Heather Lasseter, PhD

Associate Director,
Scientific Programs

Dr. Heather Lasseter earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the field of behavioral neuroscience. As a doctoral candidate in Dr. Rita Fuchs’ laboratory, Heather explored the neural circuity that regulates the ability of a drug-paired environmental context to produce cocaine-seeking behavior in a preclinical model of addiction. Her doctoral dissertation research – which earned the 2012 Linda Dykstra Distinguished Dissertation Award in Social Sciences – focused on the contribution of a mesocorticolimbic subcircuit to the reinstatement of cocaine seeking. After earning her doctoral degree, Heather was awarded a post-doctoral Health Communications Fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences. She subsequently transitioned into the medical communications community as a Senior Medical Writer for Percolation Communications LLC, working within a number of therapeutic areas, including psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Lauren Chaby, PhD

Manager,
Scientific Programs

Dr. Lauren Chaby has a background in cognitive neuroscience, including experience in preclinical models of stress. The goal of her research has been to investigate the impact of early adversity on adult outcomes using a systems approach, including cognitive skills and vulnerability to stress-linked psychopathology. To do this, she has used translational, preclinical, and theoretical approaches to create a high-resolution map of how environmental conditions during development modulate vulnerability to traumatic stress in adulthood. Her research awards have included the Radboud Excellence Initiative Fellowship and the J. Lloyd Huck Graduate Research Innovation Grant. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience from Pennsylvania State University under the mentorship of Dr. Victoria Braithwaite and Dr. Sonia Cavigelli. She then conducted postdoctoral research under the mentorship of Dr. Israel Liberzon and Dr. Shane Perrine. As a postdoctoral researcher, she investigated preclinical models of post-traumatic stress disorder and the capacity for stress to shape epigenetic regulation of protein expression and neurotransmitter levels within specific regions of the brain. Lauren also has experience in the intersection of technology and neuroscience pedagogy and has been involved in research to accelerate neuroanatomical learning using 3D models of the brain. Additionally, she served as a program coordinator for Developing Future Biologists, an immersive outreach short course through the University of Michigan.

Taryn Aubrecht, PhD

Manager,
Scientific Programs

Taryn Aubrecht, PhD supports the preclinical arm of the translational science team. In her dissertation, with Randy J. Nelson, she explored affective behaviors, learning and memory, and neuronal morphology in response to intermittent hypoxia in combination with other factors such as light at night and sex hormones in mice. She did a post-doctoral fellowship with Alan I. Faden, where she expanded her molecular and cellular biology techniques and learned multiple traumatic brain injury (TBI) models after receiving a Ruth L Kirschstein National Service Award (T32) award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to investigate the role of E2F genes in cell cycle reactivation and subsequent apoptosis following trauma. She then joined Ripple Effect in support of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP) as a science officer managing a portfolio of approximately 80 grants spanning the Epilepsy research program, Peer-reviewed Alzheimer’s research program and the combat casualty care program. Taryn completed her BA in Neuroscience at the College of Wooster in 2011 and her PhD in Neuroscience at the Ohio State University in 2015.

Kersten Small, PhD

Deputy Director,
Clinical Programs

Kersten Small, PhD is an experienced pharmaceutical scientist, drug hunter and translational research leader with over 15 years of experience in drug discovery and development at Merck and Mitsubishi-Tanabe. She has a proven track record for pipeline building and enabling decision-making across all discovery and development stage gates. Kersten has expertise in translational pharmacology and has developed both preclinical and clinical validation and biomarker strategies for small molecules and monoclonal antibodies across multiple therapeutic areas. Partnering with industry leaders, physician scientists and disease area experts, she created an industry-academic network-based research model focused on target identification, validation and establishing translational animal models and capabilities to drive the pipeline. Prior to her career in pharma, Kersten was Research Faculty at the University of Cincinnati where she studied the molecular pharmacology of polymorphic adrenergic receptors and their association with cardiovascular disease. Kersten was also a Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellow at Emory University focusing on rare X-linked muscular dystrophy. She received a B.S. in Biology from Purdue University and a PhD in Mammalian Development from University of Cincinnati.

Retsina Meyer, PhD

Associate Director,
Clinical Programs

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”-Goethe

Dr. Retsina Meyer pairs pursuit of scientific endeavors with the passionate execution to make real her vision to develop cures for mental illness.

