Meet the speakers
Hieab Adams, MD, PhD
Deptartment of Genetics, Radboud University Medical Center, Njimegen, Netherlands
Latin American Brain Health (BrainLat), Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile
Hieab Adams, MD, PhD, is clinical geneticist and professor of genetic diversity working in the Netherlands, with a joint appointment in Chile. Dr. Adams leads a multidisciplinary research group that aims to unravel how genetic variation is related to health, ranging from functional studies, to bioinformatics, and clinical studies. In 2019, he founded the UNITED consortium, a global collaboration that aims to understand ethnic differences in neurodegeneration.
Hugo J. Aparicio, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Neurology, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine
Boston University Center for Brain Recovery, Boston, MA
The research interests of Hugo J. Aparicio, MD, MPH, include the identification of lifestyle risk factors, biomarkers, neuroimaging markers and genetic influences associated with cerebrovascular diseases. He is particularly interested in the contributions of vascular risk factors to stroke, brain injury and aging, cognitive dysfunction and the development of Alzheimer’s disease and the influence of racial and ethnic disparities on these outcomes.
Joshua Bis, PhD
Senior Research Scientist at the Cardiovascular Health Research Unit at the University of Washington
Joshua Bis, PhD, received his PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health. Dr. Bis’s primary research interest is in understanding the role of genomic variation with traits relevant to cardiovascular health and aging.
Locally, he has pursued these questions within the Cardiovascular Health Study and the Heart and Vascular Health Studies. He is also involved in several large-scale genomics collaborations: he is the co-chair of the CHARGE Research Steering Committee, and participates in working groups in the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) consortium, Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project, Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Program and in the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP).
In these settings, his work has focused on analysis methods, drug-gene interactions, clinical and subclinical atherosclerosis, cardiovascular risk factors and a broad range of neurological traits including stroke, brain imaging endophenotypes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Xavier Bledsoe, MD/PhD Candidate
Vanderbilt
Xavier Bledsoe aims to positively impact heart health in their community as a physician scientist. For them, this means treating patients in need as a clinician while advancing the state of scientific knowledge as a scientist. As a fifth-year trainee in the joint MD/PhD program at Vanderbilt University, he is committed to a clinical career in pediatric cardiology with an academic focus centered on integrating population genetics with precision medicine.
His interest in genetics developed during their undergraduate studies when he conducted genomic research in the lab of Dr. Christina Gurnett at Washington University in St. Louis where he used in vitro models to interrogate the cellular effects of rare variants in children with skeletal abnormalities. He grew proficient in these techniques, eventually contributing to publications detailing functional evidence for the pathogenicity of several SNPs. In collaboration with several talented post-doctoral scientists, he learned techniques in high-throughput cellular genetics, systematic mutagenesis and computational data analysis which he actively uses in lab. He has developed a vested interest in exploring the ever-expanding toolkit of biological and computational methods in human genetics. He has been captivated by the utility of genetic approaches in describing molecular bases for the lived experiences of patients.
Jan Bressler, PhD
Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health
Dan Chasman, PhD
Director of Computational Biology at the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
Sarah Childs, PhD
Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Calgary, Canada
Sarah Childs, PhD, is interested in the genetics and development of the vascular system, in both normal development as well as the mechanisms by which mutations in key genes result in defects. Dr. Childs has been instrumental in discovering signals for normal vascular patterning (the PlexinD1-semaphorin guidance system in endothelial cells), angiogenic growth (βPix-Pak2a-integrinαv-Git1 interactions in cerebral vascularization) and vascular stabilization (Sonic hedgehog pathway regulation of a transcriptional network including FoxF2, Nkx3.1, Tbx18 in neural crest lineages to form pericytes and smooth muscle cells).
Each of these projects uses the zebrafish as a genetic model to probe pathways, starting from a gene essential for normal development and connecting interacting genes to understand the mechanism at the cellular level. She also has a consistent track record of connecting basic research to human genetic disease, starting with liver disease as an early postdoc through stroke in our current human research.
Stéphanie Debette, MD PhD
Director of Univ. Bordeaux – Inserm U1219 Bordeaux Population Health research center
Founding director of the Hospital-University Institute (IHU) Precision and global Vascular Brain
Health Institute (VBHI)
Margaret E. Flanagan, MD
Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at UT Health San Antonio
Bernard Fongang, PhD
Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Health San Antonio
Bernard Fongang, PhD, received his PhD in Computational Physics at the University of Le Mans (France) and was trained as Bioinformatician and Computational Biologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. Fongang has expertise in Genomics/transcriptomics profiling, Biostatistics, and big data analysis. He has served as lead Bioinformatician in several projects, including the genomics of somites formation in vertebrates, and the genomics and proteomics profiling of burn healing, involving thousands of burn patients recruited around the country and in Mexico. His current research focuses on developing and applying multi-omics approaches to delineate neurodegenerative diseases’ basis. This involves collecting new data across Texas or using collaborative data obtained through big consortia like the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE), the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP), and the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed). He firmly believes that a comprehensive understanding of the preclinical stage of dementia could give a window of opportunities for interventions that could ultimately delay the onset, slow down the progression, or treat dementia. Achieving that will require interpretation of molecular intricacy and variations at multiple levels, including the genome, transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, metabolome and exposome. His projects aim to determine and characterize the molecular mechanisms and features associated with the development of dementia. He will lead the current project, along with Dr. Seshadri and NJamnshi, leading the STAC and BRAIN components, respectively. Moreover, he will perform multi-omics analyses and develop AI/ML pipelines to determine drivers of the associations between the gut microbiome and AD/ADRD in French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa.
Myriam Fornage, PhD
Professor of Molecular Medicine and Human Genetics at the
Myriam Fornage, PhD, leads an active research program dedicated to identifying novel genes influencing vascular and neurodegenerative diseases of the aging brain such as Alzheimer’s Disease and stroke. Dr. Fornage has a particular interest in the multi-omic analysis of neuroimaging endophenotypes of these conditions. Her training is in human genetics and genetic epidemiology applied to cardiovascular disease. She has extensive experience in the analysis of large-scale genomic data. As PI or co-Investigator on several NIH grants, she has conducted genome-wide association studies, gene expression and DNA methylation profiling, and metabolomics and proteomics studies that have led to the identification of novel genes for traits and diseases of the aging brain in diverse populations. She participates in large national and international consortia. In particular, she is an active investigator in the NeuroCHARGE Consortium, the NIA-ADSP, and the NHLBI TOPMed program, where she leads projects on behalf of large NHLBI-funded longitudinal studies (ARIC, CARDIA, and HCHS/SOL) and chair or co-chair working groups. In summary, she has a demonstrated record of leadership and accomplished and productive research in highly-collaborative environments.
Marios K. Georgakis, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator (“Stroke Precision Lab”) and Clinician Scientist at the Institute for Stroke and Dementia (ISD) at the LMU Munich, Munich, Germany
Visiting Scientist at the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MAssachusets
Hans Grabe, MD
Professor at the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany
In the first part of the career of Hans Grabe, MD, (1994-2002) he was mainly engaged in family studies of obsessive-compulsive disorder, studies on personality traits, emotion-regulation. Since 1998, Dr. Grabe became increasingly active in the field of genetic epidemiology and became the leading researcher of genetic epidemiology at Greifswald University and contributed actively to our epidemiological cohorts and our research net. He has been funded for my family-based research in OCD, gene-environment interaction in depression, for genome-wide association studies, for a longitudinal family study on substance abuse and for research in the field of individualized medicine. Since 2010, the University Medicine of Greifswald and my research group are members of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders (DZNE) and we are conducting a large field trail on dementia care in Germany (Delphi). Since 2008 he has been active in international consortia like CHARGE, Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and ENIGMA for genomic research in brain imaging. He is the advisor of the FinnBrain study at Turku University, Finland. He is actively involved as coordinator and vice-spokesman in our epidemiological and clinical cohorts (Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP) and GANI_MED). Dr. Grabe’s research group is currently focusing on multi-OMICS data analysis in neurodegenerative disorders and aging. They are analyzing genomic, gene-expression and metabolomics data and are involved in the development of new algorithms for MRI-data analyses.
