SOBP Training Workshop: “Enhancing the Utility of Preclinical Animal Models for Advancing CNS Therapeutics”

Marc Avey, PhD

Director of Standards, Canadian Council on Animal Care

Dr. Avey completed his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Alberta, exploring the neuroethology of auditory perception in songbirds. He then completed two fellowships, one in animal policy development at the CCAC, and one on preclinical translation of animal research at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

Dr. Avey is an expert in preclinical animal reporting guidelines and clinical translation. He maintains an extensive network with national and international leaders in experimental design, reporting, and translation of preclinical/toxicology animal studies, as well as within the clinical and public health guideline development methods community. He has extensive knowledge in the principles of the Three Rs and recognizes that the reporting and experimental design of research has tremendous room for improvement, which could significantly improve the reproducibility of animal-based research.

As a scientist and manager, his focus has been on the gaps that exist between evidence and policy to achieve objectives such as improving the welfare of animals in science, and improving the health and well-being of Canadians through public health guidelines. Most recently, he played an integral role in the implementation of the Canada Border Testing Program, supporting the Public Health Agency of Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout his professional career, he has also volunteered on several committees of national and international organizations, and has provided teaching and mentorship at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, University of Ottawa, and University of Alberta.

Jill Daniel, PhD

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Tulane University

Dr. Jill Daniel is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Tulane University, the founding Director of the Tulane Brain Institute, and Associate Director of the Tulane Center of Excellence in Sex-Based Biology & Medicine. Dr. Daniel received her PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from Tulane in 2000 and completed postdoctoral training in Pharmacology at LSU Health Sciences Center. She returned to Tulane as a faculty member in 2006. Dr. Daniel currently serves as the Principal Investigator on grants awards from the National Institutes of Health that total over $16.5 million and has published extensively in the area of hormones, biological sex, and the brain. Using pre-clinical rodent models, she has elucidated how the loss of estrogens at menopause affects brain areas important for memory and the associated impacts for female cognitive aging. Additionally, results of research in her lab have revealed putative brain mechanisms by which males are more vulnerable to disorders of impulse control as compared to females. In 2018, Dr. Daniel was named the inaugural Gary P. Dohanich Professor in Brain Science.

Tim Errington, PhD

Senior Director of Research, Center for Open Science

Tim Errington is Senior Director of Research at the Center for Open Science (COS) that aims to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. In that position he conducts and collaborates with researchers and stakeholders across scientific disciplines and organizations on metascience projects aimed to understand the current research process and evaluate initiatives designed to increase reproducibility and openness of scientific research. Such projects include large scale reproducibility projects, such as the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology and the DARPA supported Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) (doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/46mnb) and evaluation projects of new initiatives, such as open science badges (doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002456), Registered Reports (doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01142-4), and a novel responsible conduct of research training (doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1917848117).

Errington received his PhD in Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology from the University of Virginia, MA in Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California Berkeley, and earned a B.S. in Biology and Chemistry at St. Lawrence University.

Chantelle Ferland-Beckham, PhD

Senior Director, External Affairs, Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Dr. Chantelle Ferland-Beckham is a translational neuroscientist by training, with over 15 years of experience in preclinical models of neuropsychiatric disorders and brain injury models. She is also an experienced public policy and advocacy professional, having spent nearly 10 years working on advocacy and public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels. After earning her PhD in Neuroscience from Tulane University, she went on to complete postdoctoral fellowships in both traumatic brain injury and clinical and preclinical models of comorbid addition and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She was later selected to be an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. In this role as a Health Science Policy Analyst, she evaluated research programs and developed policies to promote progress in biomedical research and ensure the effective use of taxpayer funds to conduct research for the benefit of human health. She also assisted with Congressionally mandated reporting and liaison activities to strengthen the relationship between the NIH and Congress. Additionally, she worked on the Fellows in Innovation initiative, spearheaded by the Obama administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to analyze current strategies and provide policy recommendations for suicide prevention in current and former members of the US military. In 2017, she joined Cohen Veterans Bioscience (CVB), serving in a capacity that bridged her scientific and public policy backgrounds and supporting both the programmatic and policy initiatives of CVB.

