NEUROVIGIL - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Co - Founder of Linkabit Corporation
Dr. Andrew Viterbi is the co-Founder of Linkabit Corporation and Qualcomm, Inc., Professor in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD and the President of the Viterbi Group. He is the inventor of the famous Viterbi algorithm and an alumnus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Viterbi is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of Wireless Communications, especially Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) Wireless Technology. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Viterbi graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957, and the University of Southern California (USC), where he earned his PhD in 1962. In 2004 the USC School of Engineering was renamed the Viterbi School of Engineering. Dr. Viterbi serves on numerous boards and committees including the USC, MIT Visiting Committee for Bioengineering, Scripps Research Institute, and the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Source: NeuroVigil and IEEE Information Theory Society.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Staff Scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute
Dr. Donald "Don" Spencer is currently a staff scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute and a visiting scholar in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. His studies focus on how brain cells store, process and transmit information both individually and in networks. He is also an expert in digital image processing and spread spectrum communications. Dr. Spencer is an alumnus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a former director of TRW's Avionics Systems Division. He installed the first American Broadband VLF recording equipment and the first radio noise synoptic recording station in Antarctica.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- President of the Salk Institute
Dr. Fred "Rusty" Gage is the President of the Salk Institute and its Adler Professor in the Laboratory of Genetics. Dr. Gage is a pioneer in Neuroscience. His work concentrates on the adult central nervous system and unexpected plasticity and adaptability to environmental stimulation that remains throughout the life of all mammals. Dr. Gage's lab showed that, contrary to accepted dogma, adult human beings are capable of growing new brain cells, a process called Neurogenesis. Dr. Gage is the co-founder of Stem Cells, Inc., a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former president of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), a recipient of the Christopher Reeve Research Medal, the Max Planck Research Prize, the IPSEN Prize in Neuronal Plasticity, and the MetLife Award for Medical Research. Dr. Gage was named one of Time magazine's 100 Innovators in Science for the 21st century. Dr. Gage was elected to the American Philosophical Society in April 2010.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Assistant Professor of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine
Dr. Gozde Durmus is an Assistant Professor of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine and a member of the Cardiovascular Institute. She conducted her postdoctoral research at Stanford; working with Prof. Ronald W. Davis and Prof. Lars Steinmetz at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University, with a minor in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship, a M.Eng. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University and B.S. degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Middle East Technical University (METU). Her work has been featured in scientific and popular media including Science, PNAS, Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, Nature Scientific Reports, New Scientist and Popular Mechanics. Her many distinctions include a Fulbright Scholarship, the ITI Young Investigator Award from Stanford University, the Entrepreneurial Fellowship from National Science Foundation (NSF) & Slater Technology Fund, a World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship fellowship, the MIT TR-35 Top Young Innovator Award, the METU Presidential Alumni Achievement and Recognition Award and the Career Award at Scientific Interface from Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF-CASI). Recently, she has been named as a "Rising Star in Biomedicine" by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Professor
Dr. Jean-Paul Spire (in Memoriam) is a Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery and the Director of the Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratories and Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Chicago. Dr. Spire's major clinical interests have been in the surgical management of intractable epilepsies and in the diagnosis and treatment of the organic sleep disorders such as narcolepsy and sleep apneas. His research interests include true spatial reconstructive imaging with PET, MRI, functional topography of the brain, and three-dimensional evoked potential studies.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Professor of Psychiatry
Dr. Jerome "Jerry" Siegel is Professor of Psychiatry and the Director of the Center for Sleep Research at UCLA. Dr. Siegel is a world known authority in the sleep field. His laboratory has made discoveries concerning the role of molecules called hypocretins in narcolepsy. Dr. Siegel is also an expert in sleep phylogeny. He has discovered that the platypus, a primitive mammal, has REM sleep and that marine mammals can go without sleep for long periods without ill effects. Dr. Siegel is a former president of the SRS, the author of "The Neural Control of Sleep and Waking" and the recipient of the NIH MERIT and Javits awards.
Dr. Lisa Haile Dr. Lisa Haile, JD, PhD, is a Partner and Co-Chair of DLA Piper's Global Life Sciences Sector. Dr. Haile has special technical experience in molecular biology, immunology, cell biology, regenerative medicine including ESCs, iPSCs, pSCs, diagnostics, therapeutics, theragnostic, drug delivery systems, host-vector systems, high throughput screening and bioinformatics. She has experience with patentability, non-infringement and validity opinions; licensing strategies; FDA counseling; due diligence work in connection with venture capital, private and public financing; mergers and acquisitions in the life sciences industry; and strategic counseling for comprehensive life sciences patent portfolio management. Dr.Haile and her team oversee prosecution of NeuroVigil's growing patent portfolio and has successfully obtained protection of industry-defining patents in several key markets. Ms. Haile is a graduate of California Western School of Law (JD 1991) and has a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Georgetown University School of Medicine (Ph.D. 1987).
