gale Hammell, PhD
Dr. Molly Gale Hammell is an Associate Professor in the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Prior to starting her own lab at CSHL, she studied small RNA pathways as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Victor Ambros at UMASS Medical School. She received a Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration award from CZI's Neurodegeneration Challenge Network.
