Industry Day 2017 Conference.
October 20, 2017
Stephen H. Koslow, PhD
Former Director, Division of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience
Founding Director of the Office of Neuroinformatics
National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Stephen H. Koslow received a B.S. from Columbia University (NY, NY), a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and performed post-doctoral training at the Karolinska Institute. Dr. Koslow has over 129 publications and has a long standing history with the NIH/NIMH. Dr. Koslow was project director of the Clinical Research Branch Collaborative Program on the psychobiology of depression-biological studies. He was the founding branch chief of the Neuroscience Research Branch of the Division of Extramural Research. He rose through the ranks as Deputy Director of Basic Brain and Behavioral Research to Director of the Division of Basic and Clinical Neurosciences at NIMH. He was the founding Director of the Office of Neuroinformatics as a new NIMH office and funding unit created under his leadership. After his retirement from the NIH in 2004, Dr. Koslow was the Director for the Allen Institute for Brain Research, BRAINet foundation, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, MyBrainSolutions, Otsuka America Pharmaceutical Inc, and founded Biomedical Synergy. Dr. Koslow has received many accolades in his lifetime of achievements such as: awards from the NIMH, NIH Director’s Award, President’s Award, and the Distinguished Service Award from the University of Chicago.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Leah A. Krubitzer, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for Neuroscience
University of California - Davis
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Dr. Leah Krubitzer is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. She received a BS at Penn State University in Communication Disorders and a PhD in Psychology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville Tennessee. Her graduate work, under the mentorship of Dr. Jon Kaas focused on the evolution of visual cortex in primates. Her interest in the evolution of the neocortex was extended in her postdoctoral work at the University of Queensland, Australia to include a variety of mammals such as monotremes and marsupials. While in Australia she performed comparative analysis on the neocortex of a variety of different species and to date has worked on the brains of over 37 mammals. Her current research focuses on the impact of early experience on the cortical phenotype, and she specifically examines the effects of the sensory environment on the development of connections, functional organization and behavior in normal and visually impaired mammals. She also examines the evolution of sensory motor networks involved in manual dexterity, reaching and grasping in mammals. She received a MacArthur award for her work on evolution.
Oswald R. Crasta, PhD
Genomic Breeding Lead and R&D Fellow
Dow AgroSciences, Indianapolis, IN
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Dr. Oswald Crasta is a R&D Fellow at Dow AgroSciences (DAS) and leads the Genomic Breeding Program in DAS Crops. Dr. Crasta is a molecular geneticist with a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University and post-graduate work at Texas Tech and Purdue Universities. Dr. Crasta has over 29 years of research experience in both industry and academia in the areas of plant biotechnology, genomics, bioinformatics pharmaceutics and agronomy. He previously worked as Associate Director of Trait Discovery at Chromatin Inc., Principal Scientist and Project Director at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute; and Project Leader at CuraGen Corporation with research focused on developing and applying genomic technologies and cyberinfrastructure capabilities to crop improvement, bioenergy-feedstocks, and human health in collaboration with big pharma. He is an inventor on 15 issued patents and co-author of over 50 scientific publications. Dr. Crasta has served as Principal Investigator on several extramurally funded grants from NIH, NSF, and other sources. His career goal is to use an integrated and transdisciplinary research approach for the discovery and validation of targets for biotechnological applications.
Scott I. Simon, PhD
Professor and Vice Chair for Research
Department of Biomedical Engineering
University of California - Davis
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Dr. Scott Simon is the Vice Chair for Research of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis and is Deputy Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. He was an Established Investigator of the AHA and is a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and is currently Vice President of Science Policy for FASEB. Dr. Scott’s research focus is on immune cell function in diseases associated with acute and chronic inflammation. His laboratory was the first to discover the signaling functions of L-selectin and E-selectin. More recently, his group has developed novel microfluidic vascular mimetic lab-on-a-chip systems that provide real time imaging of force and molecular dynamics in leukocyte-endothelial interactions under defined shear stress. These vasculature-on-a-chip devices are used to study basic functions of endothelium and leukocyte interactions, but are also test beds for assessing new anti-inflammatory drug candidates.
Willy Wriggers, PhD
Frank Batten Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and
Biomedical Engineering
Batten College of Engineering
Old Dominion University
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Dr. Willy Wriggers is currently the Frank Batten Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Batten College of Engineering, Old Dominion University. After Studies in Physics at University of Regensburg, Germany, Dr. Wriggers earned a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1998, where focused on neural network-based machine learning, simulation, and data analysis. His interest in self-organizing neural networks was extended in San Diego, California (initially at University of California, San Diego and later as a faculty member at The Scripps Research Institute), where he pioneered their use in the development of atomic models from 3D electron microscopy images. Dr. Wriggers received multiple awards for his early career work, including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology. In 2003 he moved to the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. In 2007 he joined the D. E. Shaw Research laboratory in New York City, where he developed statistical analytics methods for the Anton special purpose supercomputer, a runner up of the Science Magazine Breakthrough of the Year 2010. In 2014 Dr. Wriggers returned to academia to focus on neural network-based machine learning, data analysis and neuroscience imaging. Specifically, Dr. Wriggers developed a statistical analytics for generating dynamic heat maps from the information matching of fast and slow degrees of freedom arising in the brain. The visualized brain dynamics locates areas of speech production and perception on the brain of epilepsy patients who had an intracranial EEG electrode array implanted on the cortex. The information theoretic method is of general applicability in multi-modal imaging and big data applications where time-dependent signals should be transformed to dynamic 3D images.
J. Steven Alexander, PhD
Professor, Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology
LSU Health Sciences Center - Shreveport
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Dr. J. Steven Alexander received his B.A. degree in Biology and Ph.D. in Vascular Physiology from Boston University, followed by Post-doctoral studies in Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Joining the faculty at the LSU Health Sciences Center – Shreveport in 1994, Dr. Alexander has risen through the ranks and has held the position of Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology since 2009. Dr. Alexander has spent his research career investigating vascular physiology and pathophysiology and stem cell – vascular and tissue restorative mechanisms in tissue injury and repair. Recently, his laboratory has focused on applying human and mouse stem cell cultures to protect tissues against ischemic injury and as tissue progenitor sources in bioprosthetic tissue engineering and reconstruction. Dr. Alexander’s laboratory has developed innovative technologies in this area, evaluating synthetic surgical meshes, blood vessels, bladder and ureteral devices and bone substitutes using many molecular and biomedical engineering approaches. Dr. Alexander has published over 260 manuscripts, has served on several study sections, and currently serves as the President of the International Society for Neurovascular Disease.
Kirk St. Amant, PhD
Professor, Department of English
Eunice C. Williamson Endowed Chair in Technical Communication
Louisiana Tech University
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Kirk St.Amant is a Professor and the Eunice C. Williamson Endowed Chair in Technical Communication at Louisiana Tech University (USA), and he is also an Adjunct Professor of International Health and Medical Communication with the University of Limerick (Ireland). His research focuses on how usability and user-experience design practices can be applied to communication practices and product development processes in health and medical contexts. Kirk has worked on projects for companies such as Medtronic, VERITAS Software, and Unisys, and for the non-profit Humanitarian Demining Information Center (HDIC) and the USAID-sponsored Consortium for the Enhancement of Ukrainian Management Education (CEUME). Kirk is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and is currently vice-chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC). He is also past president of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC) and a past member of the administrative (Executive) Committee of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (IEEE PCS).
