Misha Ahrens

Janelia FarmHHMI

Email: ahrensm@janelia.hhmi.org

Misha Ahrens is a fellow at Janelia Farm, researching systems neuroscience in zebrafish. He completed his B.A. in mathematics at Cambridge University and his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, at the University College London. Since 2009 Ahrens has been a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

Elad Alon

UC Berkeley

Email: elad@eecs.berkeley.edu

He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2001, 2002, and 2006, respectively. In Jan. 2007, he joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciencesa as well as a co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC). He has held consulting or visiting positions at Xilinx, Sun Labs, Intel, AMD, Rambus, Hewlett Packard, and IBM Research, where he worked on digital, analog, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for computing, test and measurement, and high-speed communications. Dr. Alon received the IBM Faculty Award in 2008, the 2009 Hellman Family Faculty Fund Award, the 2010 UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award, the 2010 ISSCC Jack Raper Award for Outstanding Technology Directions Paper, and the 2011 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Best Student Paper Award. His research focuses on energy-efficient integrated systems, including the circuit, device, communications, and optimization techniques used to design them.

Rebecca Alvania

Neuron

Email: ralvania@cell.com

Rebecca Alvania received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied transcriptional regulation during neural development with David Ginty. After completing her graduate work, she was a science writer at the National Academies until 2010 when she joined Cell Press as the Editor of Trends in Cell Biology. She became an associate scientific editor at Neuron in 2012.

Richard Andersen

Caltech

Email: andersen@vis.caltech.edu

Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, studies neural mechanisms of sight, hearing, balance, touch, and action, and the development of neural prosthetics. Andersen obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was a faculty member of the Salk Institute and MIT before coming to Caltech. Andersen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is recipient of a McKnight Foundation Scholars Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Visiting Professor at the College de France, and the Spencer Award from Columbia University. He has served as Director of the McDonnell/Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, and the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, as well as being a member or chair of various government advisory committees.

David Anderson

Caltech

Email: Wuwei1@caltech.edu

Anderson is an expert in biology and studies the development of the nervous system; the development of the circulatory system; and the functional neuroanatomy of fear.

Dora Angelaki

Baylor College of Medicine

Email: angelaki@bcm.edu

Dr. Angelaki is the Wilhelmina Robertson Professor & Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Psychology, Rice University. She holds Diploma and PhD degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and University of Minnesota. Her general area of interest is computational, cognitive and systems neuroscience. Within this broad field, she specializes in the neural mechanisms of spatial orientation and navigation using humans and non-human primates as a model. She is interested in neural coding and how complex, cognitive behavior is produced by neuronal populations. She has received many honors and awards, including the inaugural Pradal Award in Neuroscience from the National Academy of Sciences (2012), the Grass lectureship from the Society of Neuroscience (2011), the Halpike-Nylen medal from the Barany Society (2006) and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (1996). Dr. Angelaki maintains a very active research laboratory funded primarily by the National Institute of Health and a strong presence in the Society for Neuroscience and other international organizations.

Giogio Ascoli

George Mason University, The Krasnow Institute

Email: ascoli@gmu.edu

Giorgio A. Ascoli is University Professor in the Molecular Neuroscience Department and founding director of the Center for Neural Informatics at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study of George Mason University, where he has been since 1997. Ascoli was born in Milan, Italy. After an early education in the humanities, he received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa studying proteins involved in learning and neurodegeneration. Ascoli won the European Phillips Young Investigator Award in 1989 for the synthesis of a new organic molecule and moved to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, in 1994. He edited the first book in the field of computational neuroanatomy in 2002 and is founding editor-in-chief of the journal Neuroinformatics. Ascoli created and curates NeuroMorpho.Org, the largest collection of three-dimensional digital reconstructions of neurons, and is launching Hippocampome.Org, a comprehensive knowledge base of hippocampal neurons. Also active in cognitive science, he co-edited the book Consciousness, Mind and Brain in 2005 and designed an original test to quantify autobiographic memories (cramtest.info). Ascoli was the 2012 recipients of the Outstanding Faculty Award of the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia. Lab page: krasnow1.gmu.edu/cn3

Mary Ann Asson-Bates

National Science Foundation

Email: massonba@nsf.gov

Peter Bandettini

NIH/NIMH/NeuroImage

Email: bandettini@nih.gov

Dr. Bandettini received his B.S. from Marquette University in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1994, where he played a role in the early development of magnetic resonance imaging of human brain function using blood oxygenation contrast. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital with Bruce Rosen, he continued his investigation of methods to increase the interpretability, resolution, and applicability of functional MRI techniques. In 1999, he joined NIMH as an Investigator in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition and as the Director of the NIH Functional MRI core facility. In 2001, he was awarded the Scientific Director's Merit Award for his efforts in establishing the NIH FMRI core facility. In 2002, he was awarded the Wiley Young Investigator's at the annual Organization for Human Brain Mapping Meeting. His laboratory is currently developing MRI methods improve the spatial resolution, temporal resolution, sensitivity, interpretability, and applications of functional MRI.

Helen Barbas

Boston University

Email: barbas@bu.edu

Helen Barbas studied neuroscience at McGill University (Ph.D) and at Harvard Neurological Unit, Beth Israel Hospital, before moving to Boston University and School of Medicine, where she is now Professor. She has established and directs the Neural Systems Laboratory at Boston University, funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NINDS and NIMH), the National Science Foundation, and Autism Speaks. Her research focuses on the prefrontal cortex and the pattern, organization and synaptology of prefrontal pathways associated with cognition, memory and emotions in primates, and their disruption in psychiatric and neurological diseases. Publications from the laboratory are found at: http://www.bu.edu/neural/

Cori Bargmann

The Rockefeller University

Email: cori@mail.rockefeller.edu

Dr. Bargmann studies the relationships between genes, circuits, and behaviors in the genetically tractable nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the only animal whose complete synaptic connectivity has been reconstructed from electron micrographs. The worm’s highly developed senses of smell and taste elicit strong innate behaviors, but also allow context-specific responses and experience-dependent learning. By mapping specific behaviors onto individual neurons, manipulating genes that are important for nervous system function, and monitoring the activity of neurons during behavior, the lab asks how environmental variation and genetic variation converge to generate flexible behaviors.

Peter Basser

NIH/NICHD

Email: pjbasser@helix.nih.gov

Peter Basser received his A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, and then received his postdoctoral training in Bioengineering as a Staff Fellow within the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Branch (BEIP), NIH. In 1997, Dr. Basser became Chief of the Section on Tissue Biophysics and Biomimetics (STBB), NICHD and is currently the Director of the Program on Pediatric Imaging and Tissue Sciences, NICHD. Dr. Basser's group is primarily known for its invention, development, and clinical implementation of MR diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and for explaining the physical basis of magnetic stimulation of nerve fibers. More recently, STBB has been developing a wide array of quantitative in vivo MRI methods, including AxCaliber MRI for measuring the axon diameter distribution within nerve fascicles, and double Pulsed-Field Gradient (dPFG) MRI for studying microstructural features of both gray and white matter.

Eshel Ben-Jacob

Tel Aviv University/Rice University

Email: eshelbj@gmail.com

Eshel Ben-Jacob is a Professor of physicist at Tel Aviv University, holder of the Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex Systems and a Fellow of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) at Rice University. He served as Vice President (1999-2002) and President (2002-2005) of the Israel Physical Society. Ben-Jacob became a pioneer in the study of collective behaviors and decision-making of bacteria, and has been international leader in establishing the rapidly evolving fields of Bio-complexity and Physics of Living Systems. Ben-Jacob has important contribution in the field of network neuroscience. In 2007, Scientific American selected Ben-Jacob’s invention, the first hybrid Neuro-Memory-Chip, as one of the 50 most important achievements in all fields of science and technology for that year. The Neuro-Memory-Chip entails imprinting multiple memories, based upon development of a novel, system-level analysis of neural network activity. In recent years he applied these methods towards new analysis of the stock market.

Theodore (Ted) Berger

University of Southern California

Email: berger@bmsr.usc.edu

Dr. Theodore Berger is the David Packard Professor of Engineering, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Dr. Berger’s research involves collaborations with several laboratories, and uses an integrated experimental and theoretical approach to developing biologically realistic nonlinear dynamic models of the hippocampus and its function in forming new memories. The resulting models have been used to understand the role of neural nonlinear dynamics in multi-input, multi-output signal processing, the dynamics of large-scale multi-neuron systems, and multi-scale, hierarchical neural organization. Preclinical applications (rat, monkey) of Dr. Berger’s research include the development of cognitive neural prostheses for restoring lost memory function; clinical applications extend to the design of medical devices and procedures for controlling seizures. Dr. Berger received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine and The Salk Institute. Dr. Berger has been elected a Fellow of the AAAS, the AIMBE, and the IEEE. Among other awards, he is the 2013 recipient of the Academic Career Achievement Award from the Engineering, Medicine, and Biology Society (EMBS).

William Bialek

Princeton University

Email: wbialek@Princeton.EDU

William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics at Princeton University. He also is a member of the multidisciplinary Lewis–Sigler Institute. In addition to his responsibilities at Princeton, he is Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where is helping to launch an Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences.

Born in 1960 and educated in the San Francisco public schools, Bialek graduated from Lowell High School in 1977. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, receiving the AB (1979) and PhD (1983) degrees in Biophysics. After postdoctoral appointments at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, he returned to Berkeley to join the faculty in 1986. In late 1990 he moved to the newly formed NEC Research Institute (now the NEC Laboratories) in Princeton, where he eventually became an Institute Fellow. During his years at NEC, Bialek also made extended visits for research and teaching at many institutions around the world, including the University of California at San Francisco, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, and Princeton University; he joined the Princeton faculty as Professor of Physics in 2001. In Spring 2008 he spent a sabbatical at the University of Rome, La Sapienza.

Professor Bialek’s research interests have ranged over a wide variety of theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology, from the dynamics of individual biological molecules to learning and cognition. Best known for contributions to our understanding of coding and computation in the brain, Bialek and collaborators have shown that aspects of brain function can be described as essentially optimal strategies for adapting to the complex dynamics of the world, making the most of the available signals in the face of fundamental physical constraints and limitations. More recently he has followed these ideas of optimization into the early events of embryonic development, and the processes by which all cells make decisions about when to read out the information stored in their genes. His hope is that these diverse biological phenomena may be understandable through some unifying theoretical principles, in the physics tradition.

Throughout his career Bialek has been involved both in helping to establish biophysics as a sub-discipline within physics and in helping biology to absorb the quantitative intellectual tradition of the physical sciences. During his years at NEC he organized the Princeton Lectures on Biophysics, a series of workshops that provided many young physicists with an introduction to the challenges and opportunities at the interface with biology. For more than twenty years Professor Bialek has participated in summer courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, serving as co-director of the computational neuroscience course in the summers of 1998 through 2002. Currently he is involved in a major educational experiment at Princeton to create a truly integrated and mathematically sophisticated introduction to the natural sciences for first year college students.

Parizad M. Bilimoria

Conte Center at Harvard University

Email: Parizad3@gmail.com

Parizad M. Bilimoria is science writer and outreach director for the Conte Center at Harvard University, a basic research group focused on developmental origins of mental illness. She writes about the Center’s work for a variety of different forums and audiences, develops and maintains the Center’s websites, and designs outreach programs and events serving communities both within and beyond the university. She also assists the center’s scientists in securing new sources of funding. Parizad received her PhD in neurobiology in 2010 from Harvard Medical School, where her dissertation focused on signaling pathways that regulate neuronal morphogenesis. She has worked previously as a science writer for the Department of Public Affairs at Boston Children’s Hospital and a medical writer for ETHOS Health Communications in Newtown, PA. She holds a BS/MS in neuroscience and minor in creative writing from Brandeis University.

Krastan Blagoev

National Science Foundation

Email: kblagoev@nsf.gov

I have done theoretical work on the properties of macroscopic quantum states occurring in condensed matter and cold atom systems. In the past 10 years I have worked on theoretical aspects of telomere dynamics in aging and cancer, the role of stem cells division dynamics in tissuehomeostasis, and lately on relating data from cancer clinical trials to kinetics of cancer cell divisions.

Ed Boyden

MIT

Email: esb@media.mit.edu

I lead the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT. We are inventing new tools for analyzing and engineering brain circuits. We are devising technologies for controlling specific neural circuit elements, to understand their causal contribution to normal and pathological neural computations. Our inventions include 'optogenetic' tools we developed for activation and silencing of neural circuits with light, and noninvasive devices using novel physical principles to control neural activity. We are using our inventions to enable systematic approaches to neuroscience, revealing how entire neural circuits operate to generate behavior, and empowering new therapeutic strategies for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Our entrepreneurial approach to tackling clinically and philosophically important problems will hopefully yield a better understanding of the nature of human existence, and enable the ability to engineer improvements thereupon.

