Balyn Zaro, PhD
Balyn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California San Francisco. She studied chemical biology and protein glycosylation as a graduate student with Matthew Pratt at the University of Southern California. As post-doctoral researcher with Benjamin Cravatt at Scripps Research, she studied covalent drug development and chemoproteomics. She gained additional training in hematopoiesis and innate immunity with Irving Weissman at Stanford School of Medicine.
Geidy Serrano, PhD
Geidy Serrano is the director of the Brain and Body Donation Program Neuropathology laboratory. she works closely with multidisciplinary laboratories and investigators to support neuropathological and translational research.
Ayse Ulusoy, PhD
Ayse received her PhD in 2010 in Lund (Sweden). There, she gained expertise in developing animal models of neurodegeneration, particularly by designing and applying specific adeno-associated viral vectors in vivo to modulate disease-related gene expression in the dopaminergic system. Later, she worked at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Bonn (Germany) as a post-doctoral researcher, where she expanded her research to investigate Parkinson’s disease pathology beyond the nigrostriatal system. Particularly, she is interested in elucidating mechanisms of alpha-synuclein spreading throughout the brain as well as in the peripheral nervous system. She is currently pursuing her research interests as a staff scientist at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Bonn.
Eva-Maria Surmann, PhD
Dr. Eva-Maria Surmann, Associate Director of Business Portfolio Management at The Jackson Laboratory, leads the development and commercialization of advanced stem cell model platforms. She oversees JAX’s commercial stem cell program, including building a high-quality iPSC repository and collaborating with large-scale initiatives like iNDI to enable global access. She holds a PhD in Medical Sciences from the University of Cambridge and brings over a decade of experience in biomedical research and product development.
Michael Koob, PhD
Michael is a Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, and a founding member of the Institute for Translational Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.
Peter Loskill, PhD
Peter is a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and at the NMI Reutlingen. He studies biophysics at Saarland University and conducted his postdoctoral research in the Bioengineering Department at UC Berkeley. He has almost 15 years of experience developing and applying hiPSC based Organ-on-Chip models.
Justin McDonough, PhD
Justin is Associate Director of the Cellular Engineering Service at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), where he leads a high-throughput iPSC genome engineering program and other stem cell-based initiatives. He earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has a career focused on genetic engineering and advanced cellular models. Justin has extensive expertise in precision CRISPR editing and rigorous genomic QC. He collaborated to establish a scalable pipeline for engineering hiPSCs at JAX, including the iNDI resource, enabling the generation of complex, disease-relevant models for global distribution.
Veronique Daniels, PhD
Veronique is an innovation manager at KU Leuven, covering the areas of molecular imaging and Parkinson’s disease. Veronique has a key role in valorising the research results and connecting with relevant industry partners, other academic groups and patient organisations. Additionally, she is managing the Leuven Viral Vector Core. Veronique completed her PhD in Biomedical sciences in the lab of Prof. Baekelandt. She pursued her research career as a post-doctoral scientists at UCB (Belgium) working on in vitro pharmacology and assay development. From 2015 to 2017, Veronique was employed as a Study Director at Toxikon Europe (Belgium) where she was devoted to consulting and management of extractables and leachables studies.
Veerle Baekelandt, PhD
Veerle is a professor in the Department of Neurosciences at the KU Leuven in Belgium. She has a PhD degree in neurobiology from the KU Leuven in 1995. During her PhD she obtained a Frank Boas Fulbright fellowship for a research visit in Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She was appointed as an assistant professor and head of the Laboratory for Neurobiology and Gene Therapy at the faculty of medicine at KU Leuven in 2003. In collaboration with the virologist Dr. Zeger Debyser, they were the first research groups to introduce viral vector technology in Belgium. She has acquired international recognition for the application of viral vectors in rodent brain to model and study PD and more recently for demonstrating a prion-like behaviour of the α-synuclein protein.
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.
Laura Volpicelli-Daley, PhD
"While working as a senior scientist in the lab of Drs. Virginia Lee and John Trojanowski at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Volpicelli-Daley discovered that fibrils of α-synuclein act as seeds to template the growth of α-synuclein inclusions from endogenously expressed α-synuclein in neurons. These inclusions are remarkably similar morphologically and biochemically to those found in PD. Importantly, she showed the fibrils do not cause phenotypes in neurons lacking endogenous α-synuclein, demonstrating that corruption of normal α-synuclein contributes to neuronal defects. Currently, her lab focuses on the impact of pathologic α-synuclein on synapse architecture and function in the cortex and limbic brain regions. In addition, the lab studies how accumulation of glycosphingolipids in the brain causes neuronal dysfunction, synapse loss, and cognitive decline in PD.
Andrew West, PhD
Andrew B. West, PhD, received a PhD from the Mayo Clinic in 2003, with post-doctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded F31 and F32 individual fellowships from the NIH and selected in the first wave of K99/R00 awards. Past awards include a John Jurenko Professorship and a Translating Duke Health Fellowship. Dr. West is a tenured Professor of Pharmacology at Duke University with secondary appointments in Neurology and Neurobiology. He currently directs the Duke Center for Neurodegeneration and Neurotherapeutic Research, serves on the NINDS Parkinson’s Disease Biomarker Program NINDS-PDBP steering committee, the Executive Scientific Advisory Board at The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the NIH NSD-B study section, and is a board-reviewing editor for eLife. Dr. West’s research focuses on the exploration of LRRK2 and alpha-synuclein proteins as therapeutic targets for the amelioration of Parkinson’s disease, novel biomarkers informative for disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses, and defining new cellular pathways important in neurodegeneration.