Allyson Gage, PhD

Chief Medical Officer, Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Dr. Allyson T. Gage is a neuroscientist and drug development executive, who has over 18 years of experience leading teams in all phases of clinical development. She has been responsible for the overall strategic
and clinical development of small molecules, biologics, and cellular therapies for the treatment of central nervous
system disorders, including depression, alcohol dependence, Alzheimer’s dementia, neuropathic pain, traumatic brain injury, and spinal cord injury. Allyson has a proven track record in partnering with therapeutic area clinicians, US and International regulators, patient groups, and data scientists to translate pre-clinical information into human evaluation, to design informative clinical trial protocols, and ensure a regulatory path with approvable and clinically meaningful outcome measures. Prior to joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Allyson’s most recent experience was focused in the field of regenerative medicine, working toward the development of a therapeutic for spinal cord injury.

Allyson earned her BA from Rutgers College in New Brunswick, NJ and her MS and PhD in neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.

Magali Haas, MD, PhD

CEO & President, Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Dr. Haas is Chair, CEO and President of Cohen Veterans Bioscience, a non-profit brain research organization based in New York City whose mission is to fast-track diagnostics and therapeutics to advance precision brain health. Magali has over 15 years of pharmaceutical executive experience, predominantly at Johnson & Johnson, where she assumed broad end-to-end development leadership roles in early and late stage neuroscience clinical development, translational medicine, diagnostics and integrative solutions. To pioneer new approaches for precision therapeutics for brain health, she founded Orion Bionetworks in 2012, which was transformed to Cohen Veterans Bioscience in 2015, while also serving as founding Chief Science and Technology Officer for One Mind for Research. She serves on several advisory boards including Alto Neurosciences, Partnership for Assessment and Accreditation of Scientific Practice, VirtualBrainCloud, Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics and IMEC for nanoelectronics. Magali earned her BS in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University, and her MD and PhD in neuroscience with distinction from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Nikolaos Kokras, MD, PhD

Psychiatrist & Research Associate, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Dr. Nikolaos Kokras is a psychiatrist and research associate at the Department of Pharmacology and at the First Department of Psychiatry, Eginition Hospital, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Dr. Kokras has several years of experience in psychopharmacology, drug screening and translational pharmacology. He received his medical degree in 1999, an MSc (Research) degree in Affective Neuroscience in 2006 with a thesis on the HPA axis regulation and his PhD in Pharmacology in 2011 with a thesis on the sex-related differential response to antidepressants. In 2005, he earned a fellowship from the International Brain Research Organization and he spent time at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry at the Research Group of Dr. Osborne F. X. Almeida. There, he received excellent training in molecular techniques and performed studies on the role of HPA axis in sex differences in models of depression and anxiety. In parallel with his PhD studies, he was appointed as a psychiatric trainee in late 2007 and received his certificate of completed psychiatric training in September 2010 from the First Department of Psychiatry, Eginition Hospital, Medical School of Athens. Before joining Eginition Hospital, he received excellent training for one year at the South London, Maudsley & Oxleas NHS trust in London, UK. During his clinical training he was elected as a board member in the Trainee’s Committee of the National Psychiatric Association and now is serving in the board of Young Psychiatrists Network. From 2012-2016, Dr. Kokras was employed as a post-doctoral fellow at the Dep. of Pharmacology, as member of a multidisciplinary consortium for the pharmacological screening of new CNS-acting molecules, co-funded by Greece and European Union. Moreover, Dr. Kokras has earned two fellowships from the State Institute of Fellowships (IKY) and with one of them he re-joined the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry for 6 months in 2014. He is currently participating in an exchange program between the Dep. of Pharmacology in Greece and a collaborative laboratory in the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (IKY-DAD program). Dr. Kokras has received several distinctions from the IBRO, ECNP, BAP, HSN, IKY and the WPA. Dr Kokras has published 49 papers in peer-reviewed journals covering fields of experimental and clinical psychopharmacology, as well as liaison psychiatry and psychosomatics (>1700 citations, h-index 21, source Scopus/Scholar). He has also co-authored 12 chapters in international and Greek books and he has more than 100 abstracts in Greek and international conferences. He serves as a peer-reviewer in several scientific journals.

Lee Lancashire, PhD

Chief Information Officer, Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Lee Lancashire, PhD has over 15 years of experience in machine learning and statistics. His PhD was focused on the development of artificial neural network based methodologies where he was involved in many of the first applications of neural nets to high dimensional datasets in bioinformatics.

Prior to joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Lee spent over five years within the IP&Science business of Thomson Reuters where he established and led the machine learning and statistical data analysis team. Here he held global responsibility for managing and delivering analytical projects, serving the majority of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, as well as government, academic and non-profit organizations. These projects focused on utilizing advanced machine learning approaches in the molecular profiling of disease for biomarker discovery, patient stratification and drug target identification.

