Scientific Advisory Board
Ara S. Khachaturian, PhD
Chair
Ara S. Khachaturian, PhD
Ara S. Khachaturian, PhD (Chairman of INDRC SAB) is Chair and President of the National Biomedical Research Ethics Council (NBREC) a Nevada-based 501(c)(3) tax exempt public charity that leads an international effort to improve clinical and public health research ethics. In addition, he serves as Executive Vice-President of the Campaign to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease 2020 (PAD2020), Maryland-based 501(c)(3) tax exempt public charity that seeks resolution of important challenges facing efforts to combat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders affecting memory, movement and mood. In addition, he serves as the Executive Editor of Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring, and Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translation Research & Clinical Interventions.
Dr. Khachaturian is co-founder of Khachaturian and Associates, an international consulting group on matters related to healthy brain aging. He has over twenty years of experience in the area of epidemiological and clinical research, including specialized experience in complex data analysis and modeling, public health policy, public finance, and government affairs.
Prof. Bruno Vellas, MD, PhD
Prof. Bruno Vellas, MD, PhD
Prof. Bruno Vellas, MD, PhD is Professor of Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine and Geriatric Medicine at the CHUT, and Chief of the Alzheimer’s Disease Clinical and Research Center at the University Hospital Center in Toulouse, France. Prof. Vellas is a member of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, the Chairman of the International Academy on Nutrition and Aging, and Principal Investigator for the European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium.
Prof. Vellas is also the Chairman of the Toulouse Gérontopôle, and member of the Aging Team of the INSERM unit 1027. He is the PI of the European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC) and has published over 300 articles related to Alzheimer’s Disease, especially on disease modifying treatment. He is the PI of several large international trials in the field of Alzheimer’s Disease (GuidAge and MAPT) and is editor in Chief of The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging.
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Wolfgang Wahlster
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Wolfgang Wahlster
Wolfgang Wahlster is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a pioneer of AI in Germany and Europe. As a founding director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and in his role as its long-time CEO and scientific director, he has developed DFKI into one of the world’s largest research institutions in this field with more than 1000 employees by 2019 and more than 100 successful spin-off companies. He has served as an elected President of three international AI organizations: IJCAII, EurAI, and ACL. He is an elected Fellow of AAAI, EurAI, and GI. As a professor at the world-renowned Informatics Campus at Saarland University, he laid some of the foundations for natural language dialog systems, user modelling, and speech-to-speech translation. His current research areas are multimodal dialog systems for human-centered AI and cyber-physical production systems for the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), a concept that he coined in 2010. He currently heads the steering group for a national AI standardization roadmap of the German government and serves the DFKI management board as Chief Executive Advisor (CEA). He is on the Executive Board of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley and a member of the steering board of Germany’s platform for AI. Wahlster is a member of the Nobel Prize Academy in Stockholm, the German National Academy Leopoldina and three other prestigious academies.
For his research, he has been awarded the German Future Prize, the First Class Cross of Merit and the Grand Cross of Merit by the Federal President of Germany. Other awards include four honorary doctorates from universities in Darmstadt, Linkoeping, Maastricht and Prague as well as an Honorary Citizenship of his hometown, Saarbruecken. For his substantial contributions to various fields of AI, Wolfgang Wahlster received the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Award in 2013 and the ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award of the ACM in 2016. As a member of numerous advisory bodies of the German Chancellor and the Federal Government such as the Partners for Innovation, the Research Union and the Data Ethics Commission, he has co-founded innovation platforms such as Industrie 4.0 and Learning Systems. He holds a seat on ten industrial supervisory boards and technical advisory boards of large companies, medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.
Prof. Paolo Maria Rossini, MD
Paolo Maria Rossini
Prof. Paolo Maria Rossini graduated in Medicine and Surgery with honors from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and – after a career developed in prestigious Italian and North American academic and clinical centers – has been a full professor of Neurology since 2011 at the Faculty of Medicine of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and director of the Neuroscience Area of the Policlinico Foundation A. Gemelli. He has published over 600 articles in international scientific journals on the mechanisms of healthy and diseased brain using highly innovative technologies, including those at the base of the NEUROCONNECT project. He is a world expert in the study of cerebral activity neurodegenerative mechanisms through neurophysiological techniques. He was the first and only Italian president of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology since 1949 (year of IFCN foundation, today it aggregates about 20,000 neurophysiologists from over 60 countries all over the world). In recent years, Prof. Rossini’s commitment has been focused on the technological transfer towards the early diagnosis of neurological diseases and towards rehabilitation procedures with non-invasive electromagnetic stimulations of the brain. In this context, dozens of young Italian and foreign researchers have been trained over the years under his supervision and coordination. This interest is now at the service of NEUROCONNECT, which intends to become an incubator of emerging junior scientists whose development will also be ensured by a context of multidisciplinary and integrated sciences: from information technology to biomedical engineering, from neurophysiology to neuropsychology, from modeling to the development of innovative software. Furthermore, the Prof. Rossini – who is a founding member and President of NEUROCONNECT – will coordinate the development strategies for the generation of new services that the spin-off can offer to the client companies.
