'Synapse' Pilot for Building an 'Information Commons'

Magali Haas

Magali Haas earned her Bachelor of Science in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Science in biomedical engineering degree from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and her medical degree and doctorate in neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, under the National Institutes of Health Medical Scientist Training Program. She received the Julius Marmur Research Award from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in 1997. Dr. Haas joined the Johnson & Johnson organization in 2001 and has gained extensive end-to-end development experience across the various leadership roles she has assumed in medical marketing, full clinical development, early development, translational and biomarker sciences in Psychiatry and Neurology. She oversaw the filing and approval of an antipsychotic for pediatric indications in autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder as well as the clinical Phase 2/3 programs for a novel anticonvulsant drug in epilepsy, migraine and neuropathic pain. She has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles, holds several patents and authored a recent Chapter on Pediatric Trial Methodology. She currently Heads the Department of Integrative Solutions which develops Stratified Medicine strategies and Companion Diagnostics & Solutions for AD, Mood, Schizophrenia and Pain.

Sean Hill

Dr. Hill currently serves as the Executive Director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, and has previously served as the Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience in the Blue Brain Project at the EPFL and with IBM Research. He has also supervised and led research efforts exploring the principles underlying the structure and dynamics of neocortical microcircuitry. Dr. Hill holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computational Neuroscience from Hampshire College (Amherst, MA), and a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). His PhD research focused on an investigation of the computational role of the auditory thalamocortical circuitry in the rat, which involved multi-unit recordings and large-scale neuronal simulations. After receiving his PhD, Dr. Hill held postdoctoral positions at The Neurosciences Institute of La Jolla, CA and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research interests include the use of biologically-realistic models to study the role of emergent phenomena in information processing, network connectivity and synaptic plasticity in the central nervous system, from the neocortical column to the whole brain, and across different arousal conditions including waking and sleep.

Jason Johnson

Jason Johnson is the Executive Director of the Informatics IT Department at Merck.

Michael Kellen

Michael M. Kellen currently serves as vice chairman of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Advisers, LLC and as co-president and co-chief executive officer of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Holdings, Inc. Kellen is on the Board of Trustees at the Cancer Research Institute.

Dietrich Stephan

Dr. Stephan is a human geneticist who works to understand the root causes of common human diseases so that early diagnostics and interventions can be implemented. Dr. Stephan most recently was the deputy director of discovery research at the Translational Genomics Research Institute and still holds a faculty appointment there. Dr. Stephan has identified genes that predispose to disorders such as autism, exercise-induced heart attacks and sudden infant death syndrome, and contributed to understanding a multitude of common "complex genetic" disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Stephan is chairman of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Neuroscience Microarray Consortium, and has previously held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, George Washington University and the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Stephan has published extensively in journals such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Genetics and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Stephan received his B.S. at Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, and trained as a fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH.