Kathleen Poston, MD
Dr. Kathleen Poston is Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences and (by courtesy) Neurosurgery at Stanford University. Dr. Poston’s research and clinical emphasis is to understand the motor and non-motor impairments, such as dementia, that develop in patients with alpha-synuclein pathology, such as Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body dementia, and Multiple System Atrophy. Her lab uses functional and structural imaging biomarkers, along with biological biomarkers, to understand the underlying pathophysiology associated these symptoms. Dr. Poston is Chief of the Movement Disorders Division and holds an appointment in the Memory Disorders division. She is a founding member of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and co-Director for the Pacific Udall Center.
Amanda Schneeweis, PhD
Amanda is the program manager for Team Awatramani! Her background is in Alzheimer's disease research but is very excited to contribute to the PD field! Amanda is based in Chicago, IL.
Helen Schwerdt, PhD
Helen N. Schwerdt, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research is focused on building and applying new implantable tools to elucidate the multiple dynamic modes of neural signaling that are critical to our everyday behavior, both in health and in disease. A major goal of Dr. Schwerdt’s lab is to delineate the neural signaling operations, molecular and electrical, that control plasticity during learning and how these become impaired in diseases such as Parkinson’s and major mood disorders. Dr. Schwerdt received a BS in biomedical engineering (2008) and an MSE in electrical and computer engineering (2009) from Johns Hopkins University and then earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Arizona State University (2014). Dr. Schwerdt worked in the labs of Dr. Junseok Chae for her graduate studies and Dr. Ann Graybiel and Dr. Michael Cima at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for postdoctoral work.
Tanya Simuni, MD
Dr. Simuni graduated with her medical degree from Leningrad Medical School and completed an internship in medicine in Leningrad, Russia. She subsequently completed an internship in internal medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center and a neurology residency and a clinical neurophysiology fellowship at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She then pursued a movement disorders fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she served on the clinical faculty of the Department of Neurology for three years and held the position of Medical Co-Director of the Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Movement Disorders surgical program prior to her current positions. Dr. Simuni joined the faculty of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 2000 to build and lead a multidisciplinary movement disorders center that is recognized by the Parkinson’s Foundation, Huntington Disease Society of America and Wilson’s Foundation as a Center of Excellence.
Yoland Smith, PhD
Yoland Smith, PhD, received a PhD degree from Laval University (Quebec, Canada) in 1988. After postdoctoral training at Oxford University (Oxford, England) and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), he was appointed Assistant Professor of Anatomy at Laval University in 1991. In 1996, he joined the faculty of Emory University (Atlanta, GA), where he is currently Professor and Vice-Chair of Faculty Development in Neurology, and Chief of the Division of Neuropharmacology and Neurological Disorders at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. His research has been continuously funded by the NIH. He is a member of Emory’s Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson’s Disease Research and has published over 250 manuscripts on the pathophysiology of parkinsonism and related disorders. He is a Senior Editor of the European Journal of Neuroscience. He is also principal investigator of the NIH T32 Training grant that supports the Emory’s Graduate Program in Neuroscience.
William Stauffer, PhD
William Stauffer, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is an expert in the neurophysiology of reward learning and decision making. Dr. Stauffer developed techniques to enable cell-type specific expression of optogenetic activators in nonhuman primates and used these to show that dopamine neuron activations drive value-based learning. The Stauffer lab is dedicated to understanding cell-type specific computations that enable deliberation, inference, and reasoning. A major part of this effort includes elucidating cell types in the cognitive and reward centers of primate brain and developing cell type- specific tools for circuit-based investigations
Peter Strick, PhD
Peter L. Strick, PhD, is Thomas Detre Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurobiology, Scientific Director of the Brain Institute, and Co-Director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. He heads the NIH-funded Center for Neuroanatomy with Neurotropic Viruses, which provides the neuroscience community with highly specialized reagents, training, and facilities for the use of viruses as transneuronal tracers. Dr. Strick’s research focuses on three major topics: (ai) the motor areas of the cerebral cortex—their involvement in movement generation and control, as well as in motor skill acquisition and retention; (bii) the motor, cognitive and affective functions of the basal ganglia and cerebellum; and (ciii) the neural basis for the brain-body connection. Dr. Strick received the Cajal Club’s Krieg Cortical Kudos Discover Award in 2019 and an NIH Director's Transformative Research Award in 2018. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
David Sulzer, PhD
Dr. David Sulzer is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Neurology, Pharmacology and the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He studied synaptic vesicle recycling with Eric Holtzman at Columbia University. He founded the Dopamine Society (with Louis-Eric Trudeau), the journal Nature Parkinson's Disease (with Ray Chaudhuri) and the Gordon Conference on Parkinson's disease.
James Surmeier, PhD
D. James Surmeier, PhD, is the Nathan Smith Davis Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Idaho and received his PhD in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. He pioneered the use of advanced electrophysiological, optical, and molecular approaches to unravel the roles of dopamine and acetylcholine in modulating the striatal circuitry implicated in Parkinson’s disease. These studies have yielded fundamental insights into how striatal circuits adapt to the disease and how they contribute to side-effects of symptomatic treatment. In addition, Dr. Surmeier’s group has made a significant contribution to our understanding of how the physiology of dopaminergic neurons leads to the mitochondrial oxidant stress implicated in Parkinson’s disease pathogenesis. These studies have served as a foundation for large-scale clinical trials aimed at slowing Parkinson’s disease progression.
Per Svenningsson, MD, PhD
Per Svenningsson, MD, PhD, completed his MD and PhD at the Karolinska Institutet and was then a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Paul Greengard at The Rockefeller University. He is Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet and consultant neurologist at the Karolinska University hospital. He has developed a translational research program investigating pathogenic mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) using genetic and viral-based animal models. At Karolinska University hospital, he cares for patients with PD in a weekly movement disorders clinic. Dr. Svenningsson also collects biospecimens, including cerebrospinal fluid, and performs clinical trials to slow down PD progression. He is chairman of the Basic Science special interest group of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. He is a member of the Nobel Assembly awarding the annual Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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.
Robert Turner, PhD
Robert S. Turner, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Neuroscience. Dr. Turner has extensive experience studying the neural correlates of parkinsonism and deep brain stimulation for parkinsonism using a variety of techniques. He has published extensively on the neurophysiologic correlates of parkinsonism and of deep brain stimulation therapy using nonhuman primate models. In parallel, Dr. Turner has collaborated on functional imaging studies of parkinsonism and deep brain stimulation in human patients and on intra-operative neuronal recording studies performed in patients undergoing surgical therapies for Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Turner earned his PhD working with Dr. Marjorie Anderson at the University of Washington, Seattle, and completed postdoctoral training with Dr. Mahlon DeLong at Emory University. He joined the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco in 2000 and then moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 2007
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.
Christine Weber-Schmidt, BA
Chrissy has a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from Reed College, where her senior thesis involved optimizing IHC and ISH protocols to visualize neuronal activity and examine the correlation of brain expression and behaviors in cichlid fish. She then transitioned to OHSU working under Dr. Mandel to optimize scoring and behavioral tasks and AAV brain injections in p21 mice developing Rett Syndrome (MeCP2-/-). She also worked on a project to visualize REST transcript in human and mouse brain samples using IHC. In 2017, she shifted focus to type II diabetes and islet metabolism with a group at SIBCR, where she studied amyloid formation in mice over time in the pancreas and tested pharmacological agents in the established models. She was most recently in Dr. Hill’s transplant immunology lab for 3 years focused on T cell immunology and exhaustion in preclinical mouse transplant models focusing on GVHD, leukemia and myeloma. She is current working in Dr. Rui Costa's lab as lab manager.
Thomas Wichmann, MD
Thomas Wichmann, MD, received medical training at the Universities of Münster and Freiburg (Germany), graduating in 1984, with subsequent postdoctoral research training at the University of Freiburg and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), and neurology residency training at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). He has been a faculty member at Emory University since 1996, specializing in research into the pathophysiology of parkinsonism and the clinical care of patients with Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. He is currently the A. Worley Brown Professor of Neurology, Associate Director of the Movement Disorder division in Neurology, and Associate Director for Scientific Programs at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. His research has been continuously NIH funded, and has been published in high-impact journals. Dr. Wichmann also leads Emory’s NINDS-funded Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson’s Disease Research, and the American Parkinson’s Disease Association’s Center for Advanced Research at Emory University.