Kevin L. Briggman

NIH

Email: briggmankl@mail.nih.gov

Dr. Kevin L. Briggman received his B.S. from Case Western Reserve University in 2000 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2005, where he studied behavioral choice using voltage-sensitive dye population imaging in the leech nervous system with Bill Kristan. During a postdoctoral fellowship with Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, he worked on the development of serial block-face scanning electron microscopy and used it in combination with two-photon population calcium imaging to investigate the circuit mechanisms underlying direction-selectivity in the mammalian retina. Dr. Briggman joined NIH as an investigator in 2011. His laboratory combines techniques to measure the function and connectivity of neuronal circuits, focusing on the comparative study of sensory and motor systems across species.

Randal Burns

Johns Hopkins University

Email: randal@cs.jhu.edu

Randal Burns is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a co-founder, chief architect, and the lead developer of the Open Connectome Project. His research for the last decade has centered on high-performance computing for scientific applications, specifically spatial data organization, batch query processing, and parallel data architectures. He has only recently discovered that neuroscience has the coolest data; he is a first time NIH Principal Investigator as of 2012.

György Buzsáki, MD

New York University

Email: gyorgy.buzsaki@nyumc.org

Denise Caldwell

National Science Foundation
Division Director, Division of Physics, Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Email: dcaldwel@nsf.gov

Carmen Canavier

Louisiana State University

Email: ccanav@lsuhsc.edu

Carmen Canavier is currently Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. She received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 1991. She is a computational neuroscientist whose main scientific interests include nonlinear neural oscillators and pattern formation in networks of such oscillators. Her main focus areas are the use of phase resetting curves to predict synchronization between neural oscillators and the use of nonlinear dynamical techniques and multi-compartmental modeling to analyze neural pacemakers and bursting neurons. Her modeling efforts are currently focused on the dopaminergic neurons of the mammalian midbrain, central pattern generating circuits, and on gamma and theta oscillations in the hippocampal formation. She has active collaborations with a number of electrophysiologists using the dynamic clamp, a realtime interface between artificial and biological neural circuit components. She currently serves on the Biophysics of Neural Systems study section at NIH and on the organizing committee for the Mathematical Neuroscience 2012-2013 program at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute , and has previously served on numerous other grant review panels and as vice president of the Organization for Computational Neuroscience.

Albert Cardona

Janelia Farm/HHMI

Email: cardonaa@janelia.hhmi.org

In my lab we compare the structure of the same circuit in multiple individuals, in adjacent neuromeres of the same individual, and in successive developmental stages. We aim at understanding the properties of neural circuits--such as the minimal stable circuit necessary for a specific computation--and the mechanisms of adaptation to changes in the environment or in body size while preserving the computational capabilities. We use the somatosensory system of Drosophila larva as a model system for its outstanding advantages: (1) unique identified neurons recognizable across multiple individuals, (2) relatively small size and (3) the availability of genetically targetable effectors and reporters of neural function. The ability to recognize the same neuron in a GFP-labeled preparation and in EM provides the means to validate the overall arbor of a neuron. At the synapse level, the comparison between the left and right sides of the body provides an internal control on the choice of synaptic partners. The effectors and reporters of neural function in identified neurons enable the immediate and reproducible observation of neuronal function. The relatively small number of neurons--at about 10,000--, the small size of the animal (between 0.5 and 2 millimeters) and the fact that it is transparent enable the monitoring of neural activity over time in intact preparations, as well as the observation of fictive behaviors in dissected, and therefore manipulable, preparations. To facilitate the formulation of hypothesis of neural function on the basis of known circuitry, we are currently reconstructing the complete wiring diagram of the Drosophila larva.

Jose M. Carmena

UC Berkeley

Email: carmena@eecs.berkeley.edu

Jose M. Carmena is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Neuroscience at the University of California-Berkeley, and Co-Director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at UC Berkeley and UCSF. His research program in neural engineering and systems neuroscience is aimed at understanding the neural basis of sensorimotor learning and control, and at building the science and engineering base that will allow the creation of reliable neuroprosthetic systems for the severely disabled. Dr. Carmena received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) in 1995 and the University of Valencia (Spain) in 1997. Following those he received the M.S. degree in artificial intelligence and the Ph.D. degree in robotics both from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) in 1998 and 2002 respectively. From 2002 to 2005 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Neurobiology and the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University (Durham, NC). He is senior member of the IEEE (RA, SMC and EMB societies), Society for Neuroscience, and the Neural Control of Movement Society. Dr. Carmena has been the recipient of the Bakar Fellowship (2012), the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award (2011), the Aspen Brain Forum Prize in Neurotechnology (2010), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2010), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009), the Okawa Foundation Research Grant Award (2007), the UC Berkeley Hellman Faculty Award (2007), and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003).

Nicholas Carnevale, MD

Yale School of Medicine

Email: Tcarnevale@gcs-cpa.com

Catherine Carr

University of Maryland, College Park

Email: cecarr@umd.edu

Catherine Carr is Professor of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her B.Sc. in Zoology from the University of Cape Town in 1977, her M.A. in Biology from State University New York at Buffalo in 1978, her Ph. D. in Neuroscience from University of California at San Diego in 1984, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at California Institute of Technology in 1987. Her research focuses on neural coding and brain evolution. At the Marine Biological Laboratory, Dr. Carr taught in the Neural Systems and Behavior course from 1995 and was Co-Director from 2000-2004. From 2005-2008 she was the Grass Foundation Lab director, and served on the MBL Science Council from 2005-2011. She has taught in both SONA and IBRO courses and serves as Action Editor for the Journal of Neurophysiology and the Journal of Computational Neuroscience.

Edward Chang, MD

UCSF

Email: ChangEd@neurosurg.ucsf.edu

Edward Chang is a neurosurgeon-scientist with expertise in treating intractable epilepsy, pain, movement disorders and brain tumors. He specializes in advanced brain mapping methods, including awake craniotomy for speech and motor mapping, to safely perform surgery in the brain. His laboratory develops innovative technologies to preserve and restore speech, movement and cognition.

Dr. Chang is faculty in the Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF. He co-directs the Center for Neural Engineering at UC Berkeley and UCSF, which brings together engineering, neuroscience, neurology and neurosurgery to develop devices to restore function for patients with neurological disabilities such as paralysis and speech disorders.

Dmitri ‘Mitya’ Chklovskii

Janelia Farm/HHMI

Email: chklovskiid@janelia.hhmi.org

I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and studied physics and engineering in college. I moved to the US in 1989 and obtained a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 1994. After being a Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows I decided to make a switch to theoretical neurobiology and was a Sloan Fellow at the Salk Institute. In 1999, I founded a theoretical neuroscience group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where I was an Assistant and then Associate Professor. I moved to Janelia Farm in 2007. My main interest is in building simple but powerful theories of brain structure and function.

Miyoung Chun

The Kavli Foundation

Email: chun@kavlifoundation.org

Miyoung Chun is Vice President of Science Programs at The Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California.
Prior to her current role, Dr. Chun was an assistant dean of science and engineering at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), in particular serving for the California Nanosystems Institute. She was also appointed as director of International Research Advancement at UC Santa Barbara. In this role, she was active in building partnerships among academia, government and industry around the globe. Her academic career began as an assistant professor of biochemistry and a member of Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute at Boston University School of Medicine in 1995. There she taught in the areas of cell biology and molecular medicine, and conducted research in signal transduction of G-protein coupled receptors. She has held research and training grants from foundations, industry and federal agencies. She has served as reviewer for journals as well as scientific review panels for the NIH and private foundations.
From 1999 to 2005, she worked for Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., as a scientist and project leader, where her research focused on genomics/functional genomics and on molecular imaging in drug discovery and development. She discovered and characterized novel genes that are important to inflammatory and cardiovascular diseases and has over 30 US and International issued/published patents.
Dr. Chun obtained her Ph.D. degree in molecular genetics from The Ohio State University in 1990 studying muscle assembly. She was a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Whitehead Institute with Dr. Harvey Lodish focusing on the cell and molecular biology of receptors.

George Church

Harvard Medical School

Email: gmc@harvard.edu

George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Director of PersonalGenomes.org, providing the world's only open-access information on human Genomic, Environmental & Trait data (GET). His 1984 Harvard PhD included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing & barcoding. These lead to the first commercial genome sequence (pathogen, Helicobacter pylori) in 1994 . His innovations in "next generation" genome sequencing and synthesis & cell/tissue engineering resulted in 12 companies spanning fields including medical genomics ( Knome, Alacris, AbVitro, GoodStart, Pathogenica ) and synthetic biology ( LS9, Joule , Gen9, Warp Drive ) as well as new privacy, biosafety & biosecurity policies. He is director of the NIH Center for Excellence in Genomic Science. His honors include election to NAS & NAE and Franklin Bower Laureate for Achievement in Science.

Thomas R. Clandinin

Stanford University

Email: trc@stanford.edu

Thomas R. Clandinin, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in Biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1998. The Clandinin lab combines genetic approaches with analytical techniques adapted from systems neuroscience to determine how neural circuits process visual information. Clandinin’s honors include an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a career development award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Searle Scholar Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Scholar Award from the McKnight Foundation.

Forrest Collman

Stanford University

Email: fcollman@stanford.edu

Forrest received his A.B. in Physics from Princeton University in 2003, where he wrote a senior thesis with John Hopfield. He then switched departments at Princeton to work with David Tank, receiving his Phd. in 2010 in Neuroscience and Molecular Biology. During his Phd. he worked on problems related to the study of neural circuits in awake behaving animals, including developing a motion correction algorithm for two photon microscopy in awake animals, and designing and programming a virtual reality apparatus for awake behaving mice. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Stephen Smith’s lab at Stanford University where he works on combining the imaging modalities of two photon microscopy with immunofluorescence and electron microscopy to study synaptic diversity and plasticity.

Daniel Colon-Ramos

Yale University

Email: daniel.colon-ramos@yale.edu

Clark Cooper

National Science Foundation

Email: ccooper@nsf.gov

F. Fleming Crim

National Science Foundation
Assistant Director, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate

Email: fcrim @nsf.gov

Carina Curto

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Email: ccurto2@math.unl.edu

Carina Curto was born in 1978, of Argentine parents. She lived in Iowa
City, IA until 1996, when she left to attend Harvard University. After
graduating with a physics degree in 2000, she received an NSF graduate
research fellowship to study at Duke University. In 2005, after finishing
her PhD in mathematical string theory, Carina switched fields and became a
postdoc in computational neuroscience in the laboratory of Kenneth D.
Harris at Rutgers, CMBN. She then spent one year as a postdoc in
mathematical neuroscience at the Courant Institute, NYU. Since 2009,
Carina has been an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research is largely focused on
developing theoretical and mathematical approaches to study neural
networks and neural codes. This work has been supported by NSF DMS, a
Sloan Research Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson
foundation.

Bob Datta

Harvard University

Email: srdatta@hms.harvard.edu

Karl Deisseroth

Stanford University

Email: deissero@stanford.edu

Karl Deisseroth is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and Psychiatry at Stanford University. He earned his A.B. from Harvard and M.D./Ph.D. from Stanford, serves as Director of Undergraduate Education in Bioengineering at Stanford, and is a practicing psychiatrist board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He has developed and applied technologies for controlling (optogenetics) and imaging (CLARITY) specific elements within intact biological systems, and continues to develop and apply new technologies to study physiology and behavior in health and disease, as well as train researchers around the world. He has received the NIH Pioneer Award (2005), Scheutze Prize (2008), Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2009), Koetser Prize (2010), Nakasone Prize (2010), Spencer Prize (2011), UNC/Perl Prize (2012), Zuelch Prize (2012), Pasarow Prize (2013), BRAIN prize (2013) and Lounsbery Prize (2013). Deisseroth is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

Winfried Denk

Max Planck Institute, Germany

Email: winfried.denk@mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de

Dr. Winfried Denk is Director of the Department of Biomedical Optics at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and an adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

James Deshler

National Science Foundation

Email: jdeshler @nsf.gov

James DiCarlo

MIT

Email: dicarlo@mit.edu

Dr. DiCarlo was named Investigator at the M.I.T. McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2002, and was promoted to full Professor and Department Head in 2012. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1998 and did his postdoctoral work at Baylor College of Medicine from 1998 to 2002. His research group is focused on understanding the neuronal representations and computational algorithms that underlie visual object recognition in primates.