Dr. Meyer is a translational neuroscientist, scientific founder of Resilience – a startup focused on novel treatments for PTSD and other brain diseases, and is currently consulting Scientific Program Manager for Cohen Biosciences. An active member of the biotech entrepreneurship community, Retsina works on local, national, and international programming to inspire scientist-entrepreneurs. Dr. Meyer has produced over 40 articles, abstracts, and lectures. Her academic discoveries gained international press, earned her a speaking engagement at the local TEDx conference, and served as the instigating discovery to found Resilience.

As an entrepreneur, Retsina is an alumna of MassBIO’s MassCONNECT program and SpringBoard’s Life Sciences Accelerator and is the 2014 champion of the international OneStart competition awarded by GSK’s SR One.
She obtained a Neuroscience Ph.D. at MIT where she earned five named fellowships, was a Presidential Fellow, Imperial College of London Global Fellow, and a Graduate Woman of Excellence. She served as a science advocate with the Science Policy Initiative, performing outreach, giving lectures, and meeting with members of congress to appeal for science and scientific funding.
Prior to her work at MIT, Dr. Meyer was a Fulbright Scholar, serving as a representative of the U.S. to Norway, where she worked in the lab of 2014 Nobel Prize winners Drs. May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. She holds bachelor’s degrees in applied mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics, and biopsychology from the University of Arizona where she was a Baver Scholar, and worked in the laboratories of Dr. David Rowe, Dr. Carol Barnes, and Dr. Bruce McNaughton.

Saheed Adeyeri, CCRP

Senior Clinical Trial Associate,
Clinical Programs

Saheed Adeyeri is a certified clinical research scientist and well-respected thought leader in the field, is managing clinical trial programs. Saheed has extensive industry experience having worked in clinical research management and programming at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, Becton Dickinson and InVentiv Health Clinical as well as Sanofi Pharmaceuticals. Saheed’s core competencies are end-to-end execution and management of clinical trials everything from study site start-up and monitoring to milestone tracking. He has studied and trained extensively completing Harvard University Fundamentals of Clinical Trials, the FDA Bioresearch Monitoring Program and an accreditation program in London. Saheed holds a BS with distinction in microbiology from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria.

Thahmina Rashid

Clinical Project Manager,
Clinical Programs

Thahmina is providing project management support for the adaptive platform trial in PTSD. She is an experienced clinical associate within the pharmaceutical industry having worked in a central core lab for several pharmaceutical companies including Romark, Biohaven, and Celgene, among others. She has also managed and implemented Phases I-IV for a number of clinical trials, simultaneously. Thahmina graduated with a BS in Neuroscience-Psychology from CUNY Queens College and is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Health Care Informatics at Adelphi University.

Timothy Vaughan, PhD

Deputy Director,
Data Science

Tim joined Cohen Veterans Bioscience in May 2019. For the prior 10 years, he worked at PatientsLikeMe, most recently as principal scientist within the biocomputing team. His research focused on the mathematical characterization of disease and predictive modeling of patient outcomes. He has an extensive and eclectic background in mathematical modeling, which began with his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics at Rutgers University. Tim developed his data modeling skills as a research associate at MIT, investigating the biological effects of electromagnetic fields, including transdermal drug delivery using electromagnetic fields. As a research fellow at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, he designed models to assess the effectiveness of ultrasound surgery. He has also worked as a financial engineer, and is a Top 20 Contributor to the MATLAB user community.

Kevin Urban, PhD

Associate Director,
Data Science

Kevin has over a decade of experience exploring a diverse range of complex data sets stemming from NASA and NOAA spacecraft missions in Earth’s ionosphere, magnetosphere, and interplanetary space, and from global-scale networks of ground-based instrumentation, and has leveraged this data to forecast space weather at the outer limits of Earth’s upper atmosphere and its effects in Earth’s polar cap regions, culminating in several peer-reviewed research papers. Kevin has also published on space mission design and dynamical system modeling of granular fluid systems. After receiving his PhD in physics from New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Kevin worked as a data scientist at WWE, where he built predictive models for subscriber behavior on the WWE Network (a monthly, direct-to-consumer, video streaming service averaging ~2 million daily active subscribers), and led various data engineering efforts, such as the collection, ingestion, and harmonization of WWE fan data across a host of social media and online platforms.

