Speaker Bios

Justin Baker

Justin T. Baker, MD, PhD, is the scientific director of the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry (ITP) and director of the Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics at McLean Hospital. He is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Baker’s research uses both large-scale studies and deep, multilevel phenotyping approaches to understand the nature and underlying biology of mental illnesses. He is a clinical psychiatrist with expertise in schizophrenia and bipolar spectrum disorders and other disorders of emerging adulthood. In 2016, Dr. Baker co-founded the ITP, a first-of-its-kind research and development center to foster tool development and novel applications of consumer technology in psychiatric research and care delivery.

Dr. Baker’s Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics conducts research to understand the nature and underlying biology of mental illnesses, particularly lifelong conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The goal of this work is to develop more effective strategies to both monitor the course of illness and intervene in creative ways to improve the lives of individuals struggling with these conditions. A central focus of the Baker lab is to understand how the architecture of the human brain changes as a function of psychiatric illness. Historically, most research on the biological origins of psychiatric illness has focused on individual diagnostic categories studied in isolation. Mounting evidence indicates that nominally distinct psychiatric diagnoses are not separated by clear neurobiological boundaries. The lab uses multiple behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational approaches to experimentally disentangle how changes in human brain network function and organization ultimately give rise to changes in behavior.

Raji Baskaran

Dr. Raji Baskaran is a technology and product leader who is recognized as an industry expert in sensor-enabled systems and AI/IoT solutions. She is founder and CEO of Manifolds Lab.

Raji has 15+ years of leadership experience at Intel Corporation spanning a diverse set of technologies (including silicon R&D, supply chain management and engineering, wearable technologies, and AI/NLP enterprise products). She has authored dozens of research publications, has 35+ patents under her name, and is frequently a speaker and panelist at a host of industry events. In 2017, Raji was elected into the “Hall of Fame” by SEMI, MEMS and Sensors Industry Groups.

Beyond this, Raji is also an affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has her Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara, a Masters from Cornell and Bachelors from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Raji is currently a Venture Partner with a NY-based seed fund (Social Impact Capital), and advisor at Silicon Catalyst, an SF-based hardware accelerator. She is a technology and strategy consultant to international IoT and AI chip design companies, and regularly performs venture capital/investor due diligence and advisory services in IoT, MEMS, and Semiconductor markets

Dani Bassett

Professor Dani S. Bassett’s group studies the structure and function of networks, predominantly in physical and biological systems. Bassett’s interests lie in using and developing tools and theories from complex systems science, statistical mechanics, and applied mathematics to study dynamic changes in network architecture, the interaction between topological properties of networks and physical or other constraints, and the influence of network topology on signal propagation (mechanical, electrical, informational) and system function. In physical systems, their group conducts research in dynamical systems as well as granular and particulate matter, and recent studies have considered synchronization dynamics in Kuramoto oscillators, force chain network structure in granular matter, reconfiguration of force chains under compression, and acoustic transmission through force chains. In biological systems, their group conducts research in brain connectivity and human behavior. Among other things in this area, their group has investigated collective dynamics in human behavior, how humans learn graphs of related concepts, how brain connectivity reflects cognitive capacities and changes during adolescent development, and how brain connectivity is altered in neurological disease (such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s) and disorders of mental health (such as schizophrenia and autism); these studies touch on applied algebraic topology, network control theory, maximum entropy models, multilayer networks, multiplex networks, temporal networks, and annotated graphs.

Gordon Berman

Gordon Berman is a theoretical biophysicist who uses mathematical and computational tools to gain insight into animal behavior and its neurobiological, genetic, and evolutionary underpinnings. His group specializes in the data-driven modeling of behavior across a variety of species, from flies to rodents to humans, attempting to understand how animals utilize their full repertoire of behaviors, bridging time scales ranging from fractions of a second to minutes to hours to a lifetime. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University, where he studied the biomechanical and aerodynamic basis of insect flight with Z. Jane Wang. Dr. Berman then moved to the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Biology at Princeton University, where he worked with William Bialek and Joshua Shaevitz to develop novel methods for the unsupervised characterization of naturalistic animal behavior. He joined the Biology Department at Emory University in 2015, and he also holds adjunct appointments at the Yerkes National Primate Center and the Emory-Georgia Tech WH Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Timothy Brown

Dr. Tim Brown is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also a founding member of and long-term contributor to the Neuroethics Thrust within the Center for Neurotechnology at UW. Dr. Brown’s research explores the potential impact of neurotechnologies on end users’ sense of agency and embodiment—as well as their potential to harm marginalized groups.

