Since September 2018 Georg C. Terstappen is CSO at OxStem in Oxford, UK. From March 2017 until April 2018 Georg was Head of PTS China and Neurosciences TAU Portfolio Leader at GSK’s R&D Centre in Shanghai. Georg was also Vice-Chair of InnoMedS and Co-Chair of the Strategic Governing Group Neurodegeneration in the context of the Innovative Medicines Initiative. From 2011-2016 he was Director of Neuroscience Discovery Biology at AbbVie and from 2002-2010 CSO of Siena Biotech - a neuroscience drug discovery company he co-founded. Georg has more than 25 years of experience in CNS drug discovery, is an inventor/co-inventor of 14 patents and an author of more than 80 scientific publications. He previously worked at Bayer AG, GlaxoWellcome and GlaxoSmithKline and conducted research at the Max-Planck-Institute in Cologne and the Federal Research Centre Juelich for which he received his PhD in natural sciences in 1992.
Frank Hirth is Reader of Evolutionary Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He received his PhD in Zoology at the University of Basel in Switzerland and trained in neurogenetics at the universities of Freiburg, Basel and the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London. During his time at the Institute of Zoology in Basel, he discovered evolutionarily conserved genetic mechanisms underlying insect and mammalian brain development. Currently at King’s his lab investigates how neural circuits form and function, especially central brain circuits that coordinate voluntary behaviour. In an evolutionary approach, his team applies their insights to elucidate pathogenic mechanisms underlying cell and circuit dysfunction that lead to synaptopathies including Parkinson's and Motor Neurone Disease, as well as Frontotemporal Dementia.
Shailendra Singh (Shelly) is a member of MarketsandMarket's board. He focuses on global sales and client services functions, as well as commercial optimization at MarketsandMarkets. He has years of expe¬rience in global delivery and outsourcing sector in the IT/ Consulting/Analytics/Big Data sectors. Prior to MnM, he was leading the global sales, client services and commercial ef¬fectiveness functions for Mu Sigma, a unicorn company and a leading global provider of Decision Sciences and Big Data analytics solutions.
Since September 2018 Georg C. Terstappen is CSO at OxStem in Oxford, UK. From March 2017 until April 2018 Georg was Head of PTS China and Neurosciences TAU Portfolio Leader at GSK’s R&D Centre in Shanghai. Georg was also Vice-Chair of InnoMedS and Co-Chair of the Strategic Governing Group Neurodegeneration in the context of the Innovative Medicines Initiative. From 2011-2016 he was Director of Neuroscience Discovery Biology at AbbVie and from 2002-2010 CSO of Siena Biotech - a neuroscience drug discovery company he co-founded. Georg has more than 25 years of experience in CNS drug discovery, is an inventor/co-inventor of 14 patents and an author of more than 80 scientific publications. He previously worked at Bayer AG, GlaxoWellcome and GlaxoSmithKline and conducted research at the Max-Planck-Institute in Cologne and the Federal Research Centre Juelich for which he received his PhD in natural sciences in 1992.
Professor Arshad Majid’s professional mission is to develop new therapies for patients afflicted with neurological diseases, with a particular focus on stroke. Professor Majid’s background is unique in that as well as being a leading translational neuroscientist, he is also an accomplished Vascular and Interventional Neurologist. He graduated in Medicine from the University of Glasgow. After obtaining Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) he moved to the USA where trained in Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and did Fellowship training in Stroke Research at Washington University. He did additional Fellowship training in Endovascular Surgical Neuroradiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He has published extensively in high impact international peer-reviewed journals, and presented at national and international meetings. Professor Majid served as the Founding Director of the Division of Cerebrovascular Diseases at Michigan State University and was the Founding Medical Director of the William and Claire Dart Stroke Center at Sparrow Health System. Professor Majid is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is a Fellow and Regional Advisor of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow He joined the University of Sheffield in August 2013 as Professor of Cerebrovascular Neurology.
Frank Hirth is Reader of Evolutionary Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He received his PhD in Zoology at the University of Basel in Switzerland and trained in neurogenetics at the universities of Freiburg, Basel and the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London. During his time at the Institute of Zoology in Basel, he discovered evolutionarily conserved genetic mechanisms underlying insect and mammalian brain development. Currently at King’s his lab investigates how neural circuits form and function, especially central brain circuits that coordinate voluntary behaviour. In an evolutionary approach, his team applies their insights to elucidate pathogenic mechanisms underlying cell and circuit dysfunction that lead to synaptopathies including Parkinson's and Motor Neurone Disease, as well as Frontotemporal Dementia.