Andrew Thompson, PhD

Associate Director,
Data Science

Andrew is a data scientist leading the RAPID-Dx program advance biomarker discovery and validation in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Previously, he worked at PatientsLikeMe where he led analyses of patient-reported health data and multi-omic biological data to define predictive biomarkers and characterize disease sub-types. During his graduate degree training in neurobiology, Andrew focused on plasticity in the developing visual system, investigating a role for feedback projections in the fine-tuning of circuits during development. Prior to his PhD, Andrew worked with the discovery group at Vanda Pharmaceuticals, where he performed pharmacogenomics research in support of a phase 3 clinical trial and expression profiling studies – all in an effort to elucidate common gene signatures and repurpose existing drugs for new indications. Andrew earned his BS in biology from the University of Maryland and his PhD in biological and biomedical sciences from Harvard University.

Joseph Herman, PhD

Senior Data Scientist

Dr. Herman leads the PPMI Modelling Core, working with the Michael J. Fox Foundation to develop statistical modelling approaches for analysis of longitudinal multiomics and wearables data from Parkinson’s Disease patients. He also serves as a biostatistician on the Clinical Programs Team, and is working on the study design and statistical analysis plan for a Bayesian adaptive platform trial exploring novel treatments for PTSD. He obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Oxford, focusing on computational techniques for inference in Bayesian hierarchical models, with applications in bioinformatics and genomics. He then worked as a research associate at Harvard Medical School, developing statistical methods for analyzing subpopulation structure in single-cell and spatially-resolved transcriptomics datasets, and at NYC biotech startup Kallyope, where he helped to build a single-cell atlas of cell types along the gut-brain axis. Prior to joining CVB, he worked as a senior data scientist at women’s health startup Celmatix, using electronic health records in conjunction with whole-genome sequencing data to identify genetic and clinical markers predictive of individual reproductive health.

Nikolai Shokhirev, PhD

Senior Data Scientist

Dr. Shokhirev received a Master of Science Degree in theoretical physics from Novosibirsk State University, Russia, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physics and Mathematics from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk. Dr. Shokhirev has conducted research in quantum mechanics, magnetic spectroscopy, econophysics, stochastic processes and kinetics. He has also been involved in data analysis and processing in pulse spectroscopy, indirect measurements and remote sensing, scientific, engineering and financial data. He has published over 70 papers in those fields. Dr. Shokhirev joined the Digital Health team to apply his data science skills to the emerging area of remote health monitoring and healthcare.

Roozbeh Atri, PhD

Senior Data Scientist

Roozbeh received a BSc degree in Electronic Engineering from University of Tabriz, a MSc degree in Bio-Electrical Engineering from K. N. Toosi University of Technology, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Florida International University. He has over seven years of research experience on signal processing and machine learning. He has been working on the use biomedical and mechanical signal processing to collect data and develop various machine learning algorithms that could improve the healthcare systems by transforming it toward a robust, evidence-based, and personalized system. His recent work, focused on optimization and control of powered-prosthetic systems, where he presented a model for energy expenditure and optimized it to objectively tune prosthetic parameters and presented an adaptive real-time control system for prediction of change in locomotion mode. Throughout his research background, he worked both on data collection and processing carrying out multi-disciplinary collaborations. Results of his work have been published and presented in various peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Maryan Zirkle, MD, MS, MA

Executive Director,
BRAIN Commons

Maryan Zirkle MD, MS, MA is an accomplished professional with more than 10 years of experience working in the research industry. She has expertise in research network infrastructure development and sustainability, Big Data, patient-centered outcomes research, healthcare delivery and medicine, mental health, interdisciplinary-based team management, contract management, and active research portfolio management.

Before joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Dr. Zirkle was the Associate Director of the Research Infrastructure team at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). She was responsible for providing intellectual and organizational oversight for the development and regulation of PCORI’s National Patient-Centered Clinical Data Research Network, PCORnet. Zirkle has also worked as a research health science specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She gained considerable experience in polytrauma, traumatic brain injury (TBI), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and medical informatics research at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers in Tampa, Florida, and Portland, Oregon. She completed a three-year advanced fellowship in clinical informatics at the VA in Portland. She also received two bachelor of arts degrees from the University of Florida, a master of arts in rehabilitative and mental health counseling from the University of South Florida, a master of science in biomedical and clinical informatics from Oregon Health and Science University, and a medical degree from Spartan Health Sciences University.