Jeffrey Cohn

Jeffrey Cohn is a professor of psychology, psychiatry, and intelligent systems at the University of Pittsburgh and Adjunct Faculty at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He has led interdisciplinary and inter-institutional efforts to develop advanced methods of automatic analysis of facial expression, body motion, and prosody and applied those tools to research in human emotion, interpersonal processes, social development, and psychopathology. He has co-developed influential databases (Cohn-Kanade, MultiPIE DISFA, Pain Archive, and the BP4D series), co-edited special issues on facial expression analysis, and chaired international conferences in automatic face and gesture recognition, multimodal interaction, and affective computing.

Iain Couzin

Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Speaker of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Cluster of Excellence “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” and Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany. Previously he was an Assistant- and then Full-Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and prior to that a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow in the Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford. His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from neural collectives to insect swarms, fish schools and primate groups. In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, top 5 most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research 1999-2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012, the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013, a Web of Science Global Highly Cited Researcher since 2018, the Lagrange Prize (for contributions to complexity science) in 2019, and the Leibniz Prize (Germany’s highest research honor) in 2022.

Molly Cummings

Molly Cummings an Evolutionary Biology Professor with a research focus on how social interactions arising from sexual selection shape the development of cognition and behavior. Cummings has a broad background in animal behavior, sensory ecology, sexual selection and neuroethology. As a PI on several NSF-funded grants, she identified the brain genomic pathways activated during female mate choice decisions and how these differ based on interactions with males of different mating strategies. Cummings combines neurogenomics with behavioral experimentation using a comparative approach with livebearing poecilid fishes to identify candidate genes and brain regions involved in coordinating female mate preference and aversion decisions. Cummings’ research implicates a role of synaptic plasticity and learning pathway engagement during courtship encounters, with these same pathways being inhibited during interactions with coercive males. Her lab is currently conducting a social rearing experiment with swordtail fish to test the influence of social complexity and sexual conflict on the development of the brain, behavior and a range of cognitive traits.

Bob Datta

Sandeep Robert Datta is a Professor in Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics from Yale University in 1993, and obtained an M.D./Ph.D degree from Harvard University in 2004. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University with the Nobel laureate Richard Axel, he joined HMS Neurobiology in 2009. His lab focuses on understanding how sensory cues — particularly odors — are detected by the nervous system, and how the brain transforms information about the presence of salient sensory cues into patterns of motivated action. This work involves studying genes involved in detecting odors, revealing the patterns of neural activity deep in the brain that encode sensory maps of the outside world, and probing the fundamental statistical structure of behavior itself. Dr. Datta has published numerous articles on his research in journals including Cell, Science and Nature, is a reviewer and an editor at multiple scientific journals, is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, and is a Principal Investigator in the Italian Institute of Technology/Harvard Medical School joint program in the neurosciences. Dr. Datta has received the prestigious NIH New Innovator Award, the Burroughs Welcome Career Award in the Medical Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Searle Scholars Award, the Vallee Young Investigator Award, the McKnight Endowment Fund Scholar Award and has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Science/Kavli Scholars program.

Nita Farahany

Nita A. Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. She is a Professor of Law & Philosophy, the Founding Director of Duke Science & Society, Chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics & Science Policy, and principal investigator of SLAP Lab.

Farahany is a frequent commentator for national media and radio shows. She presents her work to diverse audiences including the World Economic Forum, Aspen Ideas Festival, TED, Judicial Conferences for the US Court of Appeals, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academies of Science Workshops, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and by testifying before Congress.

In 2010, she was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and served until 2017. She is a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institute for Neurological Disease and Stroke, an elected member of the American Law Institute, President-Elect and Board member of the International Neuroethics Society, a member of the Neuroethics Working Group of the US Brain Initiative, the Global Precision Medicine Council for the World Economic Forum, and the President’s Research Council for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She is also the Chair Elect of the Section on Jurisprudence for the Association of American Law Schools. She serves on Scientific and Ethics Advisory Boards for several corporations.

Farahany is a co-editor-in-chief and co-founder of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, an editorial board member of the American Journal of Bioethics (Neuroscience), and on the Board of Advisors for Scientific American. She is also the past Chair of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Association of Law Schools, and the recipient of the 2013 Paul M. Bator award given annually to an outstanding legal academic under 40.

D. André Green II

Dr. Green is an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Our group studies the development and evolution of phenotypically plastic traits in insects in order to illuminate proximate mechanisms that promote or constrain the generation of biodiversity. We currently use monarch butterfly migration as a muti-scale model, with specific interests in multisensory integration, eco-genomics, and migration evolution.