Menghis Bairu, MD
Menghis Bairu, MD
Menghis Bairu, is a physician, entrepreneur, coach, business executive, editor, author, and philanthropist. He has 30 years of international experience in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, drug delivery and device, global health, and non-profit arenas.
Dr. Bairu is founder, chairman, and CEO of Proxenia Venture Partners, which provides capital, management talent, and access to a global networks of experts to companies in late preclinical and early-stage clinical development in biotechnology that address global challenges and improve patient lives. Most recently, he served as Executive Chairman of Treos Bio, a start-up company that uses computational biology to develop precision cancer immunotherapies tailored to patients’ genetics. In addition, he is Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Serenus Biotherapeutics, an emerging market focused specialty biopharmaceutical company. In that role he raised up to $43 million in series A funding.
Dr. Bairu concurrently served as Executive Vice President, Chief Medical Officer, Head of Global Development for Elan and President/CEO of Speranza Therapeutics. As EVP and CMO, Dr. Bairu was member of the Elan’s Operating Committee. He successfully led corporate R&D due diligence processes that resulted in a transaction with J&J at a value of approximately $1.5 billion. In 2013, he also led corporate R&D due diligence resulting in the sale of Elan to Perrigo for $8.6 billion.
Prior to joining Elan, Dr. Bairu worked at Genentech for more than six years in several managed care, medical, and commercial roles (Rituximab, Herceptin, TNK, tPA, Growth Hormone). He also served on the board of directors of various companies, including One World Health, a non-profit drug development company funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dr. Bairu currently serves as Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine where he lectures on global clinical trials’ design, development, and conduct.
Jean-Marie Charles Bouteiller, PhD
Jean-Marie Charles Bouteiller
Jean-Marie Charles Bouteiller, a Research Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, joined the University of Southern California with a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (from University of Montpellier, FRANCE) to start a PhD in Computational Neuroscience with Prof. Michel Baudry. With this dual competency in Neuroscience and Engineering, he joined in 2002 the laboratory of Prof. Theodore W. Berger to start the development of a unique computational synaptic modeling platform that would take into account the multitude of mechanisms that comprise presynaptic terminal, cleft and postsynaptic spine. This platform has substantially grown throughout the years to include a large number of mechanisms and modulatory pathways as well as astrocytic modulation, while extending its hierarchical structure to span multiple biological scales, from biomolecular mechanisms to synapse, neuron and neuronal network
Dennis Chan, MD, PhD
Dennis Chan, MD, PhD
His academic portfolio spans both clinical and translational AD research. As well as his leading international projects in people at risk of sporadic and familial AD, Dr. Chan collaborates with Professor O’Keefe and other basic neuroscience researchers in UCL and Cambridge on cross-species studies covering both AD mice and human at risk cohorts aiming to elucidate the relationships between spread of pathological tau, disruption of neuronal function and behavioural deficits.
Dr. Chan receives grant funding from Alzheimer’s Research UK, Wellcome , UK National Institute for Health Research and the UK Dementia Research Institute.
Ornit Chiba-Falek, PhD
Ornit Chiba-Falek, PhD
Dr. Chiba-Falek is a Professor and Chief of the Division of Translational Brain Sciences in the Department of Neurology at Duke University School of Medicine and holds a secondary Professor appointment in the Department of Pathology. In addition, she is affiliated with Duke/UNC ADRC and a faculty member in several other Duke centers including, Genomic and Computational Biology (GCB) and the Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS). Recently Dr. Chiba-Falek Co-Founded CLAIRIgene, an early-stage startup company committed to bring gene-targeted epigenome therapies for unmet medical needs in CNS disorders with a focus on neurodegenerative diseases. She received her PhD in Genetics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before pursuing her postdoctoral training at the NIH. Dr. Chiba-Falek joined the faculty at Duke University in 2007.
