Pablo has been managing the creation of digital experiences for over 10 years – starting with web and desktop platforms and transitioning into mobile and tablet. He is now Lead Program Manager at Y Media Labs, a SF Bay-Area mobile development firm, and has been leading the design and development efforts for many applications – including the first 5 applications ever developed for ResearchKit, the new platform that Apple developed for use in medical research, first revealed in an Apple Keynote presentation on March 9, 2015. Pablo has a deep interest in how mobile (and technology in general) can be leveraged to improve the lives of people – those with illnesses in particular.

Giampaolo Brichetto joined the Foundation of Italian MS Society (FISM) on March 2009, where he currently holds the position of Coordinator of Research in Rehabilitation. Giampaolo is 40 years old and has 15 years of Research in Rehabilitation experience in the field of Neuro-rehabilitation: parkinson’s disease, stroke, traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis; he worked as Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation MD and then as PhD in Neurosciences for the Department of Neurological Sciences, University of Genova, from 2000 to 2007 and then as Head of Traumatic Brain Injury Unit for Ottavia Ferrero Hospital from 2007 to 2009. His whole career effort aimed at improving neurorehabilitation strategies both by integrating traditional rehabilitation techniques with bio-tech devices and cognitive rehabilitation strategies and by improving rehabilitation outcome measures for clinical and research purposes.

Rudi Cartuyvels leads Imec’s R&D on Smart Systems & Energy Technologies. He is passionate about delivering industry relevant innovations in micro and nano systems enabling novel applications in the field of ICT, Healthcare and Energy markets. His R&D scope spans MEMS, Si Photonics, Mixed Signal Si based technologies, GaN-on-Si technologies for power devices & LED, Organic Electronics for System-in-Foil, Photovoltaic Technologies, Ultra Low Power chip design for energy efficient sensors and wireless communication, Body-Area–Network devices and Life Science Technologies.

Rudi Cartuyvels graduated with a MS EE degree from the KU Leuven, Belgium in 1990 and started his career at IMEC in the field of advanced CMOS technologies. He was appointed Director of Interconnect Technologies in 2001. 3D Technologies were added to his responsibilities in 2007. In 2009, he was appointed Vice President & General Manager of IMEC’s semiconductor process technology unit. Since 2012, he is Senior Vice President of imec’s smart systems & energy technologies unit.

David Eichenbaum is a Washington-based political media consultant who has helped elect two presidents and many governors, senators and members of Congress. Previously, David was a staffer on Capitol Hill, where he served as press secretary to U.S. Senator Carl Levin and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. David has worked on state and national political campaigns as a press secretary and campaign manager and served as communications director of the Democratic National Committee. David has also worked overseas in Europe and the Middle East. Prior to moving to Washington, David was an actor and he recently returned to acting as a sideline and can be seen in the current season of House of Cards and The Americans.
When his mother was diagnosed with dementia, David reached out to experts in neuroscience about starting an initiative to encourage data sharing and open science.

Keith O. Elliston, PhD is an experienced scientist and entrepreneur with expertise in the development and growth of new life science and technology businesses, from both operational and investment perspectives. As a scientist, Keith specializes in Systems Biology; he built and managed the Systems Biology program for CHDI, the Huntington’s Disease foundation, and has been a co-founder and Chief Scientist for the tranSMART Foundation, and has more than 40 peer reviewed scientific publications. As an entrepreneur, Keith is a co-founder and CEO for Virtual-Rx, a virtual pharma platform company, was Co- founder, President and CEO, of Selventa (nee’ Genstruct), a venture-backed systems biology platform company, and CEO and co-founder of Viaken Systems, a venture-backed informatics service provider, among others. Keith began his career at Merck, where he built and led the Bioinformatics and Genomics programs, and ran the Merck Gene Index, a privately funded public genome effort that published the first sequence for 90% of expressed human genes. Keith has successfully built biotechnology businesses from startup through IPO, and established profitable and capital efficient companies working both with Venture Capital and as a founder or advisor. Keith combines extensive experience in pharmaceutical R&D, biotechnology and information technology, with successful executive and team leadership into a unique set of skills that drives innovation and value.

Hugo Geerts is currently Chief Scientific Officer of In Silico Biosciences, a company providing pioneering mechanistic disease modeling services in CNS R&D for pharma companies with programs in Neurology and Psychiatry. After a degree in physics and a PhD in Biophysics, a Bachelor Degree in Medicine and a Master in Pharmaceutical Sciences, he worked for 17 years with Dr. Paul Janssen, the greatest drug hunter in history at the Janssen Research Foundation (J&J) leading the Alzheimer Discovery research with programs in tangle and b-amyloid pathology and supported the successful clinical development of galantamine. He is faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and the Drexel University Pharmacology Department.

