SPEAKERS

Heather Dawes is the Executive Director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses, an inter-institutional program between UC Berkeley and UCSF that supports collaborative research for the development of neural-interfacing medical devices and interventions. She also is the Executive Director of the Weill Neurohub, a funding and partnership organization that integrates neuroscience research across UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and the University of Washington. With Drs. Phillip Starr, David Borton, Tim Denison and Greg Worrell, Heather also oversees the OpenMind Consortium, an NIH-funded program focused on the dissemination of platform technology and advanced know-how for the community of clinical researchers developing and employing sensing-enabled neural device technology. On the research front at UCSF, Heather helps to oversee clinical trials focused on intracranial neuromodulation for the treatment of major depression and chronic pain.

Heather was previously co-Director, with Dr. Edward Chang, of the UCSF-led DARPA SUBNETS effort (2014-2019), which focused on the advancement of closed-loop neuromodulation for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. She had earlier served as Vice President, Science, for the Fidelity Foundations, a private, anonymously operating philanthropic organization in Boston, where she focused on support for research in neurodegenerative disease and translational cancer medicine. She was a scientific editor at Current Biology and Neuron from 2001-2007. Heather received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

Dr. Bijanki is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, and an affective neuroscientist leading the Translational Neuromodulation Lab. Dr. Bijanki’s lab seeks to leverage targeted neural stimulation, electrophysiology, neuroimaging, and cognitive neuroscience tasks to understand the neural bases of affective and social cognitive dysfunction. This program of research has led to the identification of a novel stimulation-based strategy for evoking positive affect and anxiolysis, for which our team has a United States Patent awarded. Dr. Bijanki was honored when this project was selected as the featured cover article at the Journal of Clinical Investigation, with coverage by the NIH Director’s Blog. This nascent program of research has garnered academic and public media attention, and Dr. Bijanki serves as PI on a variety of NIH-funded projects in the intracranial research domain (KL2TR000455, K01MH116364, R21NS104953, R01MH127006).

Sarah Heilbronner is an Assistant Professor and McKnight Land-Grant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. working with Michael Platt at Duke University then performed postdoctoral studies with Suzanne Haber at the University of Rochester. She is currently a member of UMN’s Institute for Engineering in Medicine, Medical Discovery Team on Addiction, Center for NeuroEngineering, and MnDrive Brain Conditions. Her lab focuses on using neuroanatomical and neuroimaging techniques across species to examine the connectivity of motivation and decision-making circuitry in the brain, with the intent to establish how abnormal reward pathways create irregular decisions in mental illness.

Aryn Gittis, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Neuroscience Institute at CMU. She received her undergraduate degree from Brandeis University in 2001 and was a Fulbright Scholar in France from 2001-2002. She received her Ph.D. from UCSD in 2008 where she studied with Sascha du Lac, and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Anatol Kreitzer’s lab at the Gladstone Institute/UCSF in 2012. For her postdoctoral work, she was awarded a K99 from NINDS and was a 2012 Finalist for the Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology.

She joined CMU in 2012, where her lab uses electrophysiology, optogenetics, and computational approaches to study the progression of neural circuit dysfunction in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease, with the goal of developing strategies to guide therapeutic plasticity that can repair circuit dysfunction and restore movement. She has received numerous awards for this work, including a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant in 2013, the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 2018, and was a Finalist for the Science and PINS Prize for Neuromodulation in 2018.

Stavros Zanos is a physician-scientist working in the fields of neuroscience, neuromodulation, neural engineering and translational science. After obtaining his MD degree from Aristotle University Medical School (Thessaloniki, Greece), Stavros trained in internal medicine and cardiology in Greece, and earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience & Physiology from the University of Washington, where he also served as senior fellow and instructor.

He is an Associate Professor at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell; he heads the Translational Neurophysiology (TNP) lab at the Institute for Bioelectronic Medicine. His lab focuses on the use of neurostimulation to study the nervous system and to treat diseases in which the nervous system is affected or implicated.

Christine Conelea, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Director of the Neuromodulation Program at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB), and a licensed clinical psychologist. Dr. Conelea received her BA from the University of Nevada, Reno and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She completed a predoctoral internship and post-doctoral fellowship in child mental health at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her research and clinical expertise is in the area of neurodevelopmental disorders, with an emphasis on Tourette Syndrome/tic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and anxiety disorders. She has a particular interest in studying the use of neuromodulation to augment cognitive-behavioral interventions.

Dr. Constantinidis received his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and completed postdoctoral training at Yale University and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience, and Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Vanderbilt University. His research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health, National Eye Institute, National Institute on Aging and the National Science Foundation through the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program. His research relies on non-human primate models to investigate mechanisms of cognitive function and their applications to human conditions.

Dr. Dan Rizzuto is the founder and Chief Executive Officer at Nia Therapeutics, where he is developing implantable brain stimulation devices to treat memory disorders due to traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Dan developed Nia’s core technology at the University of Pennsylvania with funding from DARPA as part of the Restoring Active Memory project, and his team has demonstrated across multiple clinical studies how personalized neurostimulation therapies can be used to improve human memory.

Dan completed his doctoral training at Brandeis University in the neuroscience of human memory, his postdoctoral training at Caltech in brain-machine interfaces, and he previously developed neurostimulation therapies for major depression at Northstar Neuroscience. Dan received the 2015 Researcher of the Year and 2019 Most Promising Startup awards from Neurotech Reports.