She has 25+ years of experience in genetics, functional genomics, molecular biology, and neuroscience with expertise in neurodegeneration and translational research. Dr. Chiba-Falek’s lab studies the genetic complexity and epigenomic landscape of age-related neurodegenerative diseases in diverse populations, with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease (AD), related dementia, Parkinson’s disease (PD), and other Lewy body disorders. Her research program is translational and combined in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies towards the development of new genetic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for AD-PD spectrum disorders. Dr. Chiba-Falek has published over 75 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Her research has been continuously funded and she is the PI of several NIH, private foundations, pharmaceutical industry, and philanthropy grants. She currently also serves as the Chief Editor of Frontiers in Molecular Medicine: molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration, and Co-Chair the Neuropsychiatric Syndromes PIA Genomics Work Group and the Alzheimer’s Association Business Consortium (AABC).
Ira Haraldsen, MD, PhD
Ira Haraldsen, MD, PhD
Ira Ronit Hebold Haraldsen, MD, PhD, specialist in Neurology and Psychiatry.
She is the PI and coordinator of AI-Mind (project No. 964220 2021-26), a 14 million Euro Research and Innovation Action (RIA) H2020-SC1-BHC-06-2020 project and Working Package leader in the eBRAINS Health project (2022-2026) as part of the new European Infrastructure strategy of the ESFRI program EBRAINS for the secure research storage of highly sensitive prospective health data in the European Union.
Her career spans from senior consultancy clinical work to clinical department and research group leadership during the last years. Starting her career at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, Germany, she has almost focused her activities on high-risk innovational developments reaching from positron emission tomography tracers to neuronal pruning phenomenon during endocrinological changes. Her research interest is in neuroendocrinology, neurobiology of ageing, and translational innovation project management. She has a proven track record in political lobbying, heading, participating and stimulating several national, EU and transatlantic project activities (ENIGI 2007-2017) Glasgow-Oslo Sheep Study, Cost actions BM1105. and BM1303.
In her positions she has been responsible for innovative planning, developing and administering major national BioTech projects of research on brain aging e.g. today, modernizing memory clinic programs, and testing cutting edge hypotheses in the real world. Most recently she is preparing with the EU flagship project AI-Mind to prepare the next medical care revolution by accelerating neede digitalization and introducing artificial intelligence algorithms technologies in the prediction and monitoring of dementia diseases.mHer experience is critical clinical data curation for AI strategic needs.
Her academic training includes: MD Bonn1984 / Dr. med 1990 Bonn, PhD 2007 University of Oslo, Norway. Specialist in Neurology 1987-1992. Specialist in Psychiatry 1993-1996. Stanford University 1997 – 2000. Senior Consultant, Head of Section and Head of Department positions between 1999-2016. She is now heading the innovative Cognitive Health Research Group (CoHR) at Oslo University Hospital, Norway with emphasis on clinical translational neurobiology of aging & dementia / public policy / politics of sciences / strategic planning / research funding.
Jakub Hort MD, PhD, FEAN
Jakub Hort MD, PhD, FEAN
Dr Hort is Professor of Neurology at Charles University and Motol University Hospital, Prague, Czech Republic. He is PI of the Czech Brain Ageing Study, a unique longitudinal prospective study examining early functional, metabolic and structural biomarkers of Alzheimer ́s Disease and other dementias. Dr. Hort served as chairman of Section on cognitive neurology of the Czech Neurological Society (2014-2020) and as a co-chair of the European Academy of Neurology Scientist Panel Dementia and Cognitive Neurology (2015-2019). Dr. Hort authorized European guidelines on Alzheimer disease and participated in EAN guidelines on non-Alzheimer dementias and combination therapy for Alzheimer disease. Dr. Hort‘s work indicated that spatial navigation testing can identify MCI and AD. Recently Dr. Hort has been involved in numerous initiatives to bring artificial intelligence, virtual reality and blockchain to both AD research and clinical practice. He founded Czech Alzheimer foundation, Alzheimerchain telemedicine and blockchain project and leads medical core in Cognitive+, start up using artificial intelligence for diagnostics of neurodegenerative disorders.
Zaven Khachaturian, PhD
Zaven Khachaturian, PhD
His career spans several major positions requiring high level strategic decision making regarding public policies and program development. He is generally acknowledged as the ‘Founder – Chief Architect’ of the extramural research programs on Neurobiology of Aging and Alzheimer supported by the National Institution on Aging (NIA) / National Institutes of Health [NIH].
During his tenure at NIH he served the dual role of Director, Office of Alzheimer’s Disease, responsible for coordinating all Alzheimer’s disease related activities NIH-wide; as well as the Associate Director for the Neuroscience and Neuropsychology of Aging Program (NNA) at the NIA/NIH. In these positions he was responsible for planning, developing and administering major national programs of research on Alzheimer’s disease and brain aging e.g., Alzheimer’s Centers, CERAD, ADCS, and other.
Outside government he has served as: Vice President of Research, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC]; Professor, Health Services Research , Gradual School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh; and Interim-Director for Pittsburg Biotechnology Center, University of Pittsburgh; Founding Director, Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute/Alzheimer’s Association; President & CEO, Lou Ruvo Brain Institute [now the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health].
His experiences in critical assessment of strategic needs have led to the creation of several important national programs of neuroscience related research that include: ¨ NIA/NIH extramural program of national research on Brain Aging & Alzheimer’s Disease / ¨ Ronald & Nancy Reagan Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s disease / ¨ Lou Ruvo Brain Research Institute [Now Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health – Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas] ¨ Alzheimer Study Group [Chaired by Speaker Newt Gingrich & Senator Bob Kerry] / ¨ Series of Research Planning Think-Tank meeting [aka Leon Thal Symposia [LTS’07-LTS’10] / ¨ Scientific Agenda Recommendations re: NAPA – National Plan to Address Alzheimer / ¨ The Campaign to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease by 2020 [PAD2020] [a 301 [c] 3 organization for strategic planning / ¨ Founding Editor-in-Chief, Alzheimer’s & Dementia [Highest ranking impact factor among neurology journals devoted to dementia]
His academic training includes: BA Yale 1961 / PhD Case-Western Reserve 1967 / Post-doctoral College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia 1967-1968. His research interests include: : neurobiology-neurophysiology of neuroplasticity-cognition / systems biology / calcium homeostasis – ‘Calcium Hypothesis’ / neurobiology of aging & dementia / public policy / politics of sciences / strategic planning & program development / research funding.
Stephen Levine, PhD
Stephen Levine, PhD
Stephen Levine, PhD, is a tenured full professor at the School of Public Health, University of Haifa. He is a psychometrician by training with over 15 years of experience in psychiatric epidemiology. To date, he has achieved an H-index of 42, published over 130 peer-reviewed journal articles (including in the BMJ, Lancet Psychiatry, JAMA Network Open, and JAMA Psychiatry), and has received multiple industry and competitive research grants. He serves on the editorial board of European Neuropsychopharmacology and has contributed as a grant reviewer for funders such as Horizon and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Additionally, he has established ongoing collaborations exceeding ten years with colleagues from Israel, Germany, Sweden, and the US.
His research program focuses on identifying risk and preventative factors for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. To study the risk of these disorders, he harnesses data based on (a) observational study designs with health maintenance organizations and multi-generation population-based registry data. To study the course of disorders, he uses advanced psychometric approaches to advance the understanding of longitudinal survey and clinical trial data. This line of research, for example, led to contributions indicating that it seems possible to shorten assessment time in clinical trials and quantify the extent of cognitive heterogeneity in dementia. To advance the study of dementia, he instigated a nationally representative geriatric cohort with retrospective and prospective information spanning 19 years. Based on this cohort, in a series of studies with colleagues, he examined the associations between schizophrenia, folate, antidepressants, opioids, and ADHD with the risk of dementia. Finally, Stephen led initiatives that resulted in R packages to estimate and extend the Number Needed to Treat and quantify the relative risk for interrupted time series study designs.
Louis Kirby, MD
Louis Kirby, MD
Starting his professional career in a busy neurological practice, he later founded several companies including Pivotal Research Centers, which grew to become one of the nation’s largest free-standing private clinical research centers, which he later sold to a public company. He has extensive drug development experience having worked as a principal investigator on nearly 400 clinical trials, consulted with pharmaceutical companies and has played a part in the FDA approval of over 70 new drugs.
He cofounded ZettaScience, a company focused on aggregating scientific data from across all disciplines and making it available to all interested scientists worldwide. The belief is that interested minds will repurpose the data to answer questions not imagined by the originators and that multi-disciplinary approaches to solving complex problems will not be resolved within a single discipline.