Martin Hofmann-Apitius holds a PhD in molecular biology and has worked for more than 10 years in experimental molecular biology. Since 2002, Dr. Hofmann-Apitius has been the head of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Fraunhofer SCAI, and is also a professor of Applied Life Science Informatics at Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology, as well as the initiator and academic coordinator for the IMI project AETIONOMY.

Inez Jabalpurwala is the President and CEO of the Brain Canada Foundation (formerly Brain Canada Foundation and NeuroScience Canada Partnership), a position she has held since 2001. Brain Canada is a national non-profit organization that supports brain research. In 2006, NeuroScience Canada received The Conference Board of Canada/Spencer Stuart National Awards in Governance award in the non-for-profit category. In 2011, the Government of Canada committed $100 million in matched funding to establish a public-private partnership, the Canada Brain Research Fund.

From 2007 to 2012, Inez was also the Executive Director of the Graham Boeckh Foundation, a private family foundation that supports research and programs in the area of mental health; and Senior Investment Analyst with Boeckh Investments Inc.

Prior to these appointments, Inez worked for ten years in public relations, communications, marketing and fundraising. She began her career in public relations at Le Groupe Columbia and National Public Relations. She later held senior advancement positions with McGill University, the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation, and Canada World Youth.

Active in her community, Inez has volunteered with a number of organizations, including the Montreal General Hospital, Mount Royal Classic breast cancer run, Farha Foundation (an organization dedicated to improving outpatient services for people with AIDS), Prometheus Project (a mentoring program) and Leave Out Violence-LOVE (youth violence prevention organization). She has also been a mentor with the Wisdom II Program/Women’s Executive Network.

Inez is currently on the board of Equitas—International Centre for Human Rights Education, and is a member of the Executive and Program committees. She is also on the board of the McGill University Alumni Association, serving as Treasurer and member of the Executive, and Nominating and Governance committees. She is a mentor for the McGill MBA program.

She is a member of the Economic Development and Public Finance committee of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal; a member of the Association of Quebec Women in Finance; and a member of the International Women’s Forum and on the Executive Committee.

Inez holds a BA and MA in English Literature, and an MBA from McGill University. She has also completed the McGill-McConnell Master’s Program (Master’s of Management) for National Voluntary Sector Leaders.

In 2007, Inez was named one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 by the Women’s Executive Network, in the “Trailblazers and Trendsetters Category”. A skilled public speaker, she has been featured at major conferences around the world.

Catherine Jacobson holds a PhD in neuroscience and has a 6 year old son with medically refractory epilepsy. When her son was 3 years old, she went back to train in epilepsy research, first in basic science at Stanford, then in clinical research at the pediatric epilepsy center at UCSF. At UCSF, she was responsible for the implementation of the first Epidiolex (Cannabidiol) compassionate use program by GW for children with severe medically refractory epilepsy. Most recently, she was Director of Research Investment at the Epilepsy Foundation where she led an effort to create a venture philanthropy fund to address the critical unmet need of adequate treatments for medically refractory epilepsy. She has been an avid advocate of generating a more effective approach to understanding the epilepsies as well as to the discovery of new drug targets.

Andreas Jeromin, PhD, has established research programs in translational neuroscience in both industry and biotech for the last 15 years and co-authored more than 100 publications. He has also been elected a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. Andreas Jeromin has led biomarker qualification programs in diagnostics and therapeutics in acute neurological injury and neurodegeneration in roles with increased responsibilities. This included several drug development program from POC to a NINDS-supported phase III trial (Protect III). He also supports as member of the SABs or steering committee, several biomarker qualification efforts such as ADNI, the Coalition against Major Diseases (CAMD) directed by the Critical Path Institute (C-PATH), the Alzheimer’s Association CSF QC and biomarker assay standardization initiatives in other CNS disorders, including MS (Accelerated Cure), ALS and PD. He is the founder and CSO of Atlantic Biomarkers, LLC, and joined Quanterix, Inc. as scientific and medical advisor in 2014.

Lee Lancashire is a bioinformatician within the computational biology group at Thomson Reuters (IP & Science). His responsibilities are in the identification and development of strategies for the delivery of informative biomarker signatures from big ‘omics’ data through the use of sophisticated statistical algorithms in combination with Thomson Reuters’ knowledgebase of pathways and interaction networks. His work focuses on the discovery of discriminatory biomarker signatures that will facilitate the design of molecularly targeted clinical trials, and ultimately assist in the molecular profiling of disease for improved patient stratification. Lee has over ten years of experience in the application of statistical and machine learning approaches for analysis of complex biological datasets. Lee completed his post-doctoral research in biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research. He has also worked as a bioinformatics team leader in personalized medicine and diagnostics companies CompanDX and Almac Diagnostics. Lee holds a PhD in bioinformatics & machine learning and has published in over 25 key industry journals.