Emer Leahy, Ph.D., is the President and CEO of PsychoGenics Inc., a preclinical CNS service company, and CEO of PGI Drug Discovery, a psychiatric drug discovery company with several partnered clinical programs. She also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Leahy has more than 25 years of drug discovery, clinical and business development experience in Pharma/Biotech. Dr. Leahy served on BIO’s Emerging Companies Section Governing Board. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Intensity Therapeutics, the Business Review Board for the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation and the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Rett Syndrome Foundation.
Winston Hide, Ph.D., moved to Harvard in 2019 from the UK, where he has been the professor and chair of computational biology at the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience and Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. He trained at the University of Texas, Houston, at the Baylor College of Medicine and at the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History. He founded the South African National Bioinformatics Institute and drove translational genomics across Africa. Dr. Hide now applies systems biology approaches to genomic data to reveal and drug critical disease processes occurring in cancer and neurodegeneration. This strategy can be used to build and implement systems that allow discovery and prioritization of key target genes and processes in involved in cancer and drug resistance. Dr. Hide has been funded by key industry partners, including Biogen Inc., to develop translational pipelines for target prioritization.
Prof. Teng is Co-Director, Neurotrauma Recovery Research and Director, Laboratory of SCI, Stem Cell Biology & Recovery Neurobiology Research, Departments of PM&R and Neurosurgery, Harvard Medical School/Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Network. He investigates Functional Multipotency of Stem Cells and Recovery Neurobiology through multimodal approaches that integrate stem cell biology, neural and glial biology, chemical and genetic engineering, molecular pharmacology, and neural oncology. Work of his team has received the prestigious Apple Award of the American Spinal Injury Association (2011), the ERF New Investigator Award from the Foundation of PM&R (2004), and the Mayfield Award and Larson Research Award of the CNS/AANS Joint Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves (2012, 2015 & 2016). Prof. Teng reviews for >50 academic and clinical journals and holds study section membership of the NIH, VA, DoD, European Union academic organizations, research and education institutions, and scientific and academic foundations. He was elected President (2013-2014) of the American Society for Neural Therapy and Repair.
Mark Tricklebank is a behavioural neuroscientist/psychopharmacologist who graduated with a joint honours degree f in Psychology and biochemistry in 1971.from the NorthEast London PolytechnicHe then took a Masters degree in Neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry and completed a PhD at the University of Manchester in 1975.He then moved into the pharmaceutical industry wher he remained until suffering a serious stroke in 2012.Not wishing to retire he applied for and won a welcome Trust Career Reentry fellowship frworking with Professor Steven Williams in the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciencess,Institute of Psychiatry Psychology and Neuroscience King’s CollegeLondon .Mark was awarded the degree of DSc from the University of Manchester in 2015.and a fellowship from the British pharmacological Society in 2012.His Industry Career took him first to Merrell-Dow,Strasbourg;Merck Sharp and Dohme Harlow; Sandoz,Basel, Novartis,Basel;, Eli Lilly,Windelsham. He is now a Wellcome Career Reentry Fellow at the Insitute of PsychitryPsychology and Neuroscience,King’sCollege.
Dave is an experienced healthcare and life sciences executive, founder and Board member, with deep expertise in market analysis, epidemiology, health economics and commercial due diligence. He is Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Glycyx Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical development company based on the Isle of Man. Glycyx acquires early clinical phase assets, advances their development, and then sells those assets on to international partners in licensing deals or outright divestments. Prior to founding Glycyx Therapeutics, Dave was Managing Partner at Juniper Consulting Group, Inc., a boutique health & life sciences consulting company. He has also made several angel investments in early stage companies and been an advisor and Board member. Dave has worked with many early stage companies, from founding, through seed, Series A and to exit. He has also worked closely with several translational science teams at academic research centres, and research spin outs.
Silvia Cainarca has a strong background in cellular and molecular biology. She developed several functional assays, in particular cell-based assays, for different molecular target classes, using different cell types, including primary cells, readout systems and instrumentations. She has also conducted several Hit-to-Lead programs.