John Donoghue

Brown University

Email: John_Donoghue@Brown.EDU

Our laboratory investigates how the brain turns thought into voluntary behaviors and how that knowledge can be used to help persons with paralysis. We study how populations of neurons represent and transform information as a motor plan becomes movement. This approach has required the creation of a novel recording array to study neural ensembles. With the knowledge we have gained about movement representation, we have translated our findings to a clinical application in which humans with paralysis can use their neurons directly to control devices.

John Doyle

Caltech

Email: doyle@caltech.edu

John G Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineer, and BioEngineering at Caltech. BS, MS EE, MIT (1977), PhD, Math, UC Berkeley (1984). Current research interests are in theoretical foundations for complex networks in engineering and biology, unifying controls, computing, communications, and physics. Emphasis on dynamics, feedback, architecture, layering, tradeoffs, evolvability. Case studies drawn from throughout technology plus cell biology, human physiology, ecology, multiscale physics, and most recently, neuroscience. Early work was in the mathematics of robust control, including extensions to nonlinear and networked systems, with applications in aerospace and process control. His group has been involved in projects including the Matlab Robust Control Toolbox (for decades the premier control design software), SOSTOOLS (Nonlinear systems analysis), SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language), and FAST (Fast AQM, Scalable TCP) internet protocols. Paper prizes include IEEE Baker, IEEE Automatic Control Transactions (twice), and best conference papers in ACM Sigcomm and AACC American Control Conference. Individual awards include AACC Eckman and IEEE Control Systems Field and Centennial Outstanding Young Engineer Awards. Held national and world records and championships in various sports. Best known for having excellent co-authors, students, friends, and colleagues.

Florian Engert

Harvard University

Email: florian@mcb.harvard.edu

I received my PhD in Theoretical Biology from the University of Chicago in 1979. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health until 1982. I have been in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pittsburgh since then. I am also an adjunct professor in the Dept of Neurobiology and Dept of Computational Biology and a Distinguished University Professor. I have written a bunch of papers in math biology and particularly neuroscience. I am the author of XPPAUT a software package for the simulation of nonlinear dynamics that runs on all desktop platforms and on iOS mobile platforms. I have written two books; one on simulation and the other on Mathematical Neuroscience. I am an avid but feckless gardener and have kept pet birds for nearly 5 decades.

Bard Ermentrout

University of Pittsburgh

Email: bard@pitt.edu

I received my PhD in Theoretical Biology from the University of Chicago in 1979. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health until 1982. I have been in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pittsburgh since then. I am also an adjunct professor in the Dept of Neurobiology and Dept of Computational Biology and a Distinguished University Professor. I have written a bunch of papers in math biology and particularly neuroscience. I am the author of XPPAUT a software package for the simulation of nonlinear dynamics that runs on all desktop platforms and on iOS mobile platforms. I have written two books; one on simulation and the other on Mathematical Neuroscience. I am an avid but feckless gardener and have kept pet birds for nearly 5 decades.

Gregory K. Farber

NIH/NIMH

Email: farberg@mail.nih.gov

Dr. Farber has a B.S. from Penn State University in chemistry (1984) and a Ph.D. from MIT in physical chemistry (1988). Dr. Farber’s research in graduate school involved determining the three dimensional structure and mechanism of the enzyme xylose isomerase in the laboratory of Dr. Gregory A. Petsko. After graduate school, Dr. Farber received a Life Sciences Research Fellowship to work on mechanistic enzymology with Dr. W. W. Cleland at the University of Wisconsin. Following his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Farber returned to Penn State as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and rose to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure by 1998. His research included work on structural movies of enzyme action, molecular evolution, and mechanistic enzymology.

Following a sabbatical year in the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation, Dr. Farber decided to stay in government service. He moved to the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), part of NIH, in 2000. At NCRR, he managed a number centers and individual investigator awards in technology development and bioinformatics, as well as a cohort of interdisciplinary research centers. Dr. Farber concluded his service at NCRR as the Director of the Office of Extramural Activities and the Director of the Office of Construction Grants.

In June 2011, Dr. Farber became the Director of the Office of Technology Development and Coordination at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). That office is responsible for coordinating all technology development and bioinformatics activities at NIMH, overseeing the National Database for Autism Research, managing the Human Connectome project on behalf of the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint, and also overseeing the NIMH small business program.

Michale Fee

MIT

Email: fee@mit.edu

Michale Fee studies how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, with a focus on the songbird as a model system. Birdsong is a complex behavior that young birds learn from their fathers and it provides an ideal system to study the neural basis of learned behavior. Because the parts of the bird's brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits that are disrupted in brain disorders such as Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, Fee hopes the lessons learned from birdsong will provide new clues to the causes and possible treatment of these conditions.

Fee joined the McGovern Institute in 2003 and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1992. Before moving to MIT, he was a principal investigator in the Biological Computation Research Department at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Joseph R. Fetcho

Cornell University

Email: jrf49@cornell.edu

Joseph R. Fetcho obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1984. He was a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook from 1990 to 2004 when he moved to the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell, where he is now. He mostly uses optical and physiological methods applied to larval zebrafish to understand the principles of organization of motor networks, which accounts for the tirade about zebrafish in his statement about the path to progress in brain research. In spite of his obvious bias, what he wrote also happens to be true.

David Fitzpatrick

Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience

Email: david.fitzpatrick@mpfi.org

David Fitzpatrick PhD is Scientific Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the only institute of the Max Planck Society that is located outside of Europe. Prior to assuming this position, he was the James B. Duke Professor of Neurobiology at the Duke University School of Medicine and founding Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Dr. Fitzpatrick received his B.S. in Biology from Penn State University and his Ph.D. from Duke University. Research in the Fitzpatrick lab employs state of the art in vivo imaging techniques to probe the functional architecture and development of neural circuits in visual cortex.

Reza Ghanadan

DARPA

Email: reza.ghanadan@darpa.mil

Ralph Greenspan

UCSD

Email: rgreenspan@ucsd.edu

Dr. Ralph J. Greenspan has worked on the genetic basis of behavior and brain function in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) almost since the inception of the field, studying with one of its founders, Jeffery Hall, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where he received his Ph.D. in biology in 1979. He is currently Associate Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Greenspan’s research includes studies of the consequences of mutations and localized genetic alterations in the nervous, molecular identification of genes causing naturally occurring variation in behavior, and the genetic analysis of fruit fly sleep and attention. His current research addresses large-scale network questions pertaining to the action of genes and neurons. In addition to research papers, he has authored: Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics, , An Introduction to Nervous Systems, and How Genes Influence Behaviour (with Jonathan Flint and Ken Kendler).

Sten Grillner

International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF)

Email: sten.grillner@ki.se

Sten Grillner is professor at the Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute, a former president of FENS and a member of the National Academy (US). He has also helped develop the OECD initiated International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) with the secretariat in Stockholm. He received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2008. His research has focused on the network organization underlying our motor repertoire. His initial work defined the basic organisation of the mammalian locomotor system in terms of supraspinal command systems, spinal networks coordinating the movements (CPGs), and the sensory control of the CPGs. To address the next level question - the molecular, cellular and synaptic design of these neuronal circuits - he developed a simpler vertebrate model (lamprey). The different network interneurons, their synaptic interaction (transmitters, receptor subtypes), and their membrane properties (ion channel subtypes expressed) have been identified. Through an interaction between detailed multi-faceted experimentation and large scale modelling with biophysically realistic numbers of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons, the operation of this entire motor control system has been uncovered. Most recently the neural mechanisms underlying selection of behaviour is in focus, and the role of the basal ganglia and habenula, both shown to be conserved in great detail from lamprey to primates.

Brigitta Gundersen

Nature Neuroscience

Email: B.Gundersen@us.nature.com

Brigitta Gundersen received a BS in Biology at Stanford University and a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she studied the molecular basis of depression and antidepressant action with Dr. Julie Blendy. She joined
Nature Publishing Group in 2011 and is now an Associate Editor at Nature Neuroscience in NPG’s New York office. Her responsibilities include reading and evaluating manuscripts, coordinating peer review, commissioning News and Views and review articles, and traveling to conferences to maintain contact with the scientific community.

Marlene Guzman

NIH/NIMH

Email: mg513r@nih.gov

Melina E. Hale

University of Chicago

Email: mhale@uchicago.edu

Melina E. Hale is an Associate Professor in The Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and on the Committees on Neurobiology and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. She received her B.S. from Duke University in 1992 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1998. She directs the NSF-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in Motor Control and Movement that trains students from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. She is the Chair-Elect of the Division of Comparative Biomechanics at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Melina’s research focuses on the organization and function of motor circuits and their evolution, the neuromechanics of movement and the role of sensory input in modulation of motor output, particularly in the larval zebrafish model system. She collaborates with engineers and biomechanists to instrument sensor systems on fish-inspired robots.

Matti Hämäläinen

Harvard Medical School

Email: msh@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

Matti Hämäläinen, Ph.D., is a physicist trained at Helsinki University of Technology. He is presently Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the MEG Core at the Martinos Center of Massachusetts General Hospital. Throughout his scientific career he has worked on the source analysis of MEG and EEG and combination of these real-time measures with other imaging methods. He introduced the minimum-norm estimates and the Bayesian statistical approach to MEG source estimation and developed novel numerical methods for the solution of the MEG/EEG forward problem. Dr. Hämäläinen was also a member of the core team developing the first whole-head MEG systems. Together with his colleagues he published in 1993 a seminal review article on MEG in Reviews of Modern Physics, now with more than 1800 citations. Presently, he continues to develop anatomically-constrained MEG/EEG source estimation methods, including sparse and temporally continuous approaches, works on combination of electromagnetic source imaging with fMRI and NIRS, on MEG/EEG studies of early brain development in infants, as well as on frequency-domain and connectivity analysis of MEG and EEG data. Both in Helsinki and at MGH he has developed software packages which are now in use in MEG centers worldwide. Dr. Hämäläinen works in close collaboration with several neuroscientists and clinicians to conduct MEG/EEG experiments in both healthy and diseased populations.

Moritz Helmstaedter

Max Planck Institute, Germany

Email: mhelmstaedter@neuro.mpg.de

Moritz Helmstaedter is a neuroscientist dedicated to mapping connectomes; the complex networks of nerve cells in the brain. A medical doctor and physicist by training, Moritz completed his doctoral thesis with Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. During his post-doctoral work together with Winfried Denk and Kevin Briggman, he developed methods to map nerve cell networks using electron microscopes and computer analysis tools.
Moritz is currently heading the “Structure of Neocortical Circuits Group” at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich, Germany, where he aims to understand the computations in mouse primary sensory cortex based on high-resolution network mapping of cortical networks. His laboratory is focusing on the development and application of novel image reconstruction techniques for connectomics involving an efficient combination of machine learning and crowd sourcing.

Harald Hess

Janelia Farm/HHMI

Email: hessh@janelia.hhmi.org

After a PhD in Physics at Princeton, Harald Hess pursued hydrogen atom trapping and Bose-Einstein condensation at MIT, various low temperature scanning probe microscopy at Bell Labs, and then left for an industrial position developing advanced equipment for hard disk drive and semiconductor inspection and production. During a liberating period of unemployment, he and a colleague, Eric Betzig, learned about photoactivatable fluorescent proteins and developed PALM (photo-activated localization microscopy) to reveal details of structure beyond the diffraction limit. He is now gainfully employed at Janelia Farms extending PALM to 3D and developing 3D electron microscopy techniques for cells and neural tissue.

Sean Hill

International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, Stockholm, Sweden

Email: sean.hill@incf.org

Sean Hill received his B.A. in Computational Neuroscience from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. After a period spent working in the biotechnology industry, where he supervised a team of programmers working on distributed databases, he then returned to academia to study for a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Here he investigated the computational role of the auditory thalamocortical circuitry in the rat, research which involved multi-unit recordings and large-scale neuronal simulations.

After receiving his Ph.D. degree, Sean Hill held postdoctoral positions at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During this time he developed the first large-scale model of the cat visual thalamocortical system that replicates neural activity during wakefulness and sleep.

In 2006, Sean Hill was recruited by IBM to serve as the Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience in the Blue Brain Project, responsible for co- leading a team of 35 researchers dedicated to constructing a data-driven large-scale model of brain circuitry. In this capacity, he coordinated efforts to integrate gene expression, morphology and electrophysiology data into modeling, simulation, visualization and analysis workflows on a variety of high performance computing platforms. He has also supervised and led research efforts exploring the principles underlying the structure and dynamics of neocortical microcircuitry.

