Future of the Brain Summit 2022

Dr. Ashbrook is a neurologist who treats people suffering from sleep and general neurologic disorders. Her research focuses on understanding certain inherited sleep and circadian traits including waking up very early or needing much less or much more sleep than most people. One of Dr. Ashbrook’s goals is to better understand how some people are able to sleep only four to six hours a night and yet feel as restored as people who require seven to nine hours of sleep. She wants to determine whether these natural “short sleepers” are resilient to negative health consequences – such as increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and memory problems – that typically are associated with getting too little sleep. Dr. Ashbrook earned her medical degree and did her residency at UCSF and completed a fellowship in sleep medicine at Stanford University.
 

Dr. Cong is an accomplished device electrical engineer with significant industry experience in engineering medical devices, particularly neural interfaces, which are electronic devices placed in or on the brain to record or stimulate brain activity. His work is aimed at addressing complex neurological disorders, including depression and impacts of stroke, using devices that interact with the nervous system. Dr. Cong joined UCSF in late 2020, and his work significantly deepens UCSF’s potential impact in the field of neuromodulation, the altering of nerve activity by applying electricity or drugs to a particular area of the brain or central nervous system. Dr. Cong previously worked for Verily, a division of Google, where he held leading positions in neuromodulation for the last six years. He also worked for the medical-device company Medtronic, where he made major contributions to neuromodulation by leading electronics platform development for next-generation, brain-interfacing implantable devices. 

Dr. Gerdts specializes in the treatment of neurologic disorders that affect the immune system, such as multiple sclerosis and autoimmune encephalitis. His research focuses on new cell-based technologies for identifying T-cell antigen targets involved in autoimmune diseases. Dr. Gerdts joined Wendell Lim, PhD, and his team in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology with the goal of employing new synthetic biology approaches – using genetic engineering to give living cells new functions – to further understand and develop new tools to sense and target T cells. Their work resulted in a new strategy for detecting T-cell antigen responsiveness that Dr. Gerdts plans to refine and apply to research on neurologic diseases. Dr. Gerdts earned his medical and doctoral degrees from Washington University Medical School in St. Louis and completed an internship in medicine and a residency in neurology at UCSF, where he currently serves as a clinical fellow.
 

Dr. de Groot specializes in brain and spine cancer and cares for patients with primary tumors, which are located where the disease began as opposed to where it spreads. His research includes bringing new approaches – such as immunotherapy treatments for glioblastoma, an aggressive and deadly brain cancer – from the lab into the clinic. Dr. de Groot is especially interested in using biomarkers – molecules in body fluids and tissues that may indicate the presence of disease – to evaluate the effectiveness of new therapies. His previous roles include director of clinical research and interim chair of the neuro-oncology department at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he completed a neuro-oncology fellowship and served on the faculty for 17 years. He earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch, an academic health science center in Galveston; and completed a neurology residency at Johns Hopkins University. 
 

A health psychologist and renowned researcher, Dr. Epel investigates ways to remain healthy as we age. She has extensively studied the psychological, social, and behavioral foundations of chronic stress; one research area examines how people can thrive in mind and body under severely adverse conditions such as living in poverty, caring for an ill family member, or suffering from depression. Dr. Epel conducts clinical trials examining how mindfulness – the practice of paying kind attention to one’s thoughts and feelings without judging them – can affect stress, compulsive eating, and cell aging. She studied psychology and psychobiology at Stanford University and earned her doctorate in clinical and health psychology from Yale University. She leads meditation and science retreats at venues such as Esalen and World Economic Forum Davos. Dr. Epel co-authored The Telomere Effect, a best-selling book about health aging, with UCSF Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn and is releasing The Stress Prescription in winter 2022. 
 

Dr. Fortuna specializes in psychiatry with children, adolescents, and adults who are traditionally underserved, as well as in addiction medicine. Her work spotlights community psychiatry, which seeks to provide mental health support services to people and families through community resources. She also treats and researches post-traumatic stress and substance-use disorders. For more than two decades, Dr. Fortuna has championed health equity, which is achieved when everyone has the same opportunity to reach their best state of health, and no one is disadvantaged from doing so by their social circumstances. Her work encompasses immigrant mental health, access to care, and implementation of solutions to improve the quality of care and address health care disparities. Dr. Fortuna’s research has expanded access to child behavioral health in primary care settings, and her Kids FACE FEARS study on treating childhood anxiety showed that combining online and in-person care can improve access to treatment.