Now she is the responsible of a unit working on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) performing and coordinating activities of genome editing, functional and epigenetic screening. She is author of different scientific publications in high impact factor journals. Project leader for grants financed by the European Community and by National and International funding and Principal Investigator in important collaborations with international clients and partners, in the field of iPS-derived cells.
Paul joined the company in 2012 as head of Cellectricon’s Discovery Services. He previously worked at AstraZeneca (AZ) where he held leadership positions at the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and later at the department of Neuroscience. At the R&D facilities, Paul led teams responsible for ion channel and GPCR profiling in LI-LO phase, mainly on analgesia targets, and most recently a target identification/target validation team focusing on native (human) tissue. Prior to joining AZ, Paul was a Postdoctoral Fellow at School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, USA, studying neurobiology using electrophysiological methods, and a Graduate student in animal physiology at University of Gothenburg, Sweden (1991- 1997).
Nick has over 17 years’ experience in the life science industry and the drug discovery process. He has worked for global pharmaceutical and innovative biotechnology companies. During his career, he has been involved in R&D and production within the cell culture process, working with and developing cellular models from cell lines, primary cells and stem cells to automated processing and was responsible for leading a team producing iPSC banks as part of the European Bank of Induced Pluripotent stem cells (EBiSC). Now as Head of Customer Solutions at Axol Bioscience he oversees Axol’s custom customer projects and wide-ranging technical needs.
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Isabella graduated in Pharmacy from the University of Pavia (Italy) and pursued a Ph.D. in Behavioural Neuroscience at the University Hospital of Tübingen (Germany) in collaboration with the International Max Planck Research School. Her PhD focused on the investigation of GABAergic neurotransmission by combining TMS and EEG under the administration of drugs with well-known modes of action. In 2014, after joining the Richardson Lab at King’s College London, she established a new TMS-EEG facility within King’s College Hospital.
Her work showed that TMS-EEG can measure GABA-mediated processes and the pharmacological effects of several drugs acting in the human brain. She incorporated TMS-EEG in first-in-human clinical trials of new anti-epileptic drugs to obtain pharmacodynamic readouts of drug activity. Her research aims to develop TMS-EEG predictors and markers of treatments and of the pathophysiology of brain disorders.
M. Chiappalone graduated in Electronic Engineering (summa cum laude) in 1999 and obtained a PhD in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from University of Genova (Italy) in 2003. In 2002 she has been visiting scholar at Northwestern University in Chicago (USA). After a Post Doc at the University of Genova, in 2007 she joined the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) as a Post Doc. In 2013 she got a Researcher position in the same Institution. In 2015 she has been Visiting Professor at Kansas University (USA), hosted by Prof. RJ. Nudo. From 2012 to 2015 she has been Coordinator of the FET Open European project BrainBow, judged excellent. In 2018, she joined the Rehab Technologies Lab of IIT to coordinate the neuroengineering group. She authored more than 60 Journal publications, more than 60 peer-reviewed Conferences contributions and she gave more than 60 scientific talks at International/National Conferences and Research Institutions. She is also Editor of 2 Books.
Dr. Olaf H.-U. Schröder is a mathematician working in computational neuroscience and pattern recognition with applications for screening technologies in CNS drug discovery. As one of the founders of NeuroProof he is heading the company as CEO. Before joining NeuroProof he developed several software applications in bioinformatics and pattern recognition, e.g. for image recognition, proteomics and spectroscopy. He managed projects in multivariate data analysis in life sciences in commercial and granted projects. He has been working in the field of MEA spike train analysis for more than 20 years now. Supported by PATTERN EXPERT he developed specific data analysis methods for the interpretation of chemically stimulated neuronal networks on micro-electrode arrays together with his co-workers. He presented his results in scientific publications and on international conferences.
Steven Biesmans is Senior Scientist at UCB Biopharma where he is responsible for implementing and managing human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based drug discovery platforms. Prior to UCB, at StemoniX and the SBP Medical Discovery Institute, he developed human iPSC-derived disease models and miniaturized assays for high-throughput phenotypic screening and drug testing. Having established stem cell-based technology systems in academia, biotech and pharma, Steven has over 10 years of preclinical drug discovery experience.
He completed his PhD program at the transnational University Limburg, in collaboration with the Neuroscience department at Janssen Research & Development (Johnson & Johnson) where he studied immune-to-brain communication, (neuro)inflammatory processes and behavioral changes in rodent models of inflammation-associated mood disorders.
His areas of expertise include human stem cell technology, neurological disease modeling, assay miniaturization and target discovery.