Since January 2011, Sean Hill serves as the Executive Director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility in Stockholm, Sweden.

Mary Ann Horn

National Science Foundation

Email: mhorn@nsf.gov

Kathy Hudson

NIH/DDSOP

Email: Kathy.hudson@nih.gov

Dr. Hudson is the Deputy Director for Science, Outreach, and Policy (DDSOP) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In April 2013, Dr. Hudson was appointed an ex-officio member of the NIH Advisory Council’s Working Group for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, with a goal to understand and map the human brain.

As NIH’s DDSOP, Dr. Hudson works with the NIH leadership developing and implementing new strategic and scientific initiatives for the world’s largest biomedical research agency, which has an annual budget of $31 billion, to advance NIH’s mission of enhancing public health.

Dr. Hudson’s professional experience includes serving as the Acting Deputy Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, NIH; the NIH Chief of Staff; the Assistant Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH; and the founder and Director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center, John Hopkins University (JHU).

Dr. Hudson holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. in Microbiology from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Biology from Carleton College.

Thomas R. Insel, MD

Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

Email: tinsel@mail.nih.gov

Thomas R. Insel, M.D., is Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the component of the National Institutes of Health charged with generating the knowledge needed to understand, treat, and prevent mental disorders. His tenure at NIMH has been distinguished by groundbreaking findings in the areas of practical clinical trials, autism research, and the role of genetics in mental illnesses.
Prior to his appointment as NIMH Director in the Fall 2002, Dr. Insel was Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. There, he was founding director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, one of the largest science and technology centers funded by the National Science Foundation and, concurrently, director of an NIH-funded Center for Autism Research. From 1994 to 1999, he was Director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta. While at Emory, Dr. Insel continued the line of research he had initiated at NIMH studying the neurobiology of complex social behaviors. He has published over 250 scientific articles and four books, including the Neurobiology of Parental Care (with Michael Numan) in 2003.
Dr. Insel has served on numerous academic, scientific, and professional committees and boards. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and is a recipient of several awards including the Outstanding Service Award from the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. Insel graduated from the combined B.A.-M.D. program at Boston University in 1974. He did his internship at Berkshire Medical Center, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and his residency at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.

Vladimir Itskov

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Email: vladimir.itskov@unl.edu

Vladimir Itskov was born in Leningrad, USSR, and received his early mathematics training in Moscow. He then came to the U.S. for graduate school, obtaining his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 2002. As a postdoc, Vladimir transitioned to research in theoretical and computational neuroscience, spending two years at Rutgers CMBN and three years as a Swartz Fellow in Columbia's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. He is currently an assistant professor in the Math Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Vladimir's research seeks to relate structure to function in hippocampal and cortical networks. This work combines mathematical theory with data analysis to uncover signatures of network mechanisms in neural activity.

Harvey Karten, MD

UCSD

Email: hjkarten@ucsd.edu

Vision is one of the most important of sensory systems used in the analysis of the surrounding world. Studies of the visual system have emphasized the antiquity and general conservative nature of information processing in the retina. Physiological and psychophysical studies have contributed to our growing understanding of the visual process, in large measure due to the accessibility of this sensory system to well-controlled external stimuli. The growing body of information in physiology and psychophysics has emphasized the need for more detailed information on the fundamental structure, biochemistry, and central organization of the visual system both in the adult and developing organism.

Our research utilizes a broad spectrum of anatomical and neurochemical methods, including: a) anterograde and retrograde pathway tracing; b) immunohistochemical and biochemical methods for the identification of specific transmitters, peptides, trophic factors, and their respective receptors; c) a single cell filling of identified neurons and quantitative morphometry; d) electron microscopic immunohistochemistry of identified neurons.

Our studies of retinal organization are directed towards identification of amacrine and ganglion cell transmitters, peptides, receptors, and their role in development of the eye and retina. The application of immunohistochemistry to studies of the retina has confirmed Cajal's original observations, based on studies using the Golgi method, of multiple subclasses of amacrine and ganglion cells. Our recent work has demonstrated a close correlation between the three- dimensional morphology of subclasses of amacrine cells and their respective transmitters/peptides and receptors.

Other projects include studies of the central pathways of each subtype of retinal ganglion cell and the comparative anatomy and evolution of central visual structures.

Narayanan 'Bobby' Kasthuri, MD

Harvard University

Email: bobby.kasthuri@gmail.com

I received a BS in Molecular Biology and Public Policy from Princeton University, an MD from Washington University in St. Louis, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University. I am currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Lichtman Lab at Harvard University working on techniques for large volume electron microscopic reconstructions of cortical connectivity.

David Kleinfeld

UCSD

Email: dk@physics.ucsd.edu

David Kleinfeld is a Professor at UC San Diego in the Department of Physics with a courtesy appointment in the Section of Neurobiology. He trained with George Feher at UC San Diego, then spent a decade at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on experimental and theoretical issues in systems neuroscience. He returned to UC San Diego in 1996. David's research group pursues algorithmic-driven issues in active sensation, a program that addresses how the vibrissa sensorimotor system of rodents extracts a stable world view through its actively moving sensors, as well as in cortical microcirculation, a program that seeks to discover the logic of the neuronal control of cortical blood flow. David's research makes use of a broad range of tools within anatomy, behavior, electrophysiology, molecular biology, and imaging. He group has developed new optical-based tools to probe and manipulate neurons, blood vessels, and neurotransmission and has extended classical statistical methods to address problems in the analysis of neuronal data. Lastly, David and his colleagues are active in postgraduate schools, e.g., at MBL and CSHL, to help educate, inform, as well as learn from young colleagues.

Alan P. Koretsky

NIH/NINDS

Email: koretskya@ninds.nih.gov

Alan Koretsky’s group has a long standing interest in development of MRI for imaging the brain. His group developed the class of techniques called arterial spin labeling that measures regional blood flow by MRI in brain and other organs which helped to launch functional MRI. They have developed manganese enhanced MRI that enables functional, anatomical, and neuronal connectivity measures at high resolution with MRI and tools that enable MRI to monitor migration of single cells in the mammalian brain. These tools are integrated to study synaptic strength changes that occur during large scale plasticity of the rodent brain in a variety of models. Presently Dr. Koretsky is Chief of the Laboratory of Functional and Molecular Imaging, Director of the NIH MRI Research Facility/Mouse Facility and Scientific Director of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Arjun Krishnaswamy

Harvard University

Email: akrish@mcb.harvard.edu

I completed a PhD in Physiology at McGill University, and am currently a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. J. Sanes' lab at the Harvard University Center for Brain Science. My general interest is to understand how neurons become connected together to form functional neural circuits. To learn more about this issue, I study the developing visual circuits in the retina. I use a multidisciplinary approach that combines mouse genetics, optogenetic tools, multiphoton microscopy and electrophysiology to identify the interneurons, that together with retinal ganglion cells, create retinal circuits and using this information I hope to address two questions: 1) What are the developmental factors that regulate the interneuron connectivity of ganglion cells? 2) What are the specific contributions of connected interneurons to a RGC's feature preference?

Robert B. Laughlin

Stanford University

Email: rbl@large.stanford.edu

Prof. Laughlin has been a member of the Stanford physics faculty since
1984. He is best known for his theoretical work on the fractional quantum
hall effect, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1998. He is also a
member of the National Academy and has won several other prestigious
awards, including the Oliver E. Buckley Prize, the E. O. Lawrence Award
for Physics and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics. His current
research relevant to the brain is the question of how living things
determine their lengths. After receiving an AB in Mathematics from U.C.
Berkeley in 1972, he served two years in the U.S. Army and then went to
MIT, where he received his PhD in Physics in 1979. He went from there to
Bell Labs and subsequently to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. He moved
to Stanford in 1984. He has written on a wide variety of subjects: anyon
superconductivity (which he invented), quantum gravity, nuclear
engineering and gene transcription. He has also written three
lay-accessible books, A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE on emergent natural law, THE
CRIME OF REASON about knowledge sequestration, and POWERING THE FUTURE
about energy.

Herbert Levine

Rice University

Email: herbert.levine@rice.edu

Herbert Levine is a theoretical physicist conducting research into the dynamical behavior of biological systems. He currently co-directs the NSF Physics Frontier Center on Theoretical Biological Physics, headquartered at Rice University. His recent interests have included eukaryotic cell motility (from the sensing to the network to the motor machinery), bacterial colony dynamics (and analogies thereof to the growth of malignant tumors), and the role of population size on Darwinian evolutionary dynamics.

Anthony Lewis

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Email: atonlew@qti.qualcomm.com

Dr. M Anthony Lewis a Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technology Research and Development working toward the development of a new class of computing devices for the consumer and research community markets. He is a founder of Iguana Robotics, Inc. and served as its president and chief research scientist. Dr. Lewis received a B.S. in Cybernetics from the UCLA and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from USC. Dr. Lewis has held faculty positions in the life sciences and engineering at UCLA, UIUC, and the University of Arizona. Dr. Lewis is a leading expert in the application of neuromorphic technology to the control of biologically inspired robots. Dr. Lewis is the author of more than 75 technical papers and the recipient of multiple best paper awards.

Jeff Lichtman

Harvard University

Email: jeff@mcb.harvard.edu

Jeff W Lichtman is Jeremy R Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Ramon Y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences. He did his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College in Maine and an M.D. and Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. Missouri. His Ph.D. work with Dale Purves concerned the ways in which connections between nerve cells are reorganized as animals begin to experience the world in early postnatal development. This subject has remained the interest of his laboratory (which he moved from St. Louis to Cambridge in 2004). In order to approach questions related to the fine structure of neural connections he has developed methods for in vivo imaging of synapses, labeling of nerve cells with different colors, and high resolution mapping of neural connections, a field he calls “connectomics”.

Deborah F. Lockhart

National Science Foundation

Email: dlockhar@nsf.gov

Daniel Lopez

Argonne National Labs

Email: dlopez@anl.gov

Dr. Daniel López is the Group Leader of the Nanofabrication and Devices group at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Instituto Balseiro in Argentina in 1995. He has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, NY) and at the Materials Science Division in Argonne National Laboratories. In 1998 he joined Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technolgies (Murray Hill, NJ) as a full-time Research Staff where he worked until the summer of 2008. Since August 2008, he has been working at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.
Dr. López is pursuing research and development of novel Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS/NEMS) with applications in science and technology.

Kip Ludwig

NIH/NINDS

Email: kip.ludwig@nih.gov

Dr. Kip Ludwig joined the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) as the Program Director for Neural Engineering in 2011, and leads the NINDS Advanced Neural Prosthetics Research and Development Program. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, followed by post-doctoral work at the same institution. Dr. Ludwig's academic work included neural decoding algorithms for brain-computer interfaces (BCI), signal processing techniques to denoise neural recordings, and advanced materials to improve the chronic stimulating and recording performance of microelectrodes. More recently he worked in industry as a research scientist, where his team conceived, developed and demonstrated the chronic efficacy of a next-generation neural stimulation electrode for reducing blood pressure in both pre-clinical and clinical trials. Through this work Dr. Ludwig oversaw several good laboratory practice (GLP) animal studies and non-GLP benchtop testing supporting the European clinical trial, as well as Feasibility and Pivotal trials in the United States. Dr. Ludwig also participated in the protocol development and execution of those trials, leading to approval for sale in the European Union. His interests are in all aspects of neural engineering, with special emphases on neuromodulation, BCI devices, and neural interface technology for translational development.

Eduardo R. Macagno

UCSD

Email: emacagno@ucsd.edu

Prof. Eduardo R. Macagno was recruited from Columbia University to UC
San Diego in 2001, where he was the Founding Dean of the Division of Biological
Sciences. As a developmental neurobiologist, Macagno remains active in
research, maintaining a laboratory on campus and serving as Editor-in-Chief of
Developmental Neurobiology, a position he has held for several years.
A native of Argentina, Macagno majored in physics at the University of Iowa,
where he worked with James Van Allen’s team on the early exploration of the
Earth’s radiation belts. As a PhD student at Columbia, he carried out a project
involving the use of muonic X-rays to determine nuclear structure with Prof.
Chien-Shung Wu. He then carried out postdoctoral studies under Prof. Cyrus
Levinthal in Columbia’s Department of Biological Sciences, working on the
development of computer-based systems for the three-dimensional
reconstruction of neuronal assemblies. His laboratory now employs a range of
molecular, cellular, anatomical and physiological techniques to investigate cellcell interactions and how individual neurons find and innervate their correct
targets in the developing nervous system of the medicinal leech. Other current
research includes Mass Spectrometry Imaging, applied to studies of molecular
distributions in nervous tissue, and several projects at the interface of
Architecture and Neuroscience, using new wireless and dry-electrode EEG
technologies to monitor brain activity in Virtual Reality environments to study the
interaction of normal and neurologically impaired subjects to the built
environment.