Joseph Lombardo
Joseph Lombardo
Joseph Lombardo is currently serving as the Executive Director of the National Supercomputing Institute located at UNLV. Additionally, heservesasa Core PIontwo research collaborations with the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health (#P20GM109025 and #1P20AG068053) and one with the Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine (NIPM) (#P20GM121325). Two of the collaborations (#P20GM109025 and #P20GM121325) are “Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence.” They are currently funded by Institutional Development Awards (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. His core-PI responsibilities deal with data management, acquisition, and analytic activities. Joseph Lombardo has served as a PIand administrative lead on numerousfederal awards and contracts over a 24-year tenure. He has been a consultant to private industry, academia, and government laboratories with an expertise in computational modeling, parallel computing, data management and data visualization. He has published numerous technical papers and reports and co- authored three textbooks. He has served as an expert witness for the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation “Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation, and Competitiveness” in thearea of High-Performance Computing as it relates to and supports academic research. A fundamental objective of his research is to demonstrate a wide variety of nationally important applications that support primary government interests, including health care, education, scientific research, and the improvement of U.S. business competitiveness.
Michael W. Lutz, PhD
Michael W. Lutz, PhD
Michael W. Lutz, PhD is Associate Professor of Neurology and Assistant Professor of Pathology in the Division of Translational Brain Sciences, Neurology Department at the Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Lutz is co-Director of the Data Management at Statistics Core of the Duke/UNC Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. He received BS and PhD degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University. Dr. Lutz held roles as Director of Computational Biology and Director of Bioinformatics Science and Technology at GlaxoSmithKline before joining the faculty at Duke in 2009.
At GlaxoSmithKline, Dr. Lutz invented novel biomedical analysis methods, developed data management and data integration approaches for genetic association studies, microarray and proteomics data and made numerous contributions in the areas of protein bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. He has led computational biology project teams working with multiple therapeutic areas on phases of drug discovery projects from target identification through the assessment of safety and efficacy in humans. At Duke, Dr. Lutz has focused his efforts on three main areas of research: (1) identification and characterization for functional and clinically-relevant genes and variants for Alzheimer’s disease, (2) developing a clearer biochemical and physiological understanding of the interactions of age, sex and APOE genotype on the risk and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. This work includes development of mathematical and statistical models for analysis of genetic, genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data and support of the development of mouse models that are more relevant to human sporadic Alzheimer’s disease than the currently available models, (3) clearer understanding of the genetic heterogeneity of neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) in Alzheimer’s Disease patients.
Dr. Lutz has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and is PI/co-PI on several NIH grants.
Norman A. Mazer MD, PhD
Norman A. Mazer MD, PhD
Norm Mazer is a hybrid MD – Physicist – Mathematician with over 35 years of experience in Pharmaceutical R&D, Medical Affairs and Academia. As a Disease Modeler at the Roche Innovation Center in Basel, Switzerland (2008 – 2023), Dr. Mazer developed semi-mechanistic mathematical models related to diabetes, reverse cholesterol transport and atherosclerosis, macular degeneration, hemolytic diseases and neurodegenerative diseases. His recent publication on the Quantitative A/T/N model (Alzheimer’s & Dementia, December 2022) links amyloid to clinical outcome in the pathogenesis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Mazer’s interest in mathematical modeling began during the 1970s, as an MD student in the Harvard-M.I.T. Program in Health Sciences and Technology and a PhD student in the Physics Department at M.I.T., where he developed quantitative models of micelle formation, biliary lipid secretion and cyclic neutropenia.
Prior to joining Roche, Dr. Mazer was an Associate Professor of Medicine (Section of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Nutrition) at Boston University (2005 – 2008) and was previously employed at TheraTech Inc./ Watson Laboratories in Salt Lake City (1987 – 2004) and at Sandoz Ltd in Basel (1983 – 1987). He was also an Adjunct Professor of Pharmaceutics at the University of Utah (1987 – 2005) and a visiting Professor in the Pharmacy departments of the University of Basel and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1992.
Dr. Mazer is the founder and sole employee of NAM consulting.