Dr. Haile is a member of DLA Piper's Executive Committee.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Expert
Dr. Michael Castro is an expert in molecular oncology, precision medicine, immunotherapy of cancer and immunomics. He received his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and has been in practice for more than 20 years. His practice is based in Beverly Hills, California.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer
Dr. Patrick Mercier is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder/co-director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at UCSD. He holds a B.Sc. from the University of Alberta, Canada, and a M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT. His pioneering research in the area of low-power wireless integrated circuits for medical applications has been the subject of numerous awards and recognitions from the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Engineering, DARPA, Biocom, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the San Diego Engineering Council, the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, UCSD, Intel, among others. Dr. Mercier has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact venues, has co-authored 4 books, and is an associate editor and member of the Technical Program Committee of various leading journals and conferences in the areas of solid-state circuits and biomedical devices. Moreover, Dr. Mercier has extensive entrepreneurial experience, including as a consultant, co-founder, board member, and scientific advisor.
Job Titles:
- Founding Member
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Roger Guillemin is a founding member of the scientific advisory board of NeuroVigil, from which he retired prior to his appointment as President of the Salk Institute, where he is also a Distinguished Professor. Dr. Guillemin has discovered an entire new class of substances shown to be important for the regulation of growth, development, reproduction and responses to stress. The impact of Dr. Guillemin's studies has been profound for a variety of diseases and disorders, including thyroid diseases, problems of infertility, diabetes and several types of tumors. One of these hormones, called growth-hormone releasing factor, is used to treat growth deficiencies in children; another, called somatostatin, is used to treat acromegaly and other types of pituitary diseases. Dr. Guillemin also was among the first to isolate endorphins, brain molecules known to act as natural opiates. Dr. Guillemin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Lasker Award, the Dickson Prize in Medicine, the National Medal of Science and the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Guillemin is also a talented artist and one of the early proponents of digital computer paintings.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Ronald L. Graham (in Memoriam) is the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (CalIT2) at UCSD. He is widely credited as one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years. A longtime collaborator of the late Paul Erdos, Dr. Graham is the author of over 300 hundred papers and five books. He is a former Chief Scientist at Bell laboratories and president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a recipient of the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement and is currently serving his third four-year term as treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Graham discovered the largest number used in a mathematical proof, a.k.a Graham's number. Dr. Graham is also the former president of the International Jugglers Association.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Professor
Dr. Sonia Ancoli-Israel is a Professor Emeritus and Professor of Research in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and Director of the Gillin Sleep and Chronomedicine Research Center. Dr. Ancoli-Israel received her Bachelor's Degree from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a Master's Degree in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Ancoli-Israel's expertise is in the field of sleep disorders and sleep research in aging. Her current interests include the longitudinal effect of sleep disorders on aging, the effect of circadian rhythms on sleep, therapeutic interventions for sleep problems in dementia, and fatigue, particularly the relationship between sleep, fatigue and circadian rhythms in cancer and other chronic illnesses. Dr. Ancoli-Israel is Past-President of the Sleep Research Society (SRS), Past-President of the Society for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms and was on the founding Executive Board of the National Sleep Foundation. She was honored in 2007 with the National Sleep Foundation Life Time Achievement Award and the SRS Mary A. Carskadon Outstanding Educator Award, in 2012 with Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine Distinguished Career Award and in 2014 with the SRS Distinguished Scientist Award. Dr. Ancoli-Israel is published regularly in medical and psychiatric journals with over 450 publications in the field.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge
Dr. Stephen W. Hawking (in Memoriam) was the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. He was also Director of Research at the Institute for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge, his other books for the general reader included A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universes, and The Universe in a Nutshell. In 1963, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. He went on to Cambridge to become a brilliant researcher and Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. Since 1979 he held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663. Professor Hawking had over a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Science. Stephen Hawking was regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein. [Source: http://www.hawking.org.uk]
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Scientist