Oscar Harari, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington in St. Louis
Oscar Harari, PhD, is a bioinformatician with expertise in single-cell omics, machine learning and data science. Dr. Harari’s research is focused on the identification of genetic and genomic factors implicated in complex neurodegenerative traits, in particular Alzheimer’s Disease. In his lab, they employ big data and bioinformatics approaches to generate testable hypotheses about the etiology of neurodegeneration. Their goal is to provide novel insights that help the development of novel and effective targeted therapeutic interventions.
In the past, he has employed traditional AD biomarkers (i.e. Cerebrospinal fluid Aβ and tau) to identify novel CSF proteins associated with neurodegeneration and used these biomarkers to perform genomewide association studies, which identified novel common disease-associated variants. He has employed polygenic risk models to study the extent of overlap of genetic architecture among distinct clinical manifestations of AD and rare variants that confer protection against AD.
Transcriptomic profiles can provide additional insights about the altered molecular pathways that lead to disease. His group has leveraged high-throughput transcriptomic data (bulk RNA-seq) from a large number of AD donors and cohorts. He has employed digital deconvolution methods to analyze how genetic factors associated with AD alter brain cellular population structure.
More recently they are leveraging latest single-cell and spatially resolved molecular approaches to study neurodegeneration. These are powerful emergent approaches to interrogate the underlying genomic or transcriptomic landscape of the cellularlycomplex human brain.
Dr. Harari is an MPI of multiple NIH-funded studies where they are coupling single-cell and spatially resolved transcriptomics from human, mouse and iPS-derived cells to study the impact on the neurovascular unit in neurodegeneration and determine sex differences in AD at the single-cell resolution. He has the privilege to lead a multicultural, diverse and vibrant team of scientists from Washu, that works close with scientists from our institution and nationwide in addition to international collaborators.
Jayandra Jung Himali, PhD /strong>
Associate Professor at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and the Department of Population Health Sciences at UT Health San Antonio
Jayandra Jung Himali, PhD, also serves as an adjunct Associate Professor of Neurology and Biostatistics at the Boston University’s School of Medicine and of Public Health and as an investigator at the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). Dr. Hamali has been engaged in collaborative public health research and teaching for over fifteen years, working with UT Health San Antonio, FHS and other national and international researchers investigating clinical and sub-clinical neurological outcomes including MRI measures of brain structure, cognition, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Some of the core objectives of his work includes research project conceptualization, advising on study design, conducting or supervising statistical analyses, assisting with interpretation and communication of findings and co-authoring publications for an array of research studies at UT Health San Antonio, FHS and across several cross-cohort collaborations.
A large amount of his research focuses on sleep, diet, plasma and MRI biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. He serves as a contact PI of a multi-PI effort on a sleep consortium which brings together five large community-based cohorts to study Contributions of sleep to preclinical and clinical Alzheimer’s. He is co-PI of another multi-PI efforts with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) – neuroinflammatory biomarkers (NB). This consortium aims to validate plasma NB for differential dementia diagnosis. He is also involved with several other consortia including: MarkVCID, the largest consortium for the development of biomarkers for vascular cognitive impairment, an initiative to study Cognitively Healthy Nonagenarians in the Cross Cohort Collaboration (CCC) and the Dynamic Dementia Risk Prediction Pooling Project (DRPP) to develop an accurate and personalized, dynamic dementia risk prediction model to identify high risk individuals.
He supervises, co-mentors and provides support to collaborators with a wide range of experience in epidemiology and biostatistics, including doctoral students, resident scientists and junior and senior investigators. His collaborative research experiences, thus far, as a PI, lead biostatistician, mentor, researcher or an ancillary investigator in numerous projects in different settings have prepared me well to provide significant contributions for the present proposal. He is thrilled to be a part of this initiative.
Honghuang Lin, PhD
Professor of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School
Honghuang Lin, PhD, is a data scientist with extensive experience in multi-omics analysis and machine learning modeling. As a Co-Director of the Program in Digital Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School, Dr. Lin has been fully engaged in the collection, cleaning and analysis of genetics and mobile health (mHealth) data. They are the PI/MPI of multiple externally funded projects to build machine learning models to study the heterogeneity and risk of Alzheimer’s. They are leading a mHealth study to explore various digital technologies to continually assess cognitive health in high-risk participants recruited from Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and Bogalusa Heart Study. They are also developing novel statistical methods to facilitate the discovery of genetic mechanisms and integrate multi-omics data to understand the interplay of genomic and environmental factors and their joint effects on complex diseases.