Peter Hartwell

Dr. Peter G. Hartwell is Chief Technology Officer at InvenSense. Peter has over 25 years’ experience commercializing silicon MEMS products, working on advanced sensors and actuators, and specializes in MEMS testing techniques. At InvenSense Peter is responsible for technology strategy and leads our Advanced Technology research group. Prior to joining InvenSense, Peter spent four years as Architect of Sensing Hardware at Apple where he built and led a team responsible for the integration of accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure, proximity, and ambient light sensors across the entire product line. Before Apple, Peter was a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories where he spent 12 years. At HP, he was the MEMS lead on HP’s 10 nano-g/rt Hz MEMS accelerometer forming the basis of HP’s Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE), an early version of what has become the Internet of Things (IoT). Peter has over 40 worldwide patents on MEMS devices and sensor applications. Peter holds a B.S. in Materials Science from the University of Michigan and a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

Benjamin Hayden

Benjamin Hayden, PhD, is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. His research involves understanding the neural basis of reward-based decision-making and executive control. His research is distinguished by a focus on naturalistic behaviors. Recently his lab’s major focus has been on combining multielectrode recordings with freely moving behaviors in rhesus macaques. This work includes novel approaches to high resolution behavioral tracking, on understanding choice and control models in continuous contexts, and the understanding of choice as the reflection of a fundamentally premotor process.

Scott Linderman

Scott Linderman is Assistant Professor of Statistics and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. Linderman is also an Institute Scholar in the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford AI Lab. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow with Liam Paninski and David Blei at Columbia University, and he completed my PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University with Ryan Adams and Leslie Valiant. Linderman originally from upstate New York. He obtained my undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and spent three great years as a software engineer at Microsoft before graduate school.

Malcolm MacIver

Malcolm A. MacIver is a group leader of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems at Northwestern University, where he is Professor with joint appointments between Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and an additional appointment in the Department of Neurobiology (courtesy). His work focuses on extracting principles underlying animal behavior, focusing on interactions between biomechanics, neuronal processing, evolution and sensory system properties. He then incorporates these principles into advanced biorobotic systems, or large scale simulations on computing clusters, for synergy between technological and scientific advances. For this work he received the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering from President Obama at the White House. MacIver has also developed interactive science-inspired art installations that have exhibited internationally, and frequently consults for science fiction film and TV series makers.

Mala Murthy

Mala Murthy (b. 1975) is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University and leads the Murthy lab in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute – their work focuses on the neural mechanisms that underlie social communication, using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model system.

Prof. Murthy grew up in Texas and received her B.S. in Biology from MIT. She was a Burchards scholar in the humanities and won the John L. Asinari prize for outstanding undergraduate research in the life sciences. She then received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, working with Thomas Schwarz and Richard Scheller – her thesis research centered on mechanisms of vesicle trafficking to synaptic and other cell membranes. She did postdoctoral work in systems neuroscience with Gilles Laurent at Caltech, as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow. Her postdoctoral work initiated a new area of investigation into stereotypy in the central brain of Drosophila, in a region of the brain important for learning in memory. In 2010, she joined the faculty at Princeton University in the Departments of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016 and to Full Professor in 2019.

Prof. Murthy has received a number of honors, including an NSF CAREER award, an NIH New Innovator award, an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, a Klingenstein fellowship, a McKnight Scholar award, an NINDS Research Program award, several awards through the NIH BRAIN Initiative, an HHMI Faculty Scholar award, and a Simons Foundation Investigator award. She has participated in several events for the BRAIN Initiative at the White House and US Capitol. In 2021, she will join the Multi-Council Working Group that oversees the long-term scientific vision of the BRAIN Initiative.

Mosadoluwa Obatusin

Mosadoluwa Obatusin, MEng is a Programmer Analyst II at the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai. He received his Master of Engineering degree from Cornell University, where his educational training focused on biomedical engineering with an emphasis on electrical and computational methods. In addition, he has expertise in building research software and ETL pipelines to collect, explore, and analyze biomedical data. In 2017, Dolu joined Dr. Helen Mayberg’s lab at Emory University to develop the MATLAB software application to interface with Deep Brain Stimulation devices (Medtronic Nexus-D API) for use in clinical investigations. Now at Mount Sinai, he architected research applications for neuromodulation experiments interfacing with an implanted prototype DBS device (Medtronic Summit system). He also plays a key role in the center’s information technology endeavors, supporting data science and machine learning workflows and data management infrastructure. Overall, Dolu is committed to building and integrating engineering solutions that have a positive impact on patient’s quality of life.

