Workshop

Dr. Natalie Trzcinski joined the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Division of Translational Research (DTR) in 2017 and serves as a Scientific Project Manager in the Small Business programs, where she oversees a portfolio of small business innovative research (SBIR), small business technology transfer (STTR), and BRAIN Technology Integration and Dissemination projects. Prior to joining NINDS, she received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University, where she researched mechanisms of electrocommunication and electroreception in weakly electric fish. She obtained her PhD in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University, studying neural mechanisms of somatosensory selective attention and experience dependent plasticity at the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute.  She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Systems Research at University of Maryland (UMD), where she developed neurophysiology methods for extracellular chronic recording in auditory cortices and studied neural mechanisms of auditory attention and plasticity. 

Sean graduated from the University of Aberdeen; receiving his M.Sc., Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacology and D.Sc. in Science. He then came to the USA and was a postdoctoral fellow at Lilly Research Laboratories, before working as a senior scientist at Pfizer and then Eli Lilly. He went on to join startup companies as Associate Director of Computational Drug Discovery at Concurrent Pharmaceuticals Inc. (now Allergan) and Vice President of Computational Biology at GeneGo (now Thomson Reuters). Dr. Ekins was CSO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc and co-founder and CEO at Phoenix Nest Inc. He is now founder and CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. which is focused on using machine learning approaches for rare and neglected disease drug discovery. He is also the on the SAB of the Pitt Hopkins Research Foundation and Adjunct Professor at 3 US universities. Since 2005 he has been awarded 20 NIH and DOD grants (STTR/SBIR grants, R21, UH2 and R01) and performs as a consultant on many others. He has authored or co-authored >300 peer reviewed papers, book chapters, and edited 5 books. For over 23 years he has been at the forefront of using commercial and in-house developed software in drug discovery research. He has a passion for finding new collaborators and developing new treatments for neglected and rare disease.

Dr. Chris Mansi is a Neurosurgeon and the CEO of Viz.ai, an applied AI healthcare company. He is a clinician innovator and entrepreneur. He cares about healthcare access, building and supporting great teams, transformative technologies, and improving provider experience to effect and scale better patient outcomes. Viz was the first FDA cleared AI software, creating a new device category; Computer Aided Triage. It uses deep learning to automatically analyze CT scans of the brain and immediately alert the stroke team about large vessel occlusion strokes, synchronizing care across a hospital network and saving time. The dual clinical and financial value proposition has led to rapid adoption; in the 9 months Viz has been on the market it has been adopted by over 250 hospitals across the USA.

Dr. Narvid is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of California San Francisco and has been a member of the Neuroradiology Section at UCSF since July 2013. Dr. Narvid earned an MD from UCSF School of Medicine where he was awarded the Regent’s Scholarship. As a clinician-scientist, Dr. Narvid has spent the last decade developing imaging biomarkers of language disorders, Neuro-HIV, and cerebrovascular disease. Most recently, Dr. Narvid has used machine learning approaches to combine laboratory and neuroimaging features to predict subclinical cerebrovascular disease and cognitive impairment in HIV+ subjects. He is also co-investigator and imaging lead at UCSF for the MR-SONIC imaging component of Women’s Interagency HIV Study.

Fabien Scalzo, PhD is Assistant Professor of Neurology and Director of the Artificial Intelligence in Imaging and Neuroscience Lab at UCLA. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering where he teaches medical imaging and computer vision. Dr. Scalzo specializes in building computational models for neuroimaging and has published over 200 research papers. He has been an investigator on several neuroscience-related research projects funded by NIH, NSF, AHA, and DARPA.

Matt Gounis, PhD, is a biomedical engineer and Professor of the Department of Radiology, University of Massachusetts Medical School. He co-founded the New England Center for Stroke Research at UMASS in 2006 where the team works to bring new imaging and medical device technology from the bench to the clinic. For 20 years, Matt has performed research on the minimally invasive treatment of cerebrovascular disease with a focus on device technology, pre-clinical disease modeling, and image-guided surgery. Matt is the 2010 recipient of the Y.C. Fung Award from the ASME, the Founding President of the SB3C Foundation, the past Chair of the Bioengineering Division of the ASME and the AHA Clinical Bioengineering Committee, Fellow of ASME and currently serves as the Basic Science Associate Editor for the Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery and on the Editorial Board of the journals Stroke and Neurosurgery.