Michelle Mielke, PhD
Michelle Mielke
Michelle M. Mielke, PhD is Chair, of the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention, and Professor, Public Health Sciences-Epicare and Professor, Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. She received a BS in neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in psychiatric epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. From 2007 to 2011, Dr. Mielke was an assistant professor in psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is currently an associate professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Dr. Mielke works as a translational epidemiologist to identify fluid and neuroimaging biomarkers for the diagnosis, prediction and/or progression of neurodegenerative diseases. Much of her work has emphasized the utility of blood-based lipids, especially the role of sphingolipids (ceramides and sphingomyelins). In relation to Parkinson’s disease, she is currently examining plasma ceramides and glucosylceramides as potential biomarkers of cognitive and functional progression. Dr. Mielke has more than 80 peer-reviewed publications and is the PI of several NIH- and Foundation-funded clinical- and epidemiological-based grants.
Prof. Robert Mikulik, MD, PhD
Prof. Robert Mikulik, MD, PhD
Robert Mikulik is a Professor of Neurology at Masaryk University in Brno and the Director of the Stroke Research Program at St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno in the Czech Republic. He was trained at St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno and in the Texas Medical Center, Houston, USA.
Professor Mikulik’s main research and professional interests are diagnostics, treatment and prevention of acute stroke, stroke care organization, stroke care quality, and raising stroke awareness. The Professor’s research group involves more than 30 professionals of different expertise. The research portfolio is designed across a translational axis from preclinical to clinical research and implementation research.
To foster pre-clinical research in stroke, Prof. Mikulik established the STROKEBRNO Research Cluster (www.strokebrno.com) involving several research institutions and companies in the Brno region. The main goal of the consortium is the development of new treatments for stroke, especially new pharmacological and non-pharmacological approaches to recanalization in patients with acute ischemic stroke.
In 2020, Prof. Mikulik and his team established the Czech Stroke Research Network STROCZECH, which involved about half of all stroke centers into one research cluster. The goal is to conduct multi-center academic clinical trials in the Czech Republic. Currently, twenty stroke centers participate in this network.
In 2016, Prof. Mikulik and his team developed the RES-Q Registry of Stroke Care Quality (www.qualityregistry.eu), an academic tool for stroke care quality measurement and improvement. RES-Q was intended to be used primarily at Eastern Europe; however, RES-Q has become globally used quality improvement platform. Nowadays, it is used in all continents by 2000 stroke centers from 85 countries, containing stroke care quality data of more than half million of patients. Prof. Mikulik leads the Implementation Research Network in Stroke Care Quality (IRENE) involving 60 experts from 30 countries in Europe with the aim to provide stroke care quality evidence and improvement.
Prof. Mikulik has developed simulation-based training in acute stroke treatment logistics for stroke teams (www.stroke-simulation.eu). Since 2016, he has conducted over 60 courses for more than 1.500 stroke professionals from 25 countries from Europe, Africa and Asia. The Professor helped to establish similar stroke simulation training programs in other countries. He is also a co-founder and member of the Simulation Training Committee in the European Stroke Organisation.
Robert Mikulik served as a Member at Large in the Executive Committee in the European Stroke Organisation (ESO) during 2016–2017. Since 2015, he has been developing and chairing the ESO EAST Program aiming at improving stroke care in Eastern European and Central Asian countries.
The Professor is a co-author of the Stroke Action Plan for Europe 2018–2030, a strategy document issued by ESO and Stroke Alliance for Europe. He is also a member of the Steering Committee responsible for Stroke Action Plan implementation.
The Professor has published more than 200 articles in renowned journals and has participated in many national and international research projects. In 2017, Prof. Mikulik received the Spirit of Excellence Award from the ESO and ANGELS Initiative for his commitment to excellence in stroke care.
Klaus Romero, MD, MS
Klaus Romero, MD, MS
Dr. Klaus Romero is a prominent clinician scientist and scholar, who serves as Chief Science Officer at Critical Path Institute. As a recognized thought-leader, Dr. Romero established C-Path’s Quantitative Medicine Program and has been an instrumental leader in the growth of the organization’s portfolio of transformative consortia and public-private-partnerships across more than 16 medical product development areas. As both a scientist and an executive, Dr. Romero led the generation of actionable drug development tools in Alzheimer’s disease, which introduced a transformation in the drug development process for this indication. In tuberculosis, Romero’s leadership was instrumental in generating a drug development infrastructure that allowed the approval of the first new individual drug and the first new regimen for this disease, in more than 50 years.