Bence Olveczky

What happens in our brains as we learn to walk, swim or talk? How are the underlying learning algorithms implemented, and how are the honed skills encoded and generated by the nervous system? For many years, the Olveczky lab addressed these questions in songbirds, an experimentally tractable model that has given us many valuable insights into how complex motor sequences can be acquired. But unlike songbirds who specialize in learning a single vocal sequence early in life, we mammals have evolved a general capacity to learn seemingly arbitrary and highly complex motor sequences, something that has led to language, tool use, and synchronized swimming. This remarkable learning ability is often attributed to our cortex, but little is known about how the cortex teams up with the rest of the motor system to implement it. What are the learning and control algorithms involved, and how are they instantiated in neural hardware? We have started to explore these questions by using rodents as our subjects and training them – in automated ways – to master different types of motor tasks. By manipulating neural circuit function using optogenetics, lesions, and pharmacological techniques, we can delineate the circuits involved. We then record activity in these circuits during learning and execution of motor skills to arrive at a mechanistic description of how the mammalian brains acquires and executes complex learned motor behaviors.

Galit Pelled

Galit Pelled Professor of Mechanical engineering, Radiology and Neuroscience at Michigan State University. She was recruited to MSU 4 years ago from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore to direct the new Neuroengineering division. Her research focuses on developing and leveraging transformative technologies for enhancing neuro-performance. Through holistic and multidisciplinary approaches her lab works toward developing marine-inspired technologies for artificial sensing and adaptive-prosthetics; restoring sensory-motor performance after traumatic brain injury (TBI) and peripheral nerve injury; and improving athletic performance and cognitive capabilities by using genetic-based neuromodulation and non-invasive brain stimulation. Over the past decade Pelled has trained 35 undergraduate, graduate students and postdoc fellows. Her past trainees are currently tenure track faculty and fellows in leading academic institutes. On top of her scientific interests and teaching commitments, she works passionately on developing programs at the institutional and the state levels for increasing inclusion and diversity in STEM fields.

Nicole Provenza

Nicole Provenza is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Sameer Sheth’s laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine. Nicole completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering in Dr. David Borton’s laboratory at Brown University in 2021, where she was awarded the Draper Fellowship for her graduate research. Her graduate work focused on developing adaptive deep brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder. As part of her graduate work, Nicole developed a research platform to collect intracranial local field potentials synchronized with disease-relevant behavior at home to aid in identification of neural biomarkers of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in natural environments.

Karen Rommelfanger

Dr. Karen S. Rommelfanger is a neurotech ethicist and strategist. She received her PhD in neuroscience and received postdoctoral training in neuroscience and neuroethics. She is founder and director of the Institute of Neuroethics, the first think tank wholly dedicated to neuroethics. Her lab, the Neuroethics and Neurotech Innovation Collaboratory explores how evolving neuroscience and neurotechnologies challenge societal definitions of disease and medicine, cross-cultural neuroethics, and cross-sectoral neuroethics implementation. Her scholarship has been published in high impact journals such as Nature, Neuron, and PNAS. Dr. Rommelfanger maintains a professorship in Emory’s Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and at the Center for Ethics where she founded the Neuroethics Program. She served as senior editor of the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, the International Neuroethics Society’s (INS) flagship journal. She is also on executive board member of INS and founding board member of the Functional Neurological Disorders Society. In recognition of her service and stewardship of neuroethics conversations in the neuroscience community, she is the first neuroethicist to be called to the editorial advisory board of Neuron. She is dedicated to cross-cultural work in neuroethics formerly working as ethicist to the China-India Mental Health Alliance and is co-chair of the Global Neuroethics Workgroup of the International Brain Initiative. She is an appointed member to the NIH BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group and served as ambassador to the EU Human Brain Project’s Ethics Advisory Board. As a Neuroethics Subgroup member of the Advisory Committee to the Director at NIH, she helped design a neuroethics roadmap for BRAIN 2025. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Disruptive Technology for Mental Health. A key part of her work is fostering communication and engagement across multiple stakeholders in neuroscience. She is a frequent contributor and commentator in popular national and international media.