Peter R. MacLeish

Morehouse School of Medicine

Email: pmacleish@msm.edu

Peter R. MacLeish received his Ph.D. from the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in the laboratories of Professors Edwin J. Furshpan and David D. Potter where he studied synapse formation in tissue culture. He did his postdoctoral training with Nobel Laureate Torsten N. Wiesel where he and two colleagues developed the procedures to isolate functioning vertebrate photoreceptors for physiological studies of phototransduction. He moved to The Rockefeller University with Torsten Wiesel where he continued his work on the mature retina studying synapse formation in vitro and retinal regeneration from the RPE.

He was recruited to Weill Cornell Medical College as Professor of Ophthalmology in Physiology and founding Director of Research of the Margaret M. Dyson Vision Research Institute. He joined Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) in 1995 where he is now chairman of the Department of Neurobiology and the first recipient of the George H. W. and Barbara P. Bush Endowed Chair in Neuroscience. Dr. MacLeish maintains a research program at MSM on how electrical signals are processed in rod and cone photoreceptors and on the functional expression of ion channels on adult non-primate retinal cells in vitro.

Dr. MacLeish's thirty-year record of accomplishment has earned him national and international recognition. He was a member of the Council of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, of the Visiting Committee for the Division of Medical Science at Harvard Medical School and, of the Society for Neuroscience Council. He also served on the selection committee for the John Merck Fund Fellowship Program and for the HHMI Medical Research Fellows Program. He and is a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2004.

Michel Maharbiz

UC Berkeley

Email: maharbiz@eecs.berkeley.edu

Michel Maharbiz received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley for his work on microbioreactor systems under Professor Roger T. Howe (EECS) and Professor Jay D. Keasling (ChemE). His work led to the foundation of Microreactor Technologies, Inc. which was acquired in 2009 by Pall Corporation. From 2003 to 2007, Michel Maharbiz was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the co-founder of Tweedle Technologies and served as vice-president for product development at Quswami, Inc. from July 2010 to June 2011.
Prof. Maharbiz is a Bakar Fellow and was the recipient of a 2009 NSF Career Award for research into developing microfabricated interfaces for synthetic biology. His group is also known for developing the world’s first remotely radio-controlled cyborg beetles. This was named one of the top ten emerging technologies of 2009 by MIT’s Technology Review (TR10) and was in Time Magazeine’s Top 50 Inventions of 2009. Dr. Maharbiz has been a GE Scholar and an Intel IMAP Fellow. Professor Maharbiz’s current research interests include building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring bio-derived fabrication methods. Michel’s long term goal is understanding developmental mechanisms as a way to engineer and fabricate machines."

Chris Martin

Kavli Foundation

Email: cmartin@kavlifoundation.org

Maryann Martone

UCSD

Email: mmartone@ucsd.edu

Dr. Maryann Martone is co-director of the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) at the University of California San Diego. She joined the department of neurosciences at UCSD in 1993, where she is currently a professor in residence.

Dr. Martone received her BA from Wellesley College in biological psychology and her Ph. D. in neuroscience in 1990 from the University of California, San Diego. She is the principal investigator of the Neuroscience Information Framework project, a national project to establish a uniform resource description framework for neuroscience. Her recent work has focused on building ontologies for neuroscience for data integration. She recently finished her tenure as the US scientific representative to the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), an international organization dedicated to developing tools and standards for neuroscience data exchange.

Dr. Martone is a practicing neuroscientist, with expertise in neuroanatomy, and light and electron microscopy. For the past decade, she has been working in the area of neuroinformatics to increase access to and utilization of neuroscience data. To further develop the framework, she heads the ontology development program for the INCF and the Data Standards Workstream for the newly launched One Mind for Research campaign. Through NIF and her neuroscience background, Dr. Martone has a unique global perspective on issues in data sharing and utilization in the neurosciences and has gained considerable insight and expertise in working with diverse biomedical data. She has also continued to explore how these knowledge frameworks can be used to solve difficult problems in neurodegenerative disease through modeling of structural phenotypes in animal models of human neurodegenerative conditions.

Mayank Mehta

UCLA

Email: Mayank@physics.ucla.edu

I did PhD in quantum field theory, investigating the structure of physical space-time. Subsequently I focused on understanding neuronal mechanisms of perceiving and learning space-time using theory and experiments. We developed a biophysical theory of how Hebbian synaptic plasticity influences hippocampal ensemble activity and tested this theory experimentally by measuring the activity of more than 100 neurons simultaneously during natural behavior. This provided the first evidence for STDP during and due to experience. I have discovered a computational mechanism by which neural rhythms can transform a rate-code into a temporal-code that facilitates spatial learning, and validated this experimentally.
Recently we have developed a technique of mapping the functional connectivity of hippocampal circuit. Using this we discovered a novel form working memory-like activity during sleep. We have also developed a non-invasive, multimodal, virtual reality for rodents that allows precise control of stimulus modalities. Using this we have dissociated spatial learning from associative learning of rewards, and discovered a novel hippocampal ensemble code called disto-code. We have developed a biophysical theory of how dendritic processing influences synaptic plasticity and memory. To test this, we are developing techniques to measure dendritic subthreshold potential chronically, during natural behavior, along with spiking activity of the surrounding microcircuit.

Karen Mesce

University of Minnesota

Email: mesce001@umn.edu

Dr. Karen Mesce is a Professor at the University of Minnesota (Department of Entomology, Graduate Program in Neuroscience, and Department of Neuroscience in the Medical School). She received her BA in Biology from the University of California, San Diego, and her PhD from the University of Oregon working with Graham Hoyle. Her postdoctoral work was conducted in the lab of Jim Truman at the University of Washington. Currently, she is focusing on the cellular mechanisms underlying behavior in three invertebrate model systems: the hawkmoth, honey bee and medicinal leech. The moth provides a rich and experimentally accessible system in which to study how neural circuits become assembled and later remodeled during development. The honeybee offers the opportunity to study how social behaviors and hive-specific tasks are regulated by the nervous system. Last, the leech preparation, with its large neurons and identified neural circuits, enables her group to study how individual neurons and the biogenic amines, especially dopamine, alter decision-making processes in the CNS and regulate the expression of specific motor programs.

Stefan Mihalas

Allen Brain Institute

Email: stefanm@alleninstitute.org

Stefan Mihalas joined the Allen Institute in 2011 from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience and subsequently an associate research scientist. As a computational neuroscientist, Mihalas has worked on models of both molecular and systems neuroscience including nervous system development, synaptic plasticity, minimalistic spiking neuron models, self-organized criticality, visual attention and figure ground segregation. His current research interests are aimed at building models to elucidate how large networks of interacting neurons produce cognitive behaviors. At the Allen Institute, Mihalas integrates anatomical and physiological connectivity data to generate models of visual perception in the mouse. To this end, he works to build a series of models of increasing complexity for both individual components, i.e., neurons, synapses, and microcircuits, as well as for large portions of the entire system. This series of models will be compared to the simplified theoretical predictions from statistical physics, information theory and computer vision. Mihalas received his Diploma in physics and M.S. in mathematics from West University of Timisoara in Romania. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

William L. Miller

Program Director
Directorate for Biological Sciences
Office of the Assistant Director
National Science Foundation

Email: wlmiller@nsf.gov

Michael Mishkind

National Science Foundation

Email: mmishkin @nsf.gov

Partha Mitra

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Email: mitra@cshl.edu

Partha Mitra received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard in 1993. He worked in quantitative neuroscience and theoretical engineering at Bell Laboratories from 1993-2003 and as an Assistant Professor in Theoretical Physics at Caltech in 1996 before moving to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2003, where he is currently Crick-Clay Professor of Biomathematics. He is interested in developing an integrative understanding of complex biological systems from a “theoretical engineering” perspective, and has organized meetings and symposia on engineering or design principles in biological systems. His research currently combines experimental, theoretical and informatics approaches to gain an understanding of how brains work.
The Mitra lab works in close collaboration with research groups at other institutions, including NYU and Cornell Medical School, where Dr. Mitra is also an Adjunct Associate Professor. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. Dr Mitra is the author of a book (Observed Brain Dynamics) from the Oxford University Press, and has co-founded and co-directed summer courses at the Marine Biological Laboratories and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Neuroinformatics, Genome-Wide Data Analysis and Vertebrate Neuroanatomy. Some of his previous research work has been featured in major media outlets including the Economist.
Partha has performed in Roald Hoffman’s “Entertaining Science” series at the Cornelia Street Cafe and has also recently recorded an album of the songs of Rabindranath Tagore. He was the organizer of a series of public science lectures at the New York Public Library (Science Soirees at the SIBL). In collaboration with sculptor Fre Ilgen, he has produced artistic renditions of nervous system architecture.

Mala Murthy

Princeton University

Email: mmurthy@Princeton.EDU

Mala Murthy is an assistant professor in the Neuroscience Institute and Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She earned her BS in Biology from MIT, her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, and conducted postdoctoral research with Gilles Laurent at Caltech. She started her lab at Princeton in May 2010. Her research focuses on the neural basis for acoustic communication in Drosophila, with emphasis on the patterns of neural activity that underlie the brain’s ability to produce and process complex and behaviorally-relevant sounds.

Nancy Kopell

Boston University

Email: nk@bu.edu

Nancy Kopell is currently a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University, and co-director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology (CompNet). She founded and directs the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative (CRC), a group of over 30 labs (mostly) in the Boston area interested in the role of brain dynamics in cognition. Her training was in pure math; she received her B.A. at Cornell University in 1963 and Ph.D at UC Berkeley in 1967. She was the first woman CLE Moore Instructor at MIT, then moved to Northeastern University; she joined Boston University in 1986 as a Full Professor. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Fellowship, Honorary Membership in the London Mathematical Society (one or two people per year, worldwide), and an Honorary Doctorate from NJIT. She has given many named lectureships, including the Weldon Memorial Prize, the H. Dudley Wright Prize, the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture of the AMS and the von Neumann Prize lecture of SIAM. Her interests span all the aspects of the CRC.

Michael J. Naughton

Boston College

Email: naughton@bc.edu

Michael J. Naughton is Evelyn J. and Robert A. Ferris Professor in and Chairman of the Department of Physics at Boston College. He received a B.S. in Physics from St. John Fisher College, a Ph.D. from Boston University, and did a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a faculty member at SUNY Buffalo for ten years. Since 1998, he has been at Boston College, serving as chairman of the Physics Department since 2006 after spending an interim year as Vice President for Research. Naughton is an NSF Young Investigator Awardee (back when he was young) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. A condensed matter experimentalist, Naughton’s research is on electrical, optical and magnetic properties of low dimensional and nanoscale matter, including nanostructured bio/chemical and neuroelectronic sensors, solar cells, near-field optics and plasmonics, and molecular organic superconductors. He has patents in micro- and nanoscale magnetometry, plastic landmine detection, and nanocoaxial electrodes for microscopy, photovoltaics and sensing. He cofounded Tau Sensors LLC and Solasta Inc., and serves on the technical advisory boards of Bloo Solar and NBD Nano.

Bill Newsome

Stanford University Schoool of Medicine/HHMI

Email: bill@monkeybiz.stanford.edu

Bill Newsome is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received a B.S. degree in physics from Stetson University and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Newsome is a leading investigator in systems and cognitive neuroscience. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and simple forms of decision making. Among his honors are the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the Spencer Award, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Dan David Prize of Tel Aviv University, the Karl Spencer Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society, and the Champalimaud Vision Award. His distinguished lectureships include the 13th Annual Marr Lecture at the University of Cambridge the 9th Annual Brenda Milner Lecture at McGill University, and most recently, the Distinguished Visiting Scholar lectures at the Kavli Institute of Brain and Mind, UCSD. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.

John Ngai

UC Berkeley

Email: jngai@socrates.berkeley.edu

John Ngai is the Coates Family Professor of Neuroscience and Director of UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He received his B.A. in Chemistry and Biology from Pomona College and his Ph.D. in Biology from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Ngai joined the faculty at UC Berkeley following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. His research focuses on the molecular and cellular basis of olfaction in vertebrates. Using molecular, genetic, genomics and computational approaches, Dr. Ngai’s group seeks to understand the mechanisms underlying the developmental, circuit and behavioral properties of this sensory system. The main projects in his laboratory include a characterization of the gene regulatory networks governing stem cell self-renewal and differentiation in the postnatal mouse olfactory epithelium; structure-function analysis of odorant receptors; regulation of odorant receptor gene expression; and elucidation of the neural circuit subserving an innate olfactory-guided behavior in zebrafish.