Dr. Fu is a pioneer in understanding how our genes influence the quantity and quality of our sleep. She and neurologist Louis Ptáček, MD, are co-principal investigators in the Neugenes Lab, which studies human sleep behaviors, neurodegeneration, and episodic disorders including seizures, headaches, and cardiac arrhythmias. They have identified several mutations for advanced sleep phase syndrome that affect peoples’ sleep schedule behavior. Recently, Dr. Fu’s team also identified new genes and mutations that can affect sleep duration. The team is working toward a better understanding of how human sleep duration and efficiency is regulated, with the goal of helping everyone reach healthy longevity through optimal sleep. Dr. Fu earned her doctorate in molecular biology and biochemistry from The Ohio State University and then spent four years in the biotech industry at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Darwin Molecular before coming to UCSF.

Dr. Gazzaley leads Neuroscape, a translational (bridging the research and clinical areas) neuroscience research center. Neuroscape uses technology such as video games, wearable devices, virtual reality/augmented reality, and motion capture as tools to better understand brain function, enhance cognition, refine behavior, and ultimately improve our minds. Dr. Gazzaley’s research led to the creation of EndeavorRX, the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children that’s delivered through a video game. He is the co-founder and chief science adviser for Akili Interactive, a prescription digital-medicine company, and JAZZ Venture Partners, which invests in technologies that improve human performance. Dr. Gazzaley has served as a scientific adviser for Apple, General Electric, Nielsen, Deloitte, and many other tech companies. He wrote and hosted the nationally televised PBS special “The Distracted Mind with Dr. Adam Gazzaley” and co-authored The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. 
 

Dr. Goldschmidt specializes in treating patients with brain, skull base, and pituitary gland tumors. His research concentrates on developing techniques that allow surgeons to perform highly complex brain surgeries using minimally invasive approaches, including endoscopic surgery performed by accessing skull-base tumors through the nose. His recent work involves developing “bug-like” robots to advance minimally invasive brain surgery. He also studies how developmental biology can help us better understand tumor growth and assist in recovery from brain injury. A native of Argentina, Dr. Goldschmidt studied the regeneration of human dura, the brain’s outermost membrane, while earning his medical degree and doctorate at the University of Buenos Aires. He did his neurosurgery residency training and a skull-base surgery fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He also completed a postdoctoral surgical fellowship in neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change in response to new information, at Sweden’s renowned Karolinska Institute.

Dr. Gorno Tempini is a behavioral neurologist and expert on language disorders across the life span. Her research and clinical work center on primary progressive aphasia, a neurodegenerative disorder that slowly damages parts of the brain that control speech and language; and dyslexia, a neurodevelopmental difference that affects how children learn to read and write. At the UCSF Dyslexia Center and the UCSF-UC Berkeley Schwab Dyslexia and Cognitive Diversity Center, Dr. Gorno Tempini strives to better understand the biological basis of learning difficulties and develop personalized approaches to address them. Since 2019, she has directed a California state-funded project to create a digital platform, UCSF Multitudes, for early screening and intervention of dyslexia in California public schools. She also directs the UCSF Memory and Aging Center’s Language Neurobiology Laboratory, where she investigates how neurodegenerative conditions impact language skills and brain regions and how they reorganize in response. 
 

Dr. Gupta’s research specialization is engineered, cell-based therapies for neurological conditions, in particular neuro-autoimmune and neuro-infectious conditions. Her work currently is directed toward using anti-CD19 CAR T cells – a type of targeted, engineered immune cell – in lab animals to help determine potential effectiveness in multiple sclerosis. Dr. Gupta also studies antigen-specific CD8 cells – another type of targeted T cell – for use against progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, a devastating disease caused by a virus that targets the brain. She earned her bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from UC Berkeley and her medical degree from the Yale School of Medicine and did her neurology residency at UCSF, where she served as chief resident. Dr. Gupta is completing her third year as a research-based fellow in neuroimmunology under the mentorship of Michael Wilson, MD, and Scott Zamvil, MD, PhD. 
 

Dr. Haack is a researcher, licensed clinical psychologist, and founder of the STRIVE Lab, which uses culturally relevant strategies and technology to improve young people’s mental and behavioral health. Her goal is to improve access to quality mental health care for young people and families in diverse, underserved populations worldwide. Dr. Haack started one of the first efforts to implement and evaluate a behavioral school-based program in Latin America to improve youth attention and behavior. Her current research includes adapting an existing digital school mental health program into Spanish for Latinx youths with hyperactivity, attention, and behavior disorders in the US and Mexico. Dr. Haack collaborates on projects involving technology-based platforms including web, text messaging, and digital applications that support mental health providers and patients. She earned her master’s degree and a doctorate in clinical psychology from Marquette University and completed a clinical internship and National Institutes of Health-funded postdoctoral fellowship​s at UCSF.
 