Robert McBurney is CEO of the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (ACP), a non-profit organization accelerating efforts to cure MS by catalyzing research. Prior to joining ACP, Robert co-founded Optimal Medicine Ltd., a UK company developing systems for optimizing the treatment of mental illness. His former positions include Executive VP of TheraGenetics Ltd.; CSO of BG Medicine, Inc.; CEO of Differential Proteomics, Inc.; and, CEO of Cambridge Neuroscience, Inc. Robert was formerly Assistant Director of the UK Medical Research Council Neuroendocrinology Unit and has held positions at the National Institutes of Health, Cambridge University and the University of New South Wales. He is a director of Optimal Medicine and a Trustee of the F. W. Olin College of Engineering. Robert received BSc and PhD degrees from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Hamid R. Noori is the head of the research group in silico Psychopharmacology at the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. Prior to this appointment, he held positions at Princeton University and at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing of the University of Heidelberg. He received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Heidelberg in 2008, his PhD in physics from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in 2015 and his German habilitation and Venia Legendi in computational neuroscience from the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the University of Heidelberg (2013), which is equivalent to associate professor level. His research interests involve mathematical and biophysical modeling and analysis of multi-scale neurobiological processes. His studies aim at development of computer-based procedures to design novel psychiatric medications and investigate their systemic effects in silico. To date, these investigations have already lead to the invention of a highly-accurate patented in silico procedure for prediction of drug-induced alterations in neurotransmitter concentrations, novel therapeutic compounds and the establishment of a unique database of drug-induced neurochemical fingerprints including measurements from over 200,000 rodents. Dr. Noori is an internationally well-established multidisciplinary scientist collaborating with leading partners from academia and serves currently as the editor-in-chief of In Silico Pharmacology, a Springer Open-Access journal.

Dr. O’Bryant is a global leader in the area of blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and leads an international consortium that is working to study biomarkers across neurodegenerative diseases. He has generated and cross-validated a blood-based screener for AD and, more recently, he has generated methods for identifying sub-populations of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease so targeted (personalized) therapeutic approach can be generated. Additionally, he led the international group that recently generated the first-ever guidelines for pre-analytic processing of blood samples for AD biomarker studies and he participated in the generation of the updated NIA Best Practices on the topic.

His work has been funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the State of Texas as well as numerous private foundations. He has published over 120 research articles and received multiple awards/honors including the early career award of the National Academy of Neuropsychology and the 2014 FABBS Early Career Impact Award.

Diana Perkins obtained her undergraduate and medical degree from the University of Maryland, and her MPH from the University of North Carolina. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. Her clinical and research efforts have focused on schizophrenia, in particular understanding the mechanisms underlying the emergence of psychosis, with over a 150 related peer-reviewed publications.

She is a Principal Investigator of NAPLS, the “North American Longitudinal Prodrome Study”, a multi-site NIMH funded investigation of the predictors and mechanisms of the development of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders in persons experiencing high-risk symptoms. Relevant to this presentations, she is the Director of the Biospecimen core for the NAPLS project.

In addition to her research interests, Dr. Perkins is a practicing psychiatrist. A decade ago she founded OASIS, “Outreach and Support Intervention Services”, a UNC clinical program that focuses on prevention of disability from schizophrenia by early and effective intervention. Her clinical work in the OASIS program are a continuous reminder of the need for biomarkers to identify persons at high risk as a critical step towards the goal of preventive interventions for severe brain disorders.

Dr. Snyder is Director of Medical and Scientific Operations at the Alzheimer’s Association. She oversees the Association’s International Research Grant Program, the mechanism through which the Association funds research applications. In addition to ensuring the smooth review of applications and distribution of awards to successful applicants, she is responsible for the dissemination of results and ongoing investigations to a wide range of audiences.

She also manages a collaborative project with the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health to develop an International Alzheimer’s Disease Research Portfolio – using a common language to describe funded research to enable the integration and comparative analysis of Alzheimer’s research funding from public and private organizations from around the world.

Dr. Snyder received her Ph.D . from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and her B.A. in Biology and Religious Studies from The University of Virginia. Since graduating from Stritch, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Neurobiology Program at Children’s Memorial Research Center, affiliated with Northwestern University, in Chicago.

Timothy Vaughan is a researcher and the director of data science at PatientsLikeMe. His research focuses on the mathematical characterization of disease and predictive modeling of patient outcomes. With a doctorate from Rutgers University and an extensive background in computational and particle physics, Dr. Vaughan developed his data modeling skills as a research associate at MIT, investigating the biological effects of electromagnetic fields, including transdermal drug delivery using electromagnetic fields. As a research fellow at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, he designed models to assess the effectiveness of ultrasound surgery. He has also worked as financial engineer in the finance industry.