Richard A. Normann

University of Utah

Email: normann@utah.edu

Richard A. Normann, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering and Ophthalmology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where he conducts research on sensory encoding and information processing by neural ensembles in the vertebrate central and peripheral nervous systems. He is the inventor of the Utah Electrode Array technologies and other high-electrode-count microelectrode arrays that can be used for basic and applied research in emerging field of neuroprosthetics. His current research interests are the cortically based restoration of vision in those with profound blindness, and peripheral nerve interventions for the restoration of stance and for the control of prosthetic limbs and bladder control in those who have lost these functions.

Arto V. Nurmikko

Brown University

Email: arto_nurmikko@brown.edu

Arto V. Nurmikko, a native of Finland, is a L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Engineering and Physics at Brown. He received his degrees from University of California, Berkeley, with postdoctoral stays at MIT and Hebrew University. Professor Nurmikko conducts research in neuroengineering, brain sciences, nanophotonics and microelectronics, especially for the translation of device research to new technologies in biomedical, life science, and photonics applications. His current interests include development of implantable wireless neural interfaces, nanoscale neural circuit sensors, compact red/green/blue semiconductor lasers, and high resolution acoustic microscopy. Nurmikko has published in several fields (over 350 journal articles), led many multi-institutional research teams, advised federal funding agencies, and lectured worldwide. Professor Nurmikko is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Yoshio Okada

Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Email: yoshio.okada@childrens.harvard.edu

A pioneer in the field of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). Established the physiological origins of MEG and EEG during 1984-2009, using in vitro and in vivo animal preparations and mathematical models of the hippocampus and neocortex. Invented and patented a pediatric high-resolution MEG system (babySQUID). Established an MEG program for human brain development at BCH during 2010-2012. Now in the process of completing a third-generation, whole-head, 375-channel high-channel density babySQUID with ARRA-NSF support and constructing an inpatient MEG/EEG facility adjacent to BCH main hospital for studying the electrophysiological development of human brain in health and disease. Research interests include perception, memory, cognition, motor control in babies. Technology development interests include: (1) methods for early diagnosis of neurological disorders, (2) flexible-helmet MEG system, (3) multichannel transcranial magnetic stimulation (multi-channel TMS) systems, and (4) multimodal, optical microscope-electrophysiology-SQUID-based magnetic microscopes for biology and neuroscience.

Bruno Olshausen

UC Berkeley

Email: baolshausen@berkeley.edu

Olshausen's research focuses on understanding the information processing strategies employed by the brain for doing scene analysis. Computer scientists have long sought to emulate the abilities of the visual system in digital computers, but achieving performance anywhere close to that exhibited by biological vision systems has proven elusive. Olshausen's approach is based on studying the response properties of neurons in the brain, and attempting to construct mathematical models that can describe what neurons are doing in terms of a functional theory of vision. The aim of this work is not only to advance our understanding of the brain, but also to devise new algorithms for scene analysis based on how brains work.

Hongkun Park

Harvard University

Email: talleye@ninds.nih.

Hongkun Park
Hongkun Park is a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is also affiliated with the Broad Institute, the Harvard Center for Brain Science, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. His research interests lie in fundamental studies of nanoscale electrical, optical, and plasmonic devices as well as the development of new nano- and microelectronic tools that can interface with living cells, cell networks, and organisms. Awards and honors that Hongkun Park has received include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Ho-Am Foundation Prize in Science, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, and the fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Erika Pastrana

Senior Editor at Nature Methods

Email: e.pastrana@us.nature.com

Erika Pastrana is responsible for reviewing and managing manuscripts in the area of Neuroscience, commissioning special articles, and writing articles and editorials.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Neurosciences at the Autonoma University of Madrid in 2005 where she employed gene expression, biochemical and cell culture-based approaches to study molecular mechanisms of axonal regeneration.
Erika Pastrana continued her training as post-doctoral fellow at the laboratory of Fiona Doetsch at Columbia University where she worked on the development of new strategies to simultaneously purify neural stem cells and their progeny from the adult brain using fluorescence activated cell sorting. She also worked on the regulation of neurogenic niches by microRNAs by performing in vitro and in vivo functional studies. She joined the journal in January 2010.

Nick Pici

The Kavli Foundation

Email: nickpici@gmail.com

Vincent Pieribone

Yale University

Email: vpieribo@jbpierce.org

Vincent Pieribone attended New York University College of Arts and Sciences where he received a baccalaureate degree in Biology and Chemistry in 1986. He then attend New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and received his doctorate in Philosophy in 1992 in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.

From 1990 to 1992 he was a National Science Foundation and Fogarty International Fellow at the Nobel Institute of Neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Sweden. From Sweden Vincent did post-doctoral work at The Rockefeller University in New York from 1992 to 1995 and became an Assistant Professor there in 1995. Vincent joined the Pierce laboratory in December 1997.

Jonathan D. Pollock

NIH

Email: jpollack @mail.nih.gov

Jonathan D. Pollock, Ph.D. is the Branch Chief for the Genetics and Molecular Neurobiology Research Branch GMNRB. Dr. Pollock manages and oversees all activities of the GMNRB. The GMNRB supports research on the genetic basis of addiction vulnerability, the fundamental cellular mechanisms that underlie addiction and the response to drugs of abuse, and basic neurobiology. Dr. Pollock received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1985 and did postdoctoral work at Caltech and the University of Utah. He subsequently held non-tenure track positions at Indiana University School of Medicine and Purdue University before coming to the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1996

Jan Rabaey

UC Berkeley

Email: jan@eecs.berkeley.edu

He received the EE and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 1978 and 1983 respectively. From 1983-1985, he was a Visiting Research Engineer at UC Berkeley. From 1985-1987, he was a research manager at IMEC, Belgium, and in 1987, joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley, where he is now holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pavia (Italy), Waseda University (Japan), the Technical University Delft (Netherlands), Victoria Technical University and the University of New South Wales (Australia). He was the Associate Chair (EE) of the EECS Dept. at Berkeley from 1999 until 2002 and is currently the Scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), as well as the director of the Multiscale Systems Research Center (MuSyC).
Professor Rabaey has authored or co-authored a wide range of papers in the area of signal processing and design automation. He has received numerous scientific awards, including the 1985 IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design Best Paper Award (Circuits and Systems Society), the 1989 Presidential Young Investigator award, and the 1994 Signal Processing Society Senior Award. In 1995, he became an IEEE Fellow. He has also be awarded the 2002 ISSCC Jack Raper Award, the 2008 IEEE Circuits and Systems Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the 2009 EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2010 Semiconductor Industry Association University Researcher Award. In 2011, he was elected to the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Belgium). He is past Chair of the VLSI Signal Processing Technical Committee of the Signal Processing Society and has chaired the executive committee of the Design Automation Conference. He serves on the Technical Advisory Boards of a wide range of companies.

Rajesh P. N. Rao

University of Washington

Email: rao1@cs.washington.edu

Rajesh P. N. Rao is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, and a member of the leadership council of the NSF ERC on Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester and was a Sloan postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies before joining UW. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He is the author of the new textbook Brain-Computer Interfacing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of two volumes, Probabilistic Models of the Brain (MIT Press, 2002) and Bayesian Brain (MIT Press, 2007). His research spans the areas of computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and brain-computer interfacing. In his not-so-copious spare time, he also works on the 4000-year-old Indus script (on which he has given a TED talk) and indulges in his passion for studying and collecting Indian miniature paintings.

Bruce Rosen

Harvard Medical School

Email: bruce@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

Dr. Rosen is Professor of Radiology and Health Science and Technology at the Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Rosen is a world-leading expert in functional neuroimaging. Over the past thirty years he has pioneered the development and application of many novel physiological and functional nuclear magnetic resonance (fMRI) techniques to measure hemodynamic and metabolic changes associated with brain activation and cerebrovascular insult, as well as complementary tools to measure microvascular and microstructural morphology. These and other techniques he has developed are used by research centers and hospitals throughout the world to study and evaluate patients with stroke, brain tumors, dementia, and neurologic and psychological disorders. Dr. Rosen’s recent work has focused on the integration of fMRI data with information from other modalities, including positron emission tomography (PET), magnetoencephalography (MEG), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), noninvasive optical imaging and optogenetics.

Dr. Rosen leads the activities of several large interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research programs including the NIH Blueprint-funded Human Connectome Project, the NIBIB Regional Resource “Center for Functional Neuroimaging Technologies” (CFNT), and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) Collaborative Tools Support Network. He is Principal Investigator/Program Director for three neuroimaging training programs. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed articles as well as over 50 book chapters, editorials and reviews. Dr. Rosen is the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of his contributions to the field of functional MRI, including, most recently, the 2011 Outstanding Researcher award from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and the Rigshospitalet’s International KFJ Prize from the University of Copenhagen/Rigshospitalet. Dr. Rosen is a Fellow and Gold Medal winner for his contributions to the field of Functional MRI from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science.

Douglas L. Rosene

Boston University

Email: drosene@cajal-1.bu.edu

Dr. Rosene received his A.B. in Psychology from Stanford University where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Karl Pribram, one of the pioneers in neurobiological studies of memory systems in primates. He received a joint Ph.D. in Psychology and Neurobiology from the Department of Psychology and the Center for Brain Research and at the University of Rochester. He came to Boston for a Post-doctoral Fellowship in primate neuroanatomy with Drs. Deepak N. Pandya and Gary W. Van Hoesen at the Harvard Neurological Unit at Beth Israel Hospital before assuming an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Anatomy at Boston University School of Medicine where he is currently a Professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurobiology. His major research focus is on the neurobiological bases of learning and memory in primate models of amnesia, dementia and age-related disorders.as well as studies of neural plasticity and recovery of function in a monkey model of limited, reproducible, cortical stroke. Most recently he has been working on validation of diffusion MRI measures of myelin damage and tractography. Methods used across these studies of monkey brain range from behaviroral assessments of brain function to quantiatitve neuroanatomy, histopathology, immunohistochemistry and MR imaging. The goal is to identify the neural substrates of cognitive function and dysfunction in the primate brain.

Michael Roukes

Caltech

Email: roukes@caltech.edu

Michael Roukes is Robert M. Abbey Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. Roukes was founding Director of Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute from 2003-2006, and has continued as its Co-Director since 2008. In 2007, Roukes co-founded the Alliance for Nanosystems VLSI (very-large-scale integration) with CEA/LETI-Minatec in Grenoble (www.nanovlsi.com), which maintains a $B-scale microelectronics research foundry. He continues to co-direct this effort. Concurrent with his Caltech appointment, he holds a Chaire d’Excellence in Nanoscience in Grenoble, France from the Réseau Thématique de Recherche Avancée (RTRA). Roukes' scientific interests range from quantum measurement to applied biotechnology − with a unifying theme of the development, application, and very-large-scale integration of complex nanostructures to biological measurements. Together with French colleagues, the Roukes group is employing VLSI in nanoelectronic, nanophotonic, and nanomechanical systems to develop complex tools for next-gen applications in neuroscience and biotechnology.

Philip Rubin

Principal Assistant Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States

Email: prubin@ostp.eop.gov

Dr. Philip Rubin is the Principal Assistant Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, where he also serves as Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and leads the White House neuroscience initiative. He is also a Senior Advisor in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Rubin is the co-Chair of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Science. He is the former CEO at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, where he remains as a senior scientist. Dr. Rubin is also on leave as a Professor Adjunct in the Department of Surgery, Otolaryngology at the Yale University School of Medicine and a Research Affiliate in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and remains a Fellow at Yale’s Trumbull College. From 2006-2011 Dr. Rubin was the Chair of the National Academies Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences. From 2000 through 2003 he served as the Director of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at NSF and also served as the ex officio representative to the National Human Research Protection Advisory Committee and the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections. He was also the co-chair of the interagency NSTC Human Subjects Research Subcommittee.

Todd C. Sacktor

SUNY Downstate

Email: todd.sacktor@downstate.edu

Todd C. Sacktor received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1978, and an M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1982. After a residency in neurology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, he studied the role of protein kinase C (PKC) in short-term memory in the model system Aplysia californica, under the tutelage of Dr. James H. Schwartz, at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, directed by Dr. Eric R. Kandel. In his own laboratory at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in 1990, he discovered a brain-specific PKC isoform, PKMzeta. Together with colleagues, his lab demonstrated that PKMzeta was both necessary and sufficient for maintaining synaptic long-term potentiation (LTP) and storing the long-term memory trace.