Akram A. Hosseini, MD, PhD, MRCP
Neurologist Lead for Nottingham Young-Onset Dementia Services; Clinical Lead for the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR, UK) Neurodegenerative Disorders in East Midlands
Akram A. Hosseini, MD, PhD, is a Specialist Register (Board Certified) neurologist who has been leading Early Onset Alzheimer’s and Dementia Clinics, the tertiary referral centre in the UK East Midland. Dr. Hosseini has been working on structural and functional neuroimaging correlates of Alzheimer’s and vascular cognitive disorders, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), UK and the UK Research and Innovation. I hold the Clinical Academic Research Partnership Award from the UK Research and Innovation (Reference MR/T005580/1) to conduct 7T MRI studies on Alzheimer’s and neurodegenerative disorders. As a member of the UK 7T Network, they utilise the Ultrahigh Field MRI at 7T for clinical studies on neurodegenerative disorders (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04992975). He leads a prospective cohort study of Early Onset ADRD with deep clinical phenotyping and biosamples including DNA, blood and cerebrospinal fluid biobank (Cognitive and neuroImaging for neuroDegenerative disorders; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03861884). The collaboration with the CNS-SARS-CoV2 Consortium enabled me to link the UK 7T Network with the expert centres internationally and to shape the ground for the 7T COVID Consortium (which is financially supported by the National Institute of Aging; NIH-R56AG074467).
Jenny Hsieh, PhD
Semmes Distinguished Chair in Cell Biology and Department Chair and Professor of Neuroscience in Developmental and Regenerative Biology at the University of Texas at San Antonio
The lab of Jenny Hsieh, PhD, has a productive track record of investigation to understand the mechanisms that promote neural stem cell self-renewal and differentiation in embryonic and adult brain. Using mouse models, video-EEG monitoring, viral techniques and imaging/electrophysiological approaches, Dr. Hsieh has pioneered work showing aberrant new neuron integration in adult rodent hippocampus contributes to circuit disruption and seizure development. More recently her lab has applied our expertise to study genetic mechanisms underlying childhood epilepsy as well as neurodegenerative disorders using human iPSC/brain organoid models. She has published over 56 original papers and reviews on these topics (h-index 35; i10-index 54) and her research program has been continuously funded by NIH since 2009.
Her research focuses on the mechanisms that promote neural stem cell self-renewal and differentiation in embryonic and adult brain. Using mouse models, video-EEG monitoring, viral techniques and imaging/electrophysiological approaches, she pioneered work showing aberrant new neuron integration in adult rodent hippocampus contribute to circuit disruption and seizure development (Cho et al., 2015; Brulet et al., 2017; Varma et al., 2019; Lybrand et al., 2021). Her lab was also the first to elucidate the key role of transcriptional/epigenetic regulators, such as REST, NeuroD1, MEF2, and histone deacetylases in maintaining a pool of quiescent adult neural stem cells and transition to neuronal fate (Hsieh et al., 2004, Gao et al., 2009, Gao et al., 2011). By unraveling the mechanisms of adult neurogenesis, her lab hopes to apply this knowledge to develop new therapeutic targets for seizure disorders. More recently, her lab is among the first to use CRISPR/Cas9 in human cerebral organoids to understand the role of the retinoblastoma protein (RB), a tumor suppressor gene, in an organoid model of brain development (Matsui et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2020). Moreover, they are using human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) cells and 3D brain organoids to model pathology associated with genetic mutations and virus infections (Varma et al., 2020; McMahon et al., 2021).
In addition to my research program, she is the founding director of the UTSA Brain Health Consortium. The UTSA Brain Health Consortium is comprised of 68 researchers leveraging their expertise in neurodegenerative disease, brain circuits and electrical signaling, traumatic brain injury, regenerative medicine, neuroinflammation, drug design and psychology to collaborate on large-scale research projects that will produce a greater understanding of the brain’s complexity and the factors that cause its decline. A key resource for the UTSA Brain Health Consortium, she established the UTSA Stem Cell Core, which is an official University of Texas system core for providing turnkey services for iPSC reprogramming and regulatory support and coordination.