Xiao is a co-founder of Cerevance, a company that is discovering new treatments for brain diseases. In her postdoctoral work with Nathaniel Heintz at The Rockefeller University, Xiao developed the NETSseq technology platform, which Cerevance is using to comprehensively profile specific brain cell types using post-mortem human brain tissue. These studies have enabled identification of novel targets for diseases including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Before Rockefeller, she worked on gene expression networks in aging during her PhD work at Stanford University.
Dr Noelle CALLIZOT, PharmD, PhD : Pharmacist and neuro-Pharmacologist, is a well-known expert in research and development of neurodegenerative disease molecules (and more specifically regarding PARKINSON , ALZHEIMER's disease and ALS). She is the co-founder of several strat-ups and biotechs (Neuro-Sys, Neurofit, Neuradom, Neuralia…) and served as Chief Scientific officer in Neuro-Sys since 2013 (date of founding). Dr CALLIZOT’s knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry market (15 years into CROs companies), therapeutic targets and neurodegenerative disease pharmacology make her a specialist of the pharmaceutical development of neuro-active molecules. As Director of the neuropharmacology and pharmaceutical development into a British based company (Cambridge, UK) for more than 7 years, Dr Noelle CALLIZOT has a large understanding of the drug discovery process for central nervous system active molecules up to clinical stages. She actually managed (i) a full program in PD indication (up to clinical phase 2b); (ii) several ALS programs (PoC studies); and (iii) two AD programs (phase 1 and phase 2) as well as several CMT1A programs. She also has a deep knowledge of most of the European biotech and startups that develop neurological programs and setup a wide and strong network over the last 15 years in business development. She was also shareholder and co-founder of Neurofit SAS (CRO based in Strasbourg, France), Neuradom (functional neuro-rehabilitation specialized company), Neuralia (start-up focused on R&D from medicinal plants). Dr Noelle CALLIZOT is an active member for several scientific committees including the AFM-TELETHON (association française contre les myopathies – myopathies diseases French association) focused on pharmacological sessions for 10 years. She is also acted as President “Pharmacological therapy and translational research” commission. She is author of about 30 publications, 3 books and co-inventors of several patents. She acts as well as SAB member into several biotech companies.
Dr Mufti Mahmud received his post–school education in India (B.Sc. from University of Madras and M.Sc. from University of Mysore, both in Computer Science in 2001 and 2003, respectively) and Italy (M.S. in Bionanotechnology from University of Trento and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of Padova in 2008 and 2011, respectively). A recipient of Marie-Curie Fellowship, Dr Mahmud served at various positions in the industry and academia in India, Bangladesh, Italy, Belgium, and the UK - where he is currently a (Senior) Lecturer of Computing and Technology at the Nottingham Trent University. Dr Mahmud’s expertise includes Brain Informatics, Healthcare and Neuroscience Big Data analytics, Advanced Machine Learning applied to Biological data, Assistive Brain–Machine Interfacing, Computational Neuroscience, Personalized and Preventive–Healthcare, Internet of Healthcare Things, Security and Trust Management in Cyber–Physical Systems, and Crowd Analysis. He has published over 65 articles and papers in leading Journals and Conferences and has released two open source tool-boxes (SigMate, and QSpike Tools) for processing and analysis of brain signals. Dr Mahmud is an Editorial Board Member of the Cognitive Computation (Springer-Nature) and Big Data Analytics (BioMed Central, Springer-Nature), and an Associate Editor of the Brain Informatics (SpringerOpen, Springer-Nature) and the IEEE Access journals. As part of dissemination efforts, he has successfully organized numerous special sessions in leading conferences, served many internationally reputed conferences in different capacities (including the IEEE World Congress in Computational Intelligence 2020 as the Coordinating Chair of the Local Organising Committee, Brain Informatics 2020 as General Chair, and IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Healthcare and E-health 2018 and 2019 as Programme Co-Chair), and has served as referee for many high-impact journals.
Prof. Karl Peter Giese is studying synaptic mechanisms that are important for learning and memory and which deteriorate in dementia. In 1992 he received his PhD in Neuroscience at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After a postdoctoral fellowship in the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (USA), he joined University College London as Lecturer in 1998, where he became Reader in 2004. In 2006 he joined King's College London as Prof. of Neurobiology of Mental Health. He has published more than 100 publications and his H-index is 50.