Aravinthan D. T. Samuel

Harvard University

Email: samuel@physics.harvard.edu

Animals are intrinsically computational. We acquire sensory information about our environments, transform this information into neural representations and memories, and calculate and execute decisions based on recent and past experiences. Our own brains are staggeringly complex, with billions of neurons networked by trillions of synapses. But the basic materials of our brains - molecular and cellular structures and interactions - are shared with our animal relatives. Well-chosen model organisms can be accessible vantage points with perspective over general biological principles. We study brain and behavior in the roundworm C. elegans and the Drosophila larva. Applying recent advances in microscopy and optics, we are able to manipulate and monitor the workings of the neural circuits of these intact behaving animals. In this way, we strive to link brain and behavior in these small but fascinating creatures.

Joshua Sanes

Harvard University

Email: sanesj@mcb.harvard.edu

Dr. Joshua R. Sanes studies the formation of synapses, with a current emphasis on assembly of circuits in the retina. He has also pioneered new genetic methods to mark and manipulate neurons and the synapses they form. He served on the faculty of Washington University for over 20 years, before moving to Harvard in 2004 as Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and founding Director of the Center for Brain Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Member-at-large for the AAAS Section on Neuroscience. He is on the editorial board of several scientific journals, including Cell and Neuron. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors and the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NIH), the Council of the Society for Neuroscience, and advisory panels for the Klingenstein Neuroscience Fund, Searle Scholars Fund, Max-Planck Institute, Wellcome Trust, Stowers Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of NIH for the BRAIN Initiative.

Terrence Sejnowski

HHMI/Salk Institute

Email: sejnowski@salk.edu

Terrence Sejnowski is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He is also a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego. His research goal is to understand the principles that link brain to behavior. His laboratory uses both experimental and modeling techniques to study the biophysical properties of synapses and neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons. New computational models and new analytical tools have been developed to understand how the brain represents the world and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms for changing the synaptic strengths of connections between neurons. He has published over 400 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, one of only 10 living persons to be a member of all 3 national academies.

Sebastian Seung

MIT

Email: seung@mit.edu

Dr. Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied theoretical physics with David Nelson at Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training with Haim Sompolinsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. He has been a Packard Fellow, Sloan Fellow, McKnight Scholar, and PopTech Science Fellow.

Dr. Seung directs the scientific programs of WiredDifferently, an organization that supports “citizen neuroscience.” Its first project is EyeWire, which mobilizes volunteers to map the retinal connectome. The ultimate goal of WiredDifferently is to test the hypothesis that the uniqueness of a person, from memories to mental disorders, lies in his or her connectome.

His research has been communicated to the general public by the TED talk “I am my connectome,” book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, and article “Connectomics: Tracing the Wires of the Brain.”

Michael Shadlen

Columbia University

Email: shadlen@columbia.edu

Michael Shadlen MD, PhD is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington, where he is also an adjunct Professor of Neurology. He performed undergraduate and medical studies at Brown University and obtained a PhD from UC Berkeley in visual neuroscience under the guidance of Ralph D. Freeman. He received postgraduate clinical training in Neurology at Stanford Medical Center. He then returned to basic neuroscience as a fellow in the laboratory of William T. Newsome, where he began to work on the neurobiology of decision-making. Shadlen studies neurons in the association cortex that process information from the visual cortex to give rise to interpretations, decisions, and plans for behavior. His experiments combine electrophysiology, behavior and computational methods to advance our knowledge of higher brain function.

For more information see http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/shadlen_bio.html

Mikhail G. Shapiro

UC Berkeley

Email: mikhails@berkeley.edu

Mikhail Shapiro is a Miller Research Fellow in Bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley. His research is focused on technologies to image and control biological activity, and particularly brain function, using penetrant forms of energy such as magnetic fields and sound waves. Mikhail received his PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT with co-advisers Robert Langer and Alan Jasanoff and his BSc in Neuroscience from Brown University, and conducted post-doctoral research in biophysics at the University of Chicago with Francisco Bezanilla. Mikhail has been awarded the Hertz, Soros, Miller and Life Science Research Foundation fellowships and the Hertz PhD Thesis Prize. In 2010, the Technology Review recognized him as one of the world’s top 35 innovators under age 35.

Eric Shea-Brown

University of Washington

Email: ETSB@amath.washington.edu

I am an associate professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington. I work to connect basic models of neural dynamics and coding function. Current projects focus on optimal decision making in simple neural networks, population coding and spike train correlations, and the consequences of chaotic dynamics in neural circuits. Before coming to UW, I was a postdoctoral fellow in mathematical neuroscience at NYU, with John Rinzel as my mentor. In 2004, I completed my Ph.D in Princeton's Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, working with Phil Holmes and Jonathan Cohen on neural dynamics and cognitive control.

Kenneth L. Shepard

Columbia University

Email: shepard@ee.columbia.edu

Kenneth L. Shepard received the B.S.E. degree from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, iand the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. From 1992 to 1997, he was a Research Staff Member and Manager with the VLSI Design Department, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he was responsible for the design methodology for IBM’s G4 S/390 microprocessors. Since 1997, he has been with Columbia University, New York, where he is now Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. He also was Chief Technology Officer of CadMOS Design Technology, San Jose, CA, until its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems in 2001. He is currently Technical Advisor and Chairman of the Board to another start-up, Ferric Semiconductor, in the area of integrated power electronics. His current research interests include power electronics, carbon-based devices and circuits, and CMOS bioelectronics. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Kamal Shukla

National Science Foundation

Email: kshukla@nsf.gov

Steve Smith

Stanford University

Email: sjsmith1@stanford.edu

Stephen J Smith, PhD, is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Smith earned his PhD at the University of Washington in 1977, did postdoctoral work at Berkeley 1977-1980, and joined the faculty of the Yale Medical School in 1980. He moved to Stanford in 1989. He teaches neuroscience imaging and electrophysiology, supervises imaging core facilities, and directs a neuroscience research laboratory. Smith also teaches imaging at Woods Hole and other international venues.

In early work, Smith pioneered the theoretical and experimental understanding of intracellular calcium dynamics and the relationships of calcium dynamics to neuronal oscillation and presynaptic transmitter release. Smith’s laboratory later invented many new microscopy methods and used them to probe brain circuit development, structure and function. This work has resulted in the discovery of several previously unknown brain signaling pathways, including the NMDAR-Ca signal (now widely recognized as fundamental to synaptic plasticity), and astrocytic calcium waves. Most recently, the lab has invented a new proteometric and ultrastructural imaging method called "array tomography", that is providing new quantitative information about synapse molecular diversity and about how synapse populations are perturbed in mental and neurological disorders.

Sara A. Solla

Northwestern University

Email: solla@northwestern.edu

Sara A. Solla, a theoretical physicist, joined the faculty at Northwestern University (NU) in 1997. Sara’s academic appointments at NU are at the Department of Physiology and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She is also a member of the NU Interdepartmental Neuroscience (NUIN) program. Before joining the NU faculty, Sara worked for 11 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she established a reputation as a leading scientist in neural networks research, specifically in the theory of learning in adaptive systems. At NU, Sara has developed a research program in theoretical and computational neuroscience, in close collaboration with experimental groups that conduct both in vivo and in vitro studies of visual and tactile sensory processing, motor control, neuromodulation, and working memory. Her work makes combined use of concepts and techniques from statistical physics, statistical inference, information theory, nonlinear dynamics and theoretical computer science, to model the neurobiological processes of encoding, storage, retrieval, and utilization of information, both at the cellular and the network levels. Her current interests include neural encoding in the early stages of sensory processing, neural activity realted to the planning and execution of movement, and pathological behaviors associated with network damage.

Fritz Sommer

UC Berkeley

Email: fsommer@berkeley.edu

Research Interests
Many impressive capabilities of the brain are not yet understood, for example, abilities in perception to rapidly analyze cluttered visual scenes, spoken language, morse code or the virtually unlimited capacity of our long-term memory. My lab investigates the theoretical principles how neurons and networks in the brain collaborate and organize to produce perception, memory and ultimately cognition. To study these issues we develop computational models of the brain, as well as advanced techniques of data analysis.

Current research foci in the lab:
How do biological mechanisms in the early visual system process the image?
What are functional roles of brain rhythms and ongoing neural activity?
Are there universal communication schemes that brain areas use to interact?
Active unsupervised learning (in biological and artificial sensor-motor loops)
Multimodal sensory integration (early fusion)
Theory of memory formation and retrieval in hippocampus and other brain structures

I am also interested in how public data sharing can grow in the community of neuroscience, making the best use of the precious resource of experimental data and to allow their analysis from many diverse angles. In other fields, such as genomics and linguistics, data sharing has became ubiquitous and highly successful, in neuroscience we are still quite at the beginning. My lab is building the core facilities for a new data sharing initiative in Neuroscience CRCNS.org

Charles Stevens

The Salk Institute

Email: stevens@salk.edu

After graduating from Yale Medical School, Stevens received a PhD in Biophysics at Rockefeller University. He was on the faculties of The University of Washington Medical School and Yale Medical School before moving to the Salk Institute.

Until about ten years ago, Stevens did experimental and theoretical work in ion channel biophysics and on the structure and function of synapses. For the last decade, he has focused on theoretical neuroscience at the systems level, and has studied the design principles that endow brain circuits with a scalable architecture.

Michael Stryker

UCSF

Email: stryker@phy.ucsf.edu

Michael Stryker studied at Deep Springs College and the University of Michigan, where he did undergraduate research in the laboratory of James Olds. Doctoral work with Peter Schiller at M.I.T. was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel at the Harvard Medical School. He joined the neuroscience program and Physiology Department at UCSF and later serving as Chair for 12 years. He holds the W.F. Ganong Chair of Physiology and has been honored by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

His major research interest is in the mechanisms responsible for the normal and abnormal development of precise functional connections within the central visual system and the plasticity of cortical responses and connections throughout life. In his experiments, he induces activity-dependent plasticity through drugs or manipulations of genetics or experience in order to discover what cellular mechanisms and what changes in cortical circuitry are responsible for rapid, long lasting changes in neuronal responses and connections. He analyzes these changes using microelectrode recordings and techniques for measurement of optical and metabolic signals related to neural activity and structure, including 2-photon microscopy and intrinsic signal imaging.

Edmund Talley

NIH/NINDS

Email: talleye@ninds.nih

Edmund (Ned) Talley is a Program Director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), an institute within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NINDS is the world's largest funder of research in basic neuroscience, which is fundamental to its core mission of reducing the burden of neurological disease. Dr. Talley oversees grants in synaptic transmission and related processes, and he directs the NINDS P30 Centers Program. He contributes to a variety of trans-NIH and trans-agency initiatives, and he directs a number of special projects, such as the EUREKA Program for Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System, and the NINDS High Impact Neuroscience Research Resource Grants Program.

David Tank

Princeton University

Email: dwtank@princeton.edu

Henry L. Hillman Professor in Molecular Biology. Professor of Molecular Biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Co-Director, Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

Area(s):
Computational Neuroscience
The McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience
The Scully Center for the Neuroscience of Mind and Behavior

Field: Measurement and analysis of neural circuit dynamics

Wilson Truccolo

Brown University

Email: wtruccolo@gmail.com

Dr. Truccolo is an Assistant Professor (Research) in the Department of Neuroscience, Brown University. His lab focuses on understanding the contribution of collective dynamics in local and large-scale neuronal networks to representation and computation in neocortex. In addition, his lab studies how pathological collective dynamics may lead to neurological disorders such as epilepsy. Current work focuses on the development of stochastic models to detect, characterize and predict cortical dynamics from recorded ensembles of single neurons and broadband field potentials in human and non-human primates. His lab is sponsored by an R01 and a K01 Career Award from NIH-NINDS.

Doris Tsao

CalTech

Email: dortsao@caltech.edu

Doris Tsao is an assistant professor of biology and computation and neural systems at Caltech. She joined the Caltech faculty in 2009, and prior to that was head of an independent research group at the University of Bremen. She studied biology and mathematics at Caltech as an undergraduate and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2002. Her central interest is in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying vision. She has received multiple honors including the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award, the Eppendorf and Science International Prize in Neurobiology, Technology Review TR35, Searle Scholar Award, Klingenstein Scholar Award, Merck Scholar Award, Alfred Sloan Fellowship, DARPA Young Faculty Award, McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, NSF CAREER Award, and the NIH Pioneer Award.

