Dr. Yuan is the Program Director of the Translational Bioinformatics and Therapeutics Development in Alzheimer’s disease and AD related Dementia at the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Dr. Yuan had training in Clinical Medicine and Pathology, Computer Science and Bioinformatics.

Prior to joining NIA, Dr. Yuan served as the Scientific Review Officer at NIH managing applications in biomedical computing, health informatics, mobile health technology/smart device, and SBIR/STTR health informatics. Dr. Yuan has broad expertise in data science and pre-clinical and clinical drug development, leading effort in development of trans-NIH portfolio analysis tools, and serving as Senior Investigator in leading pharmacogenomics and precision medicine programs across multiple disease areas at Pharmaceutical company prior to joining NIH.

Jamie Adams, MD is an assistant professor of neurology and movement disorders specialist at the University of Rochester with a dual appointment in the Center for Health + Technology.  Her research focuses on the use of technology, such as wearable sensors, smartphone applications, and telemedicine, in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson disease and Huntington disease.  Incorporating these tools into clinical trials may improve outcome measures and facilitate development of therapeutics.

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Dr. Pankaj Agarwal, principal at BioInfi, has 23+ years strategic and tactical experience utilizing bioinformatics to enable drug discovery and create pipeline value. He has collaborated extensively with numerous pharmaceutical project teams, academic/biotech partners, and top informatics talent. Dr. Agarwal has 50+ publications in top journals, including Nature Rev Drug Discovery, Nature Biotechnology, and Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, and multiple methodological and gene patents. In 2016, he was among a group of select few scientists appointed as senior fellows at GSK. Dr. Agarwal has also served on NSF, NIH, FDA and PhRMA panels. He possesses a B.Tech. in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT, Delhi and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. He is a founder and senior member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Most importantly, Dr. Agarwal is passionate about drug discovery, rare diseases, and helping patients.

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Mark W. Albers is a neurologist specializing in memory and olfactory disorders. He earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard University, working in the laboratory of Stuart Schreiber, and an MD degree from the H.S.T. program of Harvard Medical School and M.I.T. He was an internal medicine resident for two years at Massachusetts General Hospital and then trained in neurology at Mass General, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he was one of the first chief residents for the Partners neurology residency program. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Richard Axel while he practiced neurology at the Neurological Institute, Columbia University.  

At Mass General, he sees patients in the Memory Disorders Clinic and attends on the inpatient neurologic wards. His clinical research is focused on developing sensitive probes of olfactory function as a biomarker for early neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s and TBI, and COVID. His laboratory research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of neurodegeneration, identifying novel drug targets that mediate neurodegeneration, and developing therapies to prevent neurodegeneration. He is the overall PI of the NADALS trial, the first basket trial in neurodegenerative disease. The drug repurposing, baricitinib, will be tested in patient populations with either Alzheimer’s disease or ALS in this trial. He served as a member of the Translational Neuroscience committee of the American Academy of Neurology, is a faculty member of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science, the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science, and the McCance Center for Brain Health. He is the Associate Director of the Massachusetts Center for Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Science.

Dr. Patrick Antkowiak earned his BS degree in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania before attending the University of Virginia to obtain a PhD in Biomedical Engineering where he developed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods to better noninvasively measure cellular and tissue function. He performed his post-doctoral work at the University of Virginia developing methods for the collection and analysis of MRI data to assess autoimmune cellular infiltration in mouse models of diabetes.  He joined the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in 2015 as a Biomedical Engineer in the Neurostimulation Devices Branch, where he reviewed a variety of neurological therapeutic and diagnostic devices.  He then joined the Neurodiagnostic Devices team, where he became a Team Lead in 2018.  He enjoys the opportunities and challenges involved in developing and applying innovative regulatory practices, particularly in the evolving digital health device space.

Jalayne J. Arias, JD, MA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy & Behavioral Sciences in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University.  Her research examines the legal and ethical challenges in Alzheimer’s and dementia, integrating empirical legal, qualitative, and health services research methods to better understand the legal and ethical challenges that are inherent to dementia care. Jalayne received her Juris Doctor degree from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law (ASU), a Masters in Bioethics from Case Western University (Cleveland, Ohio), and completed the Atlantic Fellowship for Brain Health at the University of California San Francisco and the Cleveland Fellowship in Advanced Bioethics at the Cleveland Clinic.

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Chief Operating Officer, GeneTx Biotherapeutics
Director, Angelman Syndrome Biomarker and Outcome Measure Consortium
Co-Director, International Angelman Syndrome Research Counsil (INSYNC-AS)

Dr. Allyson Berent graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in 2002. She completed an internship at the University of Minnesota and a residency in internal medicine at the Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, thereafter. She was boarded in internal medicine in 2006.