Dr. Manley is an internationally recognized expert in neurotrauma. In addition to a robust clinical practice at ZSFG – a Level 1 trauma center – he coordinates and leads national and international clinical research efforts in the study of the short- and long-term effects of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. With a nationwide team of TBI experts, Dr. Manley recently launched the TRACK-TBI Network, an innovative, precision-medicine-driven consortium that will test phase II drugs for use in TBI. The TRACK-TBI studies have created a modern precision-medicine information commons for TBI that integrates clinical, imaging, proteomic, genomic, and outcome biomarkers. This information could propel the development of a new TBI disease-classification system that would revolutionize diagnosis, direct patient-specific treatment, and improve outcomes.
 

Dr. Moses focuses on new ways to decode speech from the brain activity of a clinical-trial participant who cannot speak on his own. He manages and coordinates projects for the lab of Edward Chang, MD, that are part of the BRAVO clinical trial, which has the long-term goal of developing “speech neuroprostheses” to restore communication to severely paralyzed patients who cannot speak. Dr. Moses also maintains the software used to enable real-time translation of brain activity into speech, which he originally developed while pursuing his doctoral degree. Along with other members of an interdisciplinary team of speech neuroscientists, machine-learning engineers, and clinical research coordinators, Dr. Moses is helping create new methods for decoding speech from the brain activity of clinical-trial participants who can’t speak. In a first-of-its-kind breakthrough, Dr. Moses and his team demonstrated that these methods could be used to reliably identify words that a participant was trying to say in real time directly from his brain activity. 
 

Dr. Mucke studies processes that cause memory loss and other major neurological deficits, especially Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases. His goal is to advance the understanding of nervous-system disorders so better treatments can be developed to prevent, control, and reverse them. Dr. Mucke has discovered how molecules called amyloid beta peptides and tau can alter the activity of brain cells and interfere with memory even when they are not part of visible protein deposits that form in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. His ongoing research focuses on how these molecules interfere with memory and how they interact with other factors to influence the risk of Alzheimer’s, the patient’s age when the disease begins, and its severity.
 

Dr. Prather describes himself as a “diehard sleep evangelist but sleep-deprived father of two.” A psychologist, he treats people with insomnia using individual cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of treatment that relies on behavioral and psychological techniques to improve a patients’ sleep quality. Most recently, his work has focused on understanding how sleep enhances the immune system, including the role sleep plays in mounting an effective response to vaccination. Dr. Prather measures sleep in the laboratory and in the real world to determine which study participants are vulnerable to sleep-related health problems and which are resilient, with the goal of developing new treatments.

Dr. Prather earned his doctoral degree in clinical and biological health psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. He did a clinical psychology internship at Duke University Medical Center then came to UCSF through a two-year fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program.
 

Dr. Rao is a neurologist who specializes in using medications, surgery, and implanted neurostimulation devices to care for people with epilepsy. His research involves using direct brain electrical recordings and implanted devices to monitor patterns of brain activity and better understand how abnormal patterns cause seizures. He also uses those tools to explore the cognitive dysfunction and mood disorders – such as anxiety and depression – that are common in people with epilepsy. One way Dr. Rao treats patients is by using patterns of brain activity to forecast their seizure risk several days in advance and giving them a warning before they have a seizure. Dr. Rao earned his medical degree from UCSF, completed his residency at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals, and returned to UCSF for a fellowship in clinical neurophysiology.

Dr. Richie specializes in treating hospitalized patients with neurological disorders including strokes, seizures, Guillain-Barré syndrome, multiple sclerosis, and delirium. She also manages less common neurological conditions, such as transverse myelitis (inflammation in a section of the spinal cord), status epilepticus (seizures lasting more than 5 minutes), infectious encephalitis, and autoimmune encephalitis. Dr. Richie earned her medical degree and completed her residency in neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She came to UCSF to complete her neurohospitalist fellowship before joining the UCSF Neurohospitalist Division in 2016. Dr. Richie also is deeply involved in medical education. She founded the UCSF Master Clinician Flexible Residency Program and an outpatient lumbar-puncture clinic for neurology residents. She also currently serves as the neurology clerkship director for UCSF medical students.
 