Robert Turner

Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Email: turner@cbs.mpg.de

Robert Turner, Ph.D. (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Robert_Turner_%28scientist%29)
Robert Turner played a key role in the invention of actively shielded gradient coils used widely in MRI, the development of diffusion weighted imaging of human brain, which allows assessment of brain connectivity and evaluation of stroke damage, and the discovery of functional MRI by measurement of the effects of blood oxygenation changes. As a Max-Planck Institute Director in Leipzig, Germany, he is currently engaged in the discovery of native cortical anatomical maps of individual living human brains using ultra-high field MRI.
He started his academic career as a physicist, studying maths and physics at Cornell University until 1968, and completed his doctorate in physics at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. After three years as a post-doctoral physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, he broadened his horizons by studying social anthropology at University College London. During the period of ethnographic fieldwork that followed, he encountered MRI, which had been recently invented, and realized that this technique could provide insight into basic aspects of human nature, via maps of human brain organization. Returning to physics as a lecturer at Nottingham University in 1984, he built his own MRI scanner in 1984, designed and built gradient coils for MRI, and assisted the Nobel Prize winning Peter Mansfield in developing ultra-fast MRI techniques. As a Visiting Scientist at NIH between 1988 and 1994, he pioneered functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion weighted imaging. This led to his appointment as Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor in Imaging Physics at the Institute of Neurology in London, where he established fMRI as a tool for cognitive neuroscience. He has published over 220 scientific papers in a broad range of disciplines, and he is currently Director of the Neurophysics Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig (see http://www.cbs.mpg.de/staff/turner-10649), where he leads a major programme of investigation into the functional anatomy of the human brain using ultra-high field strength MRI.

Kamil Ugurbill

University of Minnesota

Email: kamil@cmrr.umn.edu

Magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy studies in cerebral function and metabolism.

The primary focus of the ongoing research activity at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) is to develop techniques that will permit novel use of high field magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy and imaging, and apply these techniques to biomedical questions relevant to basic physiological research and clinical medicine. Among the areas targeted for human MR studies, the most important and prominent is neurophysiology based on non-invasive functional imaging in the brain, high-resolution and/or high contrast imaging of neuroanatomy, imaging of perfusion, and finally spectroscopic studies of metabolism. This laboratory has pioneered the development of non-invasive functional imaging in the human brain using magnetic resonance techniques and endogenous deoxyhemoglobin as an intrinsic contrast agent.

CMRR is equipped with state-of-the-art MR instruments. It has one of the three 4 Tesla systems in the world capable of accommodating humans, and has pioneered high field MR applications with humans. CMRR also housed in March 1993 a first of its kind 9.4 Tesla system which is large enough to work with medium-size animals. In addition, a 4.7 Tesla/40 cm bore system is routinely used for animal studies.

David C. Van Essen

Washington University in St. Louis

Email: vanessen@brainvis.wustl.edu

David C. Van Essen is Alumni Endowed Professor in the Anatomy & Neurobiology Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Along with Kamil Ugurbil, he is Principal Investigator of the Human Connectome Project, a $30 million NIH grant to map brain circuitry in a large population of healthy adults using cutting-edge neuroimaging methods. Van Essen’s physiological and anatomical studies of macaque visual cortex provide many insights into functional specialization within this distributed hierarchical system. He has pioneered the use of surface-based atlases for visualizing and analyzing cortical structure, function, development, and connectivity and for making comparisons across studies and across species. His tension-based theory of morphogenesis accounts for how and why the cortex gets its folds. His studies of human cerebral cortex provide insights regarding normal variability, abnormalities in specific diseases, and patterns of cortical development. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroscience, founding chair of the OHBM, and President of the Society for Neuroscience. He is a fellow of the AAAS and has received the Raven Lifetime Achievement Award from the St. Louis Academy of Sciences and the Krieg Cortical Discoverer Award from the Cajal Club.

Vivek Venkatachalam

Harvard University

Email: vivek@physics.harvard.edu

Vivek is a postdoctoral fellow in the Samuel Lab at Harvard studying long term activity in C. elegans neural circuits. He is interested in understanding how sensory experience affects local chemistry in neurons as well as modification of behavior over the lifetime of worms. Previously, he studied electrical engineering and physics at MIT and completed a PhD in experimental physics at Harvard.

Joshua T. Vogelstein

Duke University

Email: joshuav@gmail.com

Joshua T. Vogelstein is a Senior Research Scientist in the Departments of
Statistical Science and Mathematics at Duke University. He holds secondary
appointments in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, as well as the Institute
for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science at Johns Hopkins University.
He is a co-founder and the lead NeuroDataNinja of the Open Connectome
Project. His research for the last decade has centered on the development
of theory, methods, and implementations for the analysis of massive neuroscience data, including nonlinear signal processing for time-series analyses
and statistics of graphs. His interests span the spatiotemporal scales, ranging
from nanometers and milliseconds to microns and minutes.

Howard Wactlar

National Science Foundation

Email: Wuwei1@caltech.edu

Philip Sung-En Wang, MD

Deputy Director, NIMH

Email: wangphi@mail.nih.gov

Gregory Warr

National Science Foundation

Email: gwarr@nsf.gov

Van Wedeen, MD

Associate Professor of Radiology

Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging

Email: van@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

Van Wedeen is a research scientist in biomedical imaging. Earning his BA at Harvard College concentrating in mathematics and MD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he returned to Harvard in 1983 as Fellow at MGH in radiology and imaging and joined the faculty in 1986. His research has focused on devising new methods in MRI to address problems in biology and medicine, including MR angiography in 1985 [1], diffusion tractography of brain pathways and critique in 1995 [2], and high angular resolution diffusion MRI (DSI, etc.) in 1999-2001 [3]. His present work investigates the geometric organization of the brain pathways [4].

[1] Wedeen VJ, et al. Projective imaging of pulsatile flow with magnetic resonance. Science 1985, 230: 946-8.

[2] Wedeen, TL et al. White matter connectivity explored by MRI. VJ Proc First Int Conf Funct Map Human Brain, Paris, 1995; P1.69.

[3] Tuch DS, Reese TG, Wiegell MR, Makris N, Belliveau JW, Wedeen VJ. High angular resolution diffusion imaging reveals intra-voxel white matter fiber heterogeneity. Magn Reson Med. 2002 Oct; 48(4): 577-82.

[4] Wedeen VJ, et al. The Geometric Structure of Brain Fiber Pathways. Science 2012 Mar 30; 335:1628-33.

Paul S. Weiss

UCLA

Email: psw@cnsi.ucla.edu

Paul S. Weiss is director of the California NanoSystems Institute, Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences, and distinguished professor of chemistry & biochemistry and of materials science & engineering at UCLA. His interdisciplinary research group includes chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, mathematicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, and computer scientists. Their work focuses on the atomic-scale chemical, physical, optical, mechanical and electronic properties of surfaces and supramolecular assemblies. He and his students have developed new techniques to expand the applicability and chemical specificity of scanning probe microscopies. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACS Nano.

Ken Whang

National Science Foundation

Email: kwhang@nsf.gov

George Whitesides

Harvard University

Email: gwhitesides@gmwgroup.harvard.edu

George M. Whitesides was born August 3, 1939 in Louisville, KY. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University in 1960 and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (with J.D. Roberts) in 1964. He was a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963 to 1982. He joined the Department of Chemistry of Harvard University in 1982, and was Department Chairman 1986-89, and Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry from 1982-2004. He is now the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor.

Rachel Wilson

Harvard University

Email: rachel_wilson@hms.harvard.edu

Rachel Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She earned an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on olfactory and auditory processing in Drosophila melanogaster. Dr. Wilson is a MacArthur Fellow and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist. She is co-director of the Research Instrumentation Core at Harvard Medical School, and is a selection committee member for the McKnight Techological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards. She is also associate director of the Harvard PhD Program in Neuroscience.

John Wingfield

National Science Foundation
Assistant Director of the Biological Sciences Directorate

Email: jwingfie@nsf.gov

Diane Witt

National Science Foundation

Email: dwitt@nsf.gov

Chris Xu

Cornell University

Email: cx11@cornell.edu

Chris Xu is Associate Professor of Applied and Engineering Physics and Director of Graduate Studies of Applied Physics at Cornell University. His current research areas are fiber optics and biomedical imaging, with major thrusts in multiphoton microscopy, multiphoton endoscopy, and ultrafast and nonlinear fiber optics. Prior to Cornell, he was a member of technical staff in Advanced Photonic Research at Bell Laboratories from 1999 to 2002. He joined Bell Laboratories as a postdoctoral member in Biological Computation Research in 1997. His main research focus at Bell Labs was on fiber optics and optical communications. He received his Ph.D. from Applied Physics, Cornell University, working on multiphoton microscopy. He earned his B.S. in physics from Fudan University.
Dr. Xu has served on a number of conference organization committees and NSF/NIH review panels. He has co-authored over 230 journal and conference papers, and has 28 patents granted or pending. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America.

Rafael Yuste

Columbia University

Email: rmy5@columbia.edu

Rafael Yuste is Professor of Biological Sciences and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He was born and educated in Madrid, where he obtained his MD at the Universidad Autónoma. After a brief period in Sydney Brenner's group at the LMB in Cambridge, UK, he performed Ph.D. studies with Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel’s laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. He then spent four years as a postdoctoral student of David Tank and Winfried Denk in the Department of Biological Computation at Bell Labs. In 1996 he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. In 2005 he became HHMI Investigator and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits at Columbia. Dr. Yuste and his laboratory are pursuing a "reverse engineering" strategy to understand the function of the cortical microcircuit, a basic element of cortex architecture, and the dendritic spines that mediate most of its excitatory connections. To study these questions, Yuste has pioneered the development of imaging techniques, such as calcium imaging of neuronal circuits, two-photon imaging and photostimulation using caged compounds and 3D optogenetics with holographic spatial light modulation.

Yun Zhang

Harvard University

Email: yzhang@oeb.harvard.edu

After my college study in Peking University in China, I conducted PhD research with Dr. Martin Chalfie at Columbia University, where I studied neuronal cell fate determination in C. elegans. I did postdoctoral research with Dr. Cori Bargmann at the Rockefeller University, where I developed an olfactory learning paradigm in C. elegans and began to dissect the underlying neural network. In my own laboratory at Harvard University, my study has been focused on understanding the circuit mechanisms of neural and behavioral plasticity, using C. elegans olfactory sensorimotor circuits as models. In the past, we have functionally mapped a neuronal network that encodes both the naive and learned olfactory preferences. We have also recently identified a new type of circuits, “topographic circuits”, which is organized by the subcellular localization of the synapses. In addition, we characterize a set of neuromodulators, which regulate olfactory behavior through ligand-receptor interactions. Our research has yielded new knowledge about the functional organization of neural circuits and how it regulates sensorimotor response.

Tingting Zhang

University of Virginia

Email: tz3b1@virginia.edu

Tingting Zhang is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of Virginia. Her research areas are statistics for neuroimaging (human brain mapping), functional data analysis, and Bayesian statistics. Her research specifically focuses on developing semi-parametric and nonparametric statistical models/methods for multi-subject fMRI data in the study of the social regulation of emotion. In addition, she also studies brain effective connectivity under the Dynamical Causal Model using Electrocorticographi (ECoG) time series.
Tingting Zhang received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Statistics at Harvard University in 2008, and her bachelor degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 2003. Prior to joining University of Virginia, she spent one year as a postdoc at Harvard University.

Marta Zlatic

HHMI Janelia Farm

Email: zlaticm@janelia.hhmi.org

Marta Zlatic, obtained her BA in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK. She carried out her PhD (2000-2004) and post-doctoral (2004-2007) research in the laboratory of Professor Michael Bate in the Department of Zoology, Cambridge University (2000-2004), where she worked on the mechanisms of sensory axon targeting in the ventral nerve cord of Drosophila embryo. For her PhD thesis she was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, a personal scholarship which allowed her to spend two years as a visiting fellow in the lab of Wesley Grueber at Columbia University and in the lab of Julie Simpson, at HHMI Janelia Farm. She is currently lab head at HHMI Janelia Farm studying circuits that underlie multisensory integration and action selection in Drosophila larvae.

Huda Zoghbi

Baylor College of Medicine

Email: hzoghbi@bcm.edu

Dr. Huda Y. Zoghbi is a professor in the departments of Pediatrics, Molecular and Human Genetics, Neurology and Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. She is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the director of the Texas Children's Jan & Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute completed in November 2010.
The laboratory uses genetic, biochemical, and cell biological approaches to explore the pathogenesis of polyglutamine neurodegenerative diseases and Rett syndrome, and to study genes essential for normal neurodevelopment.