After completing a fellowship in interventional radiology at the Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship in Endourology at Thomas Jefferson University she served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine and Interventional Radiology/ Interventional Endoscopy at the Matthew J. Ryan Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2009, she holds a staff position at the Animal Medical Center in Interventional Radiology and Endoscopy and is director of the Interventional Endoscopy Services. Her research interests are in minimally invasive diagnostics and therapeutics and medical device development including: endourology, ureteral disease, gastrointestinal interventions, nasopharyngeal stenting and stem cell treatment for kidney disease. Her primary research is in medical device development.

In 2015 Dr. Berent became the Chief Science Officer for the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics (FAST) and has been integral in driving the research portfolio in novel treatment options for this rare genetic disorder. In 2017 Dr. Berent became the Chief Operating Officer of GeneTx Biotherapeutics, a company launched out of the non-profit FAST, with a sole mission to advance antisense oligonucleotide therapies toward human clinical trials for the treatment of Angelman syndrome. Dr. Berent also serves as the director of the Angelman Syndrome Biomarker and Outcome Measure Consortium (ABOM), a precompetitive consortium working to develop sensitive and meaningful endpoints for clinical trials in Angelman syndrome. Dr. Berent is also the mother to a 7 year-old little girl named Quincy who lives with Angelman syndrome.

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Jeroen Bogie was born in 1983 and grew up in Geleen, the Netherlands. He received his MSc degree in biomedical sciences from Amsterdam university in 2008, and subsequently received his PhD in neuroimmunology from Hasselt University (Belgium) in 2013, under the supervision of Piet Stinissen, Niels Hellings, and Jerome Hendriks. During his PhD, he defined the physiology of macrophages in multiple sclerosis (MS) and established that uptake and processing of myelin-derived cholesterol is pivotal in skewing macrophages towards a neuroprotective phenotype. As a FWO postdoctoral fellow at Rotterdam (Netherlands), Lille (France), Chulalongkorn (Thailand), and Hasselt University, Jeroen studied the impact of lipid metabolism on the functional properties of immune and glial cells in neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative disorders such as MS and Alzheimer’s disease. During this time, he discovered that the fatty acid desaturase stearoyl-CoA desaturase-1, amongst other enzymes and proteins, controls the reparative properties of macrophages and microglia in the brain. In 2021, Jeroen accepted an assistant professor position at Hasselt University. Here, he aims to further investigate the metabolic blueprint of neurodegenerative and rare auto-inflammatory disorders, focusing on protein acetylation in particular. Jeroen is currently co-heading the animal facility, a member of the faculty board life sciences, and actively involved in the coordination of the BSc and MSc curriculum biomedical sciences at Hasselt University. His research is supported by the Charcot Stichting Belgium, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Interreg, and the special research fund (BOF) Hasselt University.

Yuxia Cui, Ph.D., is a health scientist administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Dr. Cui oversees the exposure science and the exposome grant portfolio that is focused on emerging technologies towards improved exposure and risk assessment in environmental health research. These include sensor technologies, omics-based approaches, computational and informatics-based methodologies, as well as other innovative approaches to enable an integrated view and better understanding of the exposome. Cui currently serves as the program officer for the laboratory network of the Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource (HHEAR). She is also a member of the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics Program leadership team and oversees the day-to-day operations of the Program. Cui received training in molecular toxicology and transcriptomics and received her doctorate in Environmental Toxicology from Duke University.

Eva L. Feldman, M.D., Ph.D., is the Russell N. DeJong Professor of Neurology at the University of Michigan. A renowned neurologist and neuroscientist, she has devoted her career to understanding neurological disorders and developing new treatments. Dr. Feldman earned her medical and doctoral degrees at University of Michigan and completed neurology training at Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

With over 30 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Feldman has pioneered studies on neurological disorders, including ALS. A principal investigator on the first two FDA-approved stem cell transplant clinical trials for ALS, Dr. Feldman is now funded by the NIH and the CDC on her groundbreaking work on identifying environmental pollutants as a contributing cause of ALS, including a recent NIH Director’s grant on the ALS exposome, with separate NIH grants to understand how immunity contributes to ALS risk.   At Michigan Medicine, she directs a research program of 25 scientists and is Co-Director of the Neuromuscular Division. Dr. Feldman has over 500 publications with an H index of 109.

Dr. Feldman served as president of the American Neurological Association from 2011-13, the third woman to hold this position in 130 years. She is a member of the Association of American Physicians, a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and currently chairs the Neurology and Psychiatry section of the National Academy of Medicine. She has received numerous awards for both her clinical service and research, including an NIH Directors Transformative Award in 2021 for her work on ALS and the exposome. She has been named by her peers as one of the Best Doctors in America for 15 consecutive years.