Dr. Stephen Wolfram (service terminated) is a scientist, author, and business leader. He is the creator of Mathematica, the author of A New Kind of Science, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. His career has been characterized by a sequence of original and significant achievements. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20. In recognition of his early work in physics and computing, Wolfram became in 1981 the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. Having started to use computers in 1973, Wolfram rapidly became a leader in the emerging field of scientific computing, and in 1979 he began the construction of SMP--the first modern computer algebra system--which he released commercially in 1981.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Terrence "Terry" Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor and Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute. He is one of the world's foremost experts in Neuroscience and a Pioneer in the field of Computational Neuroscience. His laboratory has developed diverse and powerful techniques to understand neurophysiological activity and addresses the computational resources which the brain uses at many levels. Dr. Sejnowski is the founder of the journal Neural Computation, the president of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, the director of the Institute for Neural Computation at UCSD and the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. He is the author of several books including "Thalamocortical Assemblies, how ion channels, single neurons, and large-scale Networks organize sleep oscillations" and "The Deep Learning revolution", and an editor of "The Regulation of Sleep". He is the recipient of the Wright Prize, the Hebb Prize and the Neural Network Pioneer Award. He is a co-founder of NeuroVigil, and one of only ten living individuals elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014. He also received the 2015 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
- Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine
Dr. Utkan Demirci is a pioneering bioengineer, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and its Co-director and Co-division Chief at the Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection in the Department of Radiology. He received his PhD, a M.S. in EE and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed research articles, 24 book chapters and editorials, 4 books, and over 25 pending or granted patents which were the basis of new FDA and CE approved products and of companies that serve patients across the globe. His group focuses on developing innovative point-of-care technologies, including label-free rare cell sorting, and microfluidic platforms with broad applications to multiple diseases, including cancer. His seminal work was the basis of 3-D bioprinting of cells and biomaterials, of a portable HIV biosensor which was successfully launched in Tanzania, and of novel FDA approved sperm selection methods widely used by fertility clinics that have led to over 10,000 live child births globally. Dr. Demirci is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, a recipient of the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research (ARBIR) Distinguished Investigator Award, the Stanford Basic Scientist of the Year Award, the MIT Top Young Innovator TR-35 Award, the Harvard Medical School-Young Investigator Award, the Brigham and Women's Hospital-Bright Future Award, the EEE EMBS Early Career Award, the IEEE EMBS Translational Science Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Coulter Foundation Early Career Award and the Chinese International Young Scientist Award.
Mr. Jeffrey N. Gibbs has represented health care companies on FDA-related matters since 1984. He advises companies on a wide variety of issues, including product approvals, marketing, clinical studies, and enforcement. Previously, he served in the Chief Counsel's Office of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where he became an Associate Chief Counsel for Enforcement. While at FDA, Mr. Gibbs received the FDA Award of Merit. He also was appointed a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. Before joining FDA, he clerked for a United States District Court Judge in the District of New Jersey. Mr. Gibbs has written and lectured extensively on a variety of FDA-related topics. Mr. Gibbs served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Food and Drug Law Journal from 1998 to 2004, and was Chair in 2003-2004. He is currently on the editorial advisory board of IVD Technology and Guide to Good Clinical Practices, and is a member of the Human Subjects Research Board for George Mason University. Mr. Gibbs serves as Secretary and General Counsel of the Board of Directors of the Food and Drug Law Institute. He is a graduate of Princeton University (1975 summa cum laude) and the New York University School of Law (1978 with honors). He is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia. Source: Hyman, Phelps & McNamara, LLP
Mr. Paul Kreutz has practiced law since 1967. He started his practice in the San Francisco Bay Area with the law firm of Cooley Godward and in 1969 joined the Palo Alto firm of Ware & Freidenrich, one of Silicon Valley's pre-eminent law firms. When Ware & Freidenrich joined with San Diego's Gray Cary in 1994, Mr. Kreutz relocated to San Diego to build the combined firm's emerging company practice (now known as DLA Piper) in Southern California which he served as senior partner until his launch in 2007 of a boutique solo practice that offers emerging companies in Southern California the mentoring, strategic legal counseling skills, and the financial networking connections that he has acquired in his many years of practice.
Mr. Kreutz's practice has focused on emerging companies with an emphasis on counseling and structuring entrepreneurial enterprises poised for growth. He has served as legal counsel for such companies as Adobe Systems, 3Com Corporation, Bay Networks, KLA Instruments (now KLA-Tencor), Ross Stores, and McAfee Associates. In most of these cases, Mr. Kreutz counseled these companies from startup, through multiple rounds of private financings, to successful public offerings. He has acted as legal counsel for many of the Bay Area's pre-eminent Venture Capital firms including the representation of Sequoia Capital in its investment in Cisco Systems and TA Associates in its investment in BMC Software. In Southern California, Mr. Kreutz has represented Enterprise Partners, Forward Ventures, and many other Southern California venture capital firms.
As legal counsel for emerging companies, Mr. Kreutz is regularly called upon to advise Boards of Directors, officers, and shareholders as to their corporate responsibilities under circumstances where the interests of the directors, officers and shareholders may not be aligned with such corporate interests. Mr. Kreutz is a graduate of Yale University (BA 1964 cum laude) and Stanford Law School (LLB 1967).
Mr. Kreutz executed NeuroVigil's historic seed and Series A financings and serves as NeuroVigil's General Counsel.