Lee completed his post-doctoral research in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, a Cancer Research UK core facility. He has also worked as a bioinformatics project lead in personalized medicine and diagnostics companies CompanDX and Almac Diagnostics. He has published in over 30 key industry journals and holds several patents around the use of neural networks in the biomedical domain.
In his free time Lee devotes time volunteering as a trustee for the Ichthyosis Support Group, a charity that supports individuals and families affected by a group of rare skin disorders.

Michelle C. LaPlaca, PhD

Professor, Georgia Tech and Emory University

Michelle C. LaPlaca, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She earned a Ph.D. in Bioengineering in injury biomechanics and completed postdoctoral training in Neurosurgery, both at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. She joined the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in 1998 and is a member of the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, as well as a program faculty member in the Bioengineering graduate program at Georgia Tech and the Neuroscience graduate program at Emory. She has testified before the US Senate on traumatic brain injury (TBI), and served as President and Program Chair of the National Neurotrauma Society. Dr. LaPlaca is an elected fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), is Associate Editor at the Journal of Neurotrauma, is on the editorial board of Experimental Neurology, and is on the Board of Directors of the Brain Injury Association of Georgia (BIAG). Dr. LaPlaca’s research interests are to better understand TBI heterogeneity, as it pertains to stress, identify novel TBI biomarkers and the role of glymphatic system in biomarker efflux, and develop multimodal concussion assessment tools. She participated in the development of preclinical common data elements (CDEs) within the FITBIR framework and currently is part of the VA interagency center PRECISE-TBI (PRE Clinical Interagency reSearch resourcE-TBI) to expand CDEs and provide end-to-end informatic tools to improve rigor, reproducibility, and transparency in research. By working at both pre-clinical and clinical levels and using data science tools to study the complexity of TBI, this approach promotes successful clinical translation.

Malcom Macleod, PhD

Professor of Neurology & Translational Neurosciences and Academic Lead for Research Improvement and Research Integrity, University of Edinburgh

Malcolm Macleod is Professor of Neurology and Translational Neurosciences and Academic Lead for Research Improvement and Research Integrity at the University of Edinburgh. With Howells he co-founded the CAMARADES collaboration in 2005. He was Academic Coordinator of the European Quality in Preclinical Data IMI consortium and now leads the Guarantors of EQIPD. He was a lead author in the Lancet Series on Research Waste in 2014, and is a member of the UK Reproducibility Network steering committee. His current research interests relate to providing evidence for the effectiveness (or not) of strategies which might be adopted by funders, journals and institutions to improve the quality of their research.

Martin Michel, MD

Professor of Pharmacology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Dr. Martin C. Michel graduated from medical school at the University of Essen in 1985. Based upon a thesis in the Dept. of Biochemistry of the University of Essen he received a doctorate in 1987. He has worked as a post-doc in Essen (1985-1987) and at the University of California San Diego (1987-1990) and was appointed as Adjunct Assistant Professor in San Diego and as lecturer in Essen in 1991. He is a board-certified pharmacologist (1990) and clinical pharmacologist (1997). Between 1993 and 2002 he was head of the Nephrology and Hypertension Research Laboratory at the University of Essen, 2003-2011 professor and head of the Department of Pharmacology & Pharmacotherapy at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and 2011-2016 Global Head Product & Pipeline Scientific Support at Boehringer Ingelheim. He currently is a Professor of Pharmacology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany).  He is a member of many pharmacological and urological societies and serves as editor of several journals including Neurourology & Urodynamics, Pharmacological Reviews, Molecular Pharmacology and Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology. Dr. Michel has published more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals cited more than 31,000 times (h-index 89). His most important academic honour was the election into the Academia Europaea, the European academy of sciences, in 2008. Dr. Michel’s research interests include urogenital and cardiovascular pharmacology and physiology spanning the entire range from molecular pharmacology to clinical trials.

Penny Reynolds, PhD

Research Applied Statistician, University of Florida

Penny Reynolds, PhD, is a research applied statistician in the Departments of Anesthesiology (College of Medicine) and Small Animal Clinical Sciences (College of Veterinary Medicine), University of Florida USA, and co-founder of STatistics in Anesthesiology Research (STAR)-Core at UF. She has a MSc in Biometry and PhD in Zoology with Statistics minor from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was a member of the International Working Group for the revision of the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) 2.0 Guidelines for reporting animal-based research. She is a current member of the University of Florida Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Recent research has focused on sample size estimation and methodology, and evaluation of methodological and statistical quality gaps in preclinical and veterinary studies.