Maryam Shanechi

Maryam Shanechi is Associate Professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC. She joined USC as Assistant Professor in July 2014. Prior to that, she was Assistant Professor at Cornell University’s ECE department in 2014. She received the B.A.Sc. degree with honors in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto in 2004 and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2006 and 2011, respectively. She works at the interface of statistical inference and signal processing, machine learning, and control to develop neurotechnology and study the brain through decoding and control of neural dynamics. Her work has led to closed-loop brain-machine interfaces (BMI) for motor function and for deep brain stimulation to treat neuropsychiatric disorders. She is also the PI of a joint US/UK multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) to lead the development of multiscale BMIs.

Nanthia Suthana

Dr. Suthana’s research program aims to develop therapeutic cognitive treatments and tools through the characterization of neuronal mechanisms underlying successful human learning and memory. Dr. Suthana has a unique multi-modality background with expertise in Cognitive Neuroscience methodologies including functional magnetic resonance imaging, single neuron and local field potential electrophysiology, electroencephalography, and deep brain stimulation. She has dedicated her career to improving and understanding the brain’s contribution to the formation and retrieval of successful memory. Her research currently works towards the development of a computational model of the human medial temporal memory system that can be incorporated into a novel neuroprosthetic device used to restore memory in afflicted patients. This work is made possible through collaborative efforts between Departments of Engineering, Neurosurgery, Psychology, and Neurology. Inspiring these efforts, her postdoctoral research published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed the ability to enhance spatial memory in epilepsy patients using low current deep brain stimulation of the human entorhinal area applied during learning. For this work, she received a Society for Neuroscience Travel award and a nomination for the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research. In addition to Dr. Suthana’s research program, she has been a longtime contributor to local Neuroscience outreach programs. She was previously awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to work with Los Angeles K-12 schools to incorporate inquiry based lesson plans and Neuroscience topics into the curriculum. She has also organized and facilitated an undergraduate course called Project Brainstorm where students are trained to develop and implement Neuroscience lesson plans in local K-12 schools. During the same years she organized annual Brain Awareness Week programs where hundreds of K-12 students visited the university to participate in laboratory tours, career panels, Neuroscience activities, and brain demos. She also currently organizes a summer journal club for incoming underrepresented Ph.D. students in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematic fields where presentation skills and critical review of scientific literature are focused upon.

Lena Ting

Lena Ting a Professor and the McCamish Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering at in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, at Georgia Tech and Emory and a Professor in Rehabilitation Medicine in the Division of Physical Therapy at Emory University. Dr. Ting directs the Neuromechanical Laboratory at Emory, focusing on complex, whole body movements such as walking and balance in healthy and neurologically impaired individuals, as well as skilled movements involved in dance and sport. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing from neuroscience, biomechanics, rehabilitation, computation, robotics, and physiology. Her lab has developed several computational methods to characterize and understand individual differences in movement and movement control, and how these change in neurological disorders, as well as with rehabilitation and training. Dr. Ting also co-directs the Georgia Tech and Emory Neural Engineering Center and an NIH T32 in Computational Neural Engineering. Dr. Ting is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (2016), she was awarded the Arthur C. Guyton Award for Excellence in Integrative Physiology by the American Physiological Society (2007), the Atlanta Business Chronicles, Healthcare Hero Award (2018) and several teaching and mentoring awards from Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Allison Waters

Allison Waters is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The mission of the Waters Lab is to make brains more accessible to themselves through the development of individualized brain read-outs to enhance treatment for patients, and to promote wellness in non-clinical populations. Their primary method of inquiry is brain electrophysiology and related analytic strategies, applied to brain circuit dysfunction and associated psychiatric symptoms. The group is embedded in the Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics where the shared mission is to advance treatment with deep brain stimulation for psychiatric and neurological indications, including treatment resistant depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, Parkinson’s disease and other conditions.

Tim Wright

Tim Wright has long been fascinated by the phenomenon of vocal learning. He and his students investigate the function, evolution, and underlying neural mechanisms of this complex behavioral trait. This work has largely been done with the parrots, a diverse group of birds well known for their advanced learning abilities, but also with two other groups of avian vocal learners, the hummingbirds and songbirds. His work employs both field and laboratory approaches and has taken him to sites across the Neotropics. He coauthored, with Cathy Toft, Parrots of the Wild: A Natural History of the World’s Most Captivating Birds. He is also active in the conservation of endangered parrot species through basic research, advisory panels and public education. Tim is a Professor of Biology at New Mexico State University, where he has been on faculty since 2004. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Zoo and in the Biology and Psychology Departments at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD in 1996 from the University of California San Diego. He is an Associate Editor for Integrative Organismal Biology, recently served as Program Officer of the Animal Behavior Society and is a Fellow of the American Ornithologists Society.