Jennifer Huffman, PhD
Senior Research Scientist at the Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research & VA Palo Alto Health Care System at Palo Alto, California
Broadly, the scientific interest of Jennifer Huffman, PhD, is addressing human health outcomes using computational genetics. By utilizing robust statistical approaches for genomic analysis of risk factors for cardiovascular disease, we can better understand the underlying causal pathways to disease. Dr. Huffman’s particular areas of interest relate to blood clotting, including both blood cell characteristics and hemostasis – the balance between too much and too little blood clotting. When this balance is disrupted, it can lead to disease at either end of the spectrum, with atherothrombotic stroke and venous thromboembolism at one end, and bleeding disorders at the other.
With the large array of ‘omic data currently available, integration across platforms is essential to further understanding of biological pathways to disease. Starting with their dissertation work, and into my post-doctoral training, they have been keen to employ these methods and strategies. The focus of their dissertation work was the integration of genomic and glycomic data, to better understand genes that control human N-glycosylation (one of the most common post-translational modifications). In addition to the discovery of new genes, this also led to the discovery of a new biomarker for Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY). One of my postdoctoral projects focused on the integration of genomic with platelet and leukocyte transcriptomic data which resulted in the largest platelet eQTL study to-date and the discovery of a novel platelet trans-eQTL which has been taken into mouse knockout and cell-based studies for confirmation.
Over the last 10 years they have been leading, coordinating, and collaborating on the analysis of large genomic datasets. As a key contributor to leading computational genetics consortiums, they have been applying methodologies for ‘omic dataset integration and use of cloud computing for over 8 years. They have led several collaborative projects as both the lead analyst and first author on resulting publications, and collaborated on many more. Through their work in the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genetic Epidemiology (CHARGE) consortium, particularly within the Hemostasis Working Group, they led the exome array analysis of fibrinogen, factor VII, factor VIII and von Willebrand which was recently published in Blood.
Timothy Hughes, PhD
Associate Professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
The research of Timothy Hughes, PhD, focuses on elucidating the relationships between vascular disorders and brain health with specific focus given to brain abnormalities commonly seen in ‘normal’ brain aging, Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. This collaborative work has identified mechanisms related to vascular dysregulation that may promote dementia pathologic processes, through cerebral small vessel disease, atrophy, tau and β-amyloid accumulation. Dr. Hughes’ approach to research builds upon my training in aging, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular epidemiology, multimodal neuroimaging and neuroepidemiology. His research brings together my experience with non-invasive techniques used to measure subclinical vascular disease commonly used in cardiovascular studies (e.g. pulse wave velocity and coronary calcium) and the multimodal neuroimaging techniques, including PET and MRI. They have described novel associations relating cardiometabolic risk factors (e.g. cholesterol metabolism pathways, blood pressure, and arterial stiffness) with evidence of cerebral small vessel disease, atrophy and other dementia-related pathology in the brains of older adults. As a result of this line of research, he serves as the PI for multi-site and multi-ethnic studies of vascular contributions to dementia in the ACE clinical trial, ARIC and MESA cohorts. His overarching research goal is to identify early molecular signatures, modifiable risk factors and novel prevention strategies for age-related cognitive dysfunction and dementia in ethnically diverse populations.
Mohammad Arfan Ikram, MD, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology at Erasmus MC Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health
Mohammad Arfan Ikram, MD, PhD, is the principal investigator of the Rotterdam Study and a key collaborator in the CHARGE (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology) consortium. Dr. Ikram’s research focuses on investigating the etiology of neurologic diseases in the elderly, with a particular focus on dementia, Alzheimer’s and healthy brain aging. The main areas of research are to elucidate the earliest signs of brain diseases, before clinical symptoms are present and to understand how these lead to clinical manifestation of disease. Moreover, they are interested in preclinical signs and systemic comorbidities that can be used to identify persons at highest risk of developing disease. More recently, they have expanded their research interests to focus on Healthy Longevity at large and determinants of Health care and Health care utilization.
For their research, they have used data from the large population-based Rotterdam Study and Rotterdam Scan Study that have followed nearly 15,000 persons for a period of nearly 30 years. A main focus on their research has been the use of MRI-imaging to understand brain disease. Also, they have used neuropsychological testing, genome- wide, exome chip, DNA-methylation and sequencing technologies, and recently electronic gait assessments. Not only are they interested in how these pre-clinical markers lead to clinical disease, they also want to disentangle the intricate relationships between these markers.
They are also active in various local and national research infrastructures, including EraCORe (clinic-based COVID- 19 cohort study), BBMRI-NL, Health-RI, X-omics, and Netherlands Cohorts Consortium. I have published over 1,050 international scientific papers (H-index = 113) and currently head a research group of 15 PhD-students, 3 post-docs, 3 MSc-students, and 5 research staff.
Xueqiu Jian, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor at the Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and Department of Population Health Sciences at UT Health San Antonio
Xueqiu Jian, PhD, MPH, is an early-stage investigator in the field of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (AD/ADRD). Dr. Jian has a background in medicine and public health, with specific training in genetic epidemiology of human complex traits related to cerebrovascular disease and brain aging. Their current research focuses on the identification of heritable factors and characterization of underlying mechanisms influencing the risk of AD/ADRD using genomics and multi-omics approaches in large, representative human samples. They have been actively involved in large collaborative AD/ADRD genomics projects within the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) consortium, Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP), Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program, Texas Alzheimer’s Research and Care Consortium (TARCC), International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP) and UK Biobank. They are the PI of two active research grants and a key member of the Genetics and Multiomics Core of the NIA-designated South Texas Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC). The present R03 application is essentially related to and an extension of their prior work to accrue pilot data for a future larger study. In summary, they have the motivation, expertise and resources essential to successfully carry out the proposed project.
Yoichiro Kamatani, MD, PhD
Professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo
Yoichiro Kamatani, MD, PhD, is also member of the steering committee of the BioBank Japan (BBJ, https://biobankjp.org/en/index.html ). Previously, Dr. Kamatani was a team leader at RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences and the head of statistical genetics analyses for BBJ. He conducted and co-authored several peer-reviewed journal articles about the genome-wide association studies of large non-European genetic data set. After that he joined Kyoto University and contributed to the construction of national registry for rare diseases called RADDAR-J (https://www.raddarj.org/en/). His main research interest is to identify similarities and differences of genetic susceptibility factors for diseases, and contribute to the development of equitable genomic medicine.
Tiffany Kautz, PhD
Assistant Professor at the Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Health San Antonio
Tiffany Kautz, PhD, has a strong, decade-long background in RNA virology research. Since coming to UT Health San Antonio in July 2019, Dr. Kautz has led the research lab activities at the Biggs Institute and independently started the Biggs Biobank, which focuses upon collecting and storing biological samples from our clinical patients and research participants. To support the various clinical studies and human research studies, she regularly oversees the processing of samples and running of neurodegenerative and inflammatory biomarker assays, such as Quanterix assays, MSD assays and ELISAs. She also manages the RedCap and Freezerworks databases that they use to track participant information and biological samples. As the lab director, she routinely provides laboratory services to clinical investigators at UT Health San Antonio, such as protocol advice, blood processing, freezer storage and downstream sample processing and analysis.
Honghuang Lin, PhD
Professor of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School
Honghuang Lin, PhD, is a data scientist with extensive experience in multi-omics analysis and machine learning modeling. As a Co-Director of the Program in Digital Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School, Dr. Lin has been fully engaged in the collection, cleaning and analysis of genetics and mobile health (mHealth) data. They are the PI/MPI of multiple externally funded projects to build machine learning models to study the heterogeneity and risk of Alzheimer’s. They are leading a mHealth study to explore various digital technologies to continually assess cognitive health in high-risk participants recruited from Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and Bogalusa Heart Study. They are also developing novel statistical methods to facilitate the discovery of genetic mechanisms and integrate multi-omics data to understand the interplay of genomic and environmental factors and their joint effects on complex diseases.