Dr. Chan is a neurologist who sees patients with Memory and Movement Disorders in the Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She completed the MD PHD degree at Boston University, residency in Neurology at Yale New Haven Hospital and fellowship at MGH. Her research background is in basic neuroscience and during fellowship at MGH, she pivoted to do clinical and translational research with the goal of developing novel neuromodulation techniques for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. During her post-doctoral training, she worked in Li-Huei Tsai’s lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she spearheaded the translational work to develop novel modalities of neuromodulation. In a collaboration between Li-Huei Tsai, Keith Johnson and Brad Dickerson at MGH, she has been working on leveraging gamma frequency sensory stimulation to entrain the brain and evaluate the effects of this technique in patients with mild Alzheimer’s dementia. Her current project aims to see if we can use gamma frequency stimulation to prevent progression to dementia in people who are at risk for developing dementia.

Dr. Grace Hwang is a Program Director in the Directorate for Engineering within the Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems at the National Science Foundation. She is a rotator from Johns Hopkins University. She manages the Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering Program and serves on the Understanding the Brain Coordinating Group. She led the development of an Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program topic: Brain-inspired dynamics for engineering energy efficient circuits and artificial intelligence (BRAID) which is aimed at creating a new class of energy- and data- efficient algorithms, hardware, and learning systems inspired by brain dynamics. She is a former co-PI on an NSF grant focused on understanding neural dynamics of the hippocampal formation to inspire new control algorithms for self-organized single- and multi-agent systems. She is also a PI on an NIH grant that seeks to understand the mechanisms of ultrasound-induced gene activation and long-term cortical plasticity. She has a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Northeastern University, an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from MIT, and an M.S. in biophysics and a Ph.D. in biophysics and structural biology with specialization in computational neuroscience from Brandeis University.

Dr. Megan Frankowski is a Program Officer in the Division of Translational Research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) where she oversees a portfolio of grants and cooperative agreements funded through the trans-NIH Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative®. Her current portfolio consists of neuropsychiatric disorder and movement disorder projects which are late stage translational efforts focused on advancing implantable neurotechnologies along the development, optimization, and regulatory pipeline through first in human feasibility studies. She has an extensive background in human neuroimaging, managing clinical research, and designing clinical trials, particularly those incorporating the use of devices. Previous projects have focused on the use of neuromodulation for psychiatric disorders, specifically for major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Dr. Frankowski received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Emory University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychology – Affective Neuroscience from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining the NINDS, Dr. Frankowski was a postdoctoral researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Neurosurgery where her work focused on using neuroimaging techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion weighted imaging combined with simulated electrical field modeling to understand individual differences in the efficacy and targeting of deep brain stimulation for neuropsychiatric disorders. Her doctoral research investigated electrocortical and hemodynamic brain activity during emotional and rewarding scene perception in both healthy participants and nicotine users.

Dr. Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad received her Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology and her Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Tehran in Iran. She then moved to the United States and earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Afterwards, she pursued her Postdoctoral Fellowship in Systems Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Yazdan-Shahmorad joined the University of Washington in the Fall of 2017 as the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Assistant Professor of Neuroengineering in the departments of Bioengineering, and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Throughout her career, Dr. Yazdan has developed new tools and techniques for implementing optogenetics in non-human primates (NHPs) and rats, and she has recently used these tools to induce and study targeted plasticity in sensorimotor connections in NHPs. Her long-term goal is to use neural technologies to develop stimulation-based therapies to help restore function and mobility in people with neurological disorders such as stroke.

Dr. Yazdan-Shahmorad is the recipient of two Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards from the American Heart Association, the 2014 IEEE Brain Grand Challenges Young Investigator Award, and the 2018 Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Research Career Development Award. Her research in targeted sensorimotor plasticity was selected as a Hot Topic of 2016 by the Society for Neuroscience. She is also currently a Weill Neurohub Investigator, a program aimed to foster cross-campus, interdisciplinary teams of researchers to explore, create, and test bold new concepts and technologies for treating neurological and psychiatric diseases. Dr. Yazdan has recently received an Excellence in Mentorship Award from the University of Washington Bioengineering Department.

Dr. Luan was trained in device and quantum physics at Stanford (Ph. D.) and Harvard (postdoc fellow). She then made a career transition to neural engineering. She is currently an assistant professor at Rice University, in the department of electrical and computer engineering, and the department of bioengineering. Her lab works on the development of ultraflexible neural electrode and their application in rodent models of neurological disorders.

Alexander Opitz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on developing non-invasive brain stimulation technologies for psychiatric and neurological disorders. Dr. Opitz has a particular interest in the underlying biophysics and physiology of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial electric stimulation (TES). He believes it is necessary to study the effect of brain stimulation across various levels of investigation to make progress. Thus, research in his lab spans from computational modeling of electric fields and their effect on neurons, to electrophysiological recordings of brain activity in animal models and humans. His lab is further developing closed-loop stimulation technologies to improve the effectiveness of TMS. Dr. Opitz organizes the annual “Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Workshop” at the University of Minnesota targeted at all researchers interested in advancing their methods tool kit in advanced brain stimulation methods.