Dr. Romero’s leadership has also resulted in the transformation of medical product development paradigms for many other diverse areas, like polycystic kidney, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, as well as type 1 diabetes prevention, kidney transplantation, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and several other rare and orphan indications. As a trained clinical pharmacologist and epidemiologist, Dr. Romero is a fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, a founding member of the International Society of Pharmacometrics, as well as a member of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology. He is also an Associate Research Professor at the University of Arizona, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California and Arizona State University.
Katerina Sheardova, MD, PhD
Katerina Sheardova, MD, PhD
Dr. Sheardova is a medical director and co-founder of the Czech Brain Aging Study, based at the International Clinical Research Center at St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno. The program collaborates on the research with international partners, mainly the University of South Florida and Mayo Clinic. Dr. Sheardova is also a member of the international advisory boards of several pharmaceutical companies involved in world leading Alzheimer disease research involved in world-leading Alzheimer’s disease research and serves as the Assistant Science Officer for the Scientific Advisory Council of the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation. She received her MD at Masaryk University and PhD in Neuroscience at Charles University Prague. Dr. Sheardova’s principal research interests are to deepen the understanding of the epidemiology of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A primary focus of her research is the identification of biomarkers for the diagnosis and related lifestyle factors in prediction and/or progression of Alzheimer’s disease. She publishes and lectures in this field of research internationally.
Sudhir Sivakumaran, PhD
Sudhir Sivakumaran, PhD
Sudhir Sivakumaran, PhD, serves as the Vice President of Translational Medicine at Beacon Biosignals. Dr. Sivakumaran brings more than 20 years of combined academic, industry scientific, and management experience with expertise in neurodegeneration and neuropsychiatric disorders such as Epilepsy, Stroke, Alzheimer’s, and Autism. In addition to a bachelor’s and master’s degree in microbiology obtained from the University of Madras, India, he holds a PhD in Neuroscience from SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, Italy. Dr. Sivakumaran also brings prior experience in systems biology, computation modeling and analysis from his research tenures at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, India and the University of Tokyo in Japan.
He leads Beacon’s efforts to evaluate the scientific, clinical and regulatory evidentiary considerations for the development and evaluation of novel biomarkers in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric indications. As part of the Leadership team at Beacon, he is also involved in strategic prioritization and business development activities.
Previously, Dr. Sivakumaran led the Alzheimer’s disease consortium (CPAD) and Neuroscience Program at the Critical Path Institute (C-Path) where he oversaw strategic and scientific planning, and management of pre-competitive initiatives in partnership with industry, academic and regulatory agencies. Prior to that, he led pre-clinical research management and external partnerships and alliances at Aptinyx, Inc. and Pfizer. Dr. Sivakumaran is a member of the Scientific Program Committee of the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC), serves on the Scientific Review Board of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), and most recently, joined the INDRC as a Scientific Advisory Board member.
Josef Sivic, PhD
Josef Sivic, PhD
Josef Sivic holds a distinguished researcher position at the Czech Institute of Robotics, Informatics and Cybernetics at the Czech Technical University in Prague where he heads the Intelligent Machine Perception project and the ELLIS Unit Prague. He received a habilitation degree from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 2014 and PhD from the University of Oxford in 2006. After Phd he was a post-doctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the British Machine Vision Association Sullivan Thesis Prize, three test-of-time awards at major computer vision conferences, and an ERC Starting Grant. He currently serves on the board of the European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and as a chairman of the AICZECHIA national AI research initiative.
Peter J. Snyder, PhD
Dr. Peter J. Snyder
Prof. Jacques Touchon, MD, PhD
Prof. Jacques Touchon, MD, PhD
Jacques Touchon, MD, PhD is Emeritus Professor at Montpellier University France , member of the Institut des Neurosciences de Montpellier (INM) INSERM UNIT 1298. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s disease (JPAD), co-Chairman and founding member of the of the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference (CTAD). Jacques Touchon obtained his MD in 1979, and from 1980 to 1984 degrees in neurology, psychiatry, neurophysiology and geriatric. Formerly, Jacques Touchon was Professor of Neurology at the Montpellier Medical School (1990-2014) Chief of the Neurology Department of the Montpellier University Hospital (2004-2014), Dean of the Montpellier Medical School (2000-2010), Director of the Center for Memory Resources and Research (CMRR) for the Languedoc-Roussillon region (2004-2014). His areas of interest are Alzheimer’s Disease, aging and neurodegenerative diseases. He was awarded for excellence in Alzheimer Disease Research: Academic Palms in 1999, PINEL prize in 2000 and in 2007 Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