Dr. Sanders is a geneticist and pediatrician who specializes in the genetics of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD). His research uses genomics and bioinformatics – a field that combines biology, statistics, and computer science – to understand the causes of developmental disorders and develop gene-therapy approaches. Dr. Sanders’ lab has identified hundreds of genes and genetic mutations associated with autism and works to understand how these impact brain development. He also studies how brain development differs between females and males to understand why autism is more common in males. Dr. Sanders trained as a pediatric physician and earned his medical degree at Nottingham Medical School in the UK before earning his doctoral degree and doing his postdoctoral research at Yale University under Matthew State, MD, PhD, now the head of UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. 
 

Dr. Scangos is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with an interest in developing novel therapies for neuropsychiatric conditions. She conducts quantitative circuit-based neuroscience research to identify electrophysiologic biomarkers of mood disorders and new forms of responsive brain stimulation therapies. She led a clinical trial of personalized closed-loop deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression. She also is currently a medical director at Neumora Therapeutics, where she works to integrate multimodal biomarker development into clinical trials on a large scale. Dr. Scangos earned her medical and doctoral degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF and developed a biomarker of major depression based on recordings from the surface of the brain.
 

Dr. Seeley graduated from UCSF medical school and completed a neurology residency at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals in Boston. He then came back to UCSF for a behavioral neurology fellowship with Bruce Miller, MD, and developed expertise in caring for patients with dementia and other forms of neurodegeneration. Dr. Seeley began to question how events that occurred at the molecular level could target such small subsets of the brain’s roughly 86 billion nerve cells. This biological problem, referred to as selective vulnerability, became the center of his research, especially as it relates to dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other age-related neurodegenerative diseases. The goal of his research is to determine what makes certain brain cells susceptible or resistant to disease, with an eye toward translating these findings into novel treatment approaches.
 

Mr. Stull is president of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). During his tenure, the Conservatory has launched a dynamic new curriculum that prepares artists to seize opportunities in the modern economy while equipping them for lifelong success in any endeavor. Mr. Stull previously served for nine years as dean and professor of brass studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Before Oberlin, he worked for the Aspen Music Festival, held dean and teaching positions at Lawrence University, and served as the associate director of admissions for The Juilliard School. A professional tubist, Stull has performed with the Milwaukee Ballet, the Bravo Colorado Music Festival, the Oberlin Brass Quintet, the American Brass Quintet, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, and Live from Lincoln Center. Mr. Stull earned degrees in tuba performance and English literature at Oberlin College and a master’s degree in music at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Dr. Tolou-Shams, a child clinical psychologist, has more than 20 years of experience developing evidence-based mental-health, substance-use, and sexual-health interventions for youths and their families who have interacted with the justice, child welfare, or foster care systems. She and her Juvenile Justice Behavioral Health Research Team investigate how to improve access to behavioral health care and results for these young people; their vision is to achieve brain-health equity for all children and families. Dr. Tolou-Shams also serves as principal investigator of several National Institutes of Health-funded clinical trials in this area, including identifying ways technology can improve outcomes and determining effective trauma-responsive interventions – those that anticipate the potential for trauma, rather than just taking it into account during treatment – particularly for girls in the juvenile justice system. Dr. Tolou-Shams earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
 

Edwin Outwater currently serves as the music director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He works with orchestras and institutions around the world, producing, curating, and conducting unique concert experiences. He frequently premieres new works and connects audiences with repertoire beyond the mainstream. Recent wide-ranging projects include collaborations with Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, John Lithgow, and Metallica. Mr. Outwater has a long association with the San Francisco Symphony. He regularly conducts and curates their SoundBox series, and has conducted and hosted “Holiday Gaiety,” an LGBTQ holiday concert he created with drag performer Peaches Christ. Previously, Mr. Outwater was music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and led them on a highly acclaimed European tour. He also served as the San Francisco Symphony’s director of summer concerts. Mr. Outwater is music director laureate of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, where he returns regularly. 

Dr. Willsey researches how genes associated with autism spectrum disorder function during neurodevelopment and how we can harness those functions to design therapeutics. To identify these mechanisms, she has developed a high-throughput Xenopus tropicalis frog platform, manipulating frog genes and rapidly studying many autism spectrum disorder genes at the same time. By mutating many large-effect autism genes in parallel using CRISPR genome editing and then screening small molecules, she can identify resiliency pathways to counter the effects of gene mutations. Her work has pinpointed forebrain neurogenesis as a potential critical process in autism and estrogen signaling as a potential mitigating pathway. Dr. Willsey earned her doctoral degree in genetics at Yale University and did her postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and UCSF.