Gladys Maestre, MD, PhD
Professor of Neuroscience and Human Genetics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Gladys Maestre, MD, PhD serves as the Core Co-Leader for the Health Disparities Research and Recruitment Innovation Core. In this capacity, Dr. Maestre provides expertise on critical aspects required for successful completion of the goals of the Core, such as community change, community engagement and recruitment activities in underrepresented populations and development or resources tailored to these populations. To achieve these objectives, she leverages her experience as PI of the Maracaibo Aging Study, where she has developed a unique community-based cohort of Hispanic individuals who have undergone in-depth neuropsychological assessments (including computerized tested), neuroimaging and cardiovascular traits and we have followed them since 1997. Also, as PI on a number of NIA–funded grants, she uses her experience in research focused on cultural, educational and genetic risks for Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline, as well as cognitive function and health among minorities and ethnically diverse populations across the life span. She has gained expertise in recruitment, longitudinal follow-up, characterization of biological, genetic, neuroimaging and environmental risk factors and data analysis of large, ethnically diverse community-based cohorts. She has also supported several health application development for people living with cognitive disabilities. She has successfully administered diverse projects and have been responsible for analyzing and communicating results of longitudinal studies that she has le led. Currently, she is the Director of the Rio Grande Valley Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (PI Maestre P30AG059305) where we support early-career investigators to advance the study of Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders in Hispanics. She is also the Co-Director of the South Texas ADRC (PI Seshadri, mPI Maestre, 1P30AG066546-01A1), where they focus on novel precision, personalized medicine approaches to educate, support and improve prevention, treatment and care for patients with AD and related dementias. As a result of these experiences, she is aware of the importance of frequent communication among project members, particularly between distributed collaborators, senior and junior investigators and of constructing realistic plans, timelines and budgets. Her background and experience, particularly in leading community-based cohorts of minorities in low-resource settings, makes her well qualified to serve as a Core Co-Leader of the Health Disparities Research and Recruitment Innovation Core of the ALZ-NET.
Marta Marquié MD, PhD
Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Big Data applied to Neurology Program at Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona
Marta Marquié, MD, PhD, is a neurologist specialist in cognitive disorders with extensive clinical and research experience in Spain and the United States. She trained as a researcher at Mass General Hospital – Harvard Medical School from 2010-2017, where she performed her PhD studies focused on the postmortem validation of tau PET tracer Flortaucipir and obtained the John H Growdon Clinical Research fellowship.
Dr. Marquié is currently the Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Big Data applied to Neurology Program at Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona, which she combines with clinical practice visiting patients with cognitive disorders at the Memory Clinic. She is also an associate professor of the Medicine Department at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya.
She has obtained research funding from the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship from the Horizon2020 program and coordinates several research projects at Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona. Her main research interests include neuropathology, PET imaging of the brain, retinal imaging and preclinical stages of AD.
Debora Melo van Lent, PhD
Assistant Professor in Nutrition Science and Epidemiology at the Biggs Insitute
Debora Melo van Lent, PhD, has a passion to investigate the role of nutrition – from micronutrients to dietary patterns- on neurodegenerative disease related outcomes. The current application builds on her ongoing dietary pattern analysis work. Dr. Melo van Lent has been successful in receiving multiple competitive grants as a postdoc: NIH-NIA R03 grant (2020), Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship (2022) and an ASPEN Rhoads Research foundation grant (2019). Moreover, she produced 24 peer-reviewed publications – including 7 first author publications – published in journals such as Nature Genetics, JAMA Psychiatry and Alzheimer’s and Dementia. In addition she is collaborating with Dr. Sudha Seshadri and others: (1) providing my expertise on the use of dietary assessment methods, (2) conducting consortia research projects such as leading the MIND diet, brain and dementia project within the “Cross Cohort Collaboration” (PI Seshadri 1RF1AG059421), leading a dietary intake assessment effort and carrying out dietary pattern analysis projects for the Diverse Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia consortium and being the project manager for the Fatty Acids and Outcomes Research Consortium. Further, (3) she is the chair of the Nutrition Metabolism and Dementia (NMD) Profession Interest Area (PIA) Executive Committee of the International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment (ISTAART). She has organized webinars and contributed to two white papers, including one on personalized nutrition among others. The field of Nutrition Epidemiology is advancing, and novel concepts are emerging to combat limitations of group level dietary intake assessment methods. Therefore, in her new position as Assistant Professor she is going to extend her area of research by adding individual level (blood biomarkers) data – using the novel concept of personalized nutrition – to group level (food frequency questionnaire) data to objectify the MIND diet with metabolomic signatures. This will allow her to deepen our understanding of which “MIND diet signature metabolites” are involved in the underlying pathways that may decrease the risk for dementia and generate evidence to optimize levels of metabolites through dietary intake.