Kaarli Tasso

Director, Product Management,
BRAIN Commons

Kaarli Tasso, director of product management on the BRAIN Commons team is managing the adoption of the BRAIN Commons by target user personas and working to ensure these user personas have a high-quality experience.

Kaarli began her career as a physicist at Bell Labs, where her analysis of the electronic properties of silicon crystals changed the theory of corrosion. Since then, she has worked across a variety of verticals, including fintech, edtech, media and entertainment. Her focus has been on the many ways digital transformation can change how people interact with information and each other.

While driving transformation in the fintech space, she created the 3D Trading Floor for NYSE, which is a fully functional virtual world that provides a dynamic 3D view of shares and financial information. This system is updated every second in the interactive space and is a virtual reality milestone that has yet to be surpassed.

While working in entertainment, Kaarli built The Sunday Night NFL Special, which is a mobile companion to the television broadcast. This application earned the Communication Arts Award for Entertainment.

Kaarli has an A.B. cum laude in physics from Harvard College and was selected to be the IBM Fellow in the Yale Department of Applied Physics and Engineering.

Deepti Cole

Associate Director,
Data Science

Deepti Cole is an informatics professional with more than ten years experience in the governance of biological and clinical data, supporting research through translational science, and leveraging open-source bioinformatics applications to deliver innovative and customized solutions.

As a former Data Scientist at Clarivate Analytics/Thomson Reuters she led numerous projects specializing in data and web-services integration and analytical pipeline designs. Her wide-ranging experience provides a balance of understanding the dynamics of operating in several fast-changing industries, along with the nuances of partnership rapport at all levels.

Deepti received her Master of Science degree in Bioinformatics from Boston University and began her career at Harvard and Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics, followed by The Jackson Laboratory. In her free time she spends time with her family and trains and competes with the Greater Boston Track Club, where she aims to improve her current personal best marathon time of 3:06.

Olu Daramola, MBA

Technical Project Manager,
BRAIN Commons

Olu, an experienced software engineer, is a technical project manager at Cohen Veterans Bioscience. He has more than 10 years of experience in agile project management and software engineering. Prior to joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, he served 4 years as the Technical Program Manager for Delta Dental/DentaQuest, where he successfully built new client data solutions impacting 30 million+ healthcare customers as well as new business implementations. He also led development teams to deliver CMS medical data compliance project initiatives to drive enterprise financial results. Olu completed his Masters in Business Administration (MBA) in Finance and Derivatives at Dominican University. In his free time, Olu likes to play volleyball and tennis – in addition to coding machine learning algorithms.

Eugene Rakhmatulin

Executive Director,
Technology Development

Eugene Rakhmatulin, is launching a new department at Cohen Veteran’s Bioscience dedicated to highly sophisticated technology development. He has more than two decades of experience in Information Technologies IT), including ten years in Life Sciences. Eugene’s work has largely focused on software development, systems architecture and management.

Previously, Eugene was the Senior Director of Enabling Technologies and Informatics Delivery at Clarivate Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science business. In this role, he led a global Professional Services Technology organization that was dedicated to designing and implementing data integration solutions, analytics tools and content services for major pharmaceutical companies, government, academia and non-profit organizations. Eugene joined Thomson Reuters in 2010 through an acquisition of GeneGo, the leading provider of software and content for Systems Biology. There, he served as the Head of IT and software Development.

Eugene earned his MA in Computer Science and Engineering from the Moscow Aviation Institute (State Technical University) in Moscow, Russia.

Zhanna Rozenberg

Associate Director,
Technology Development

Zhanna received her BA at Cornell University where she triple majored in Economics, Comparative Literature, and an College Scholars major that tread on philosophy, critical theory, and sociology. She completed a minor in East Asian Studies. She later went to study statistics, econometrics, and machine learning at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Universität Mannheim, and the Metis’s data science bootcamp. Zhanna is interested in making technology that helps people live more meaningful lives, using data to improve human performance. Zhanna is active in NY’s meetup culture focusing on data science, neuroscience, wearables, IoT, and habit design. Zhanna’s major individual project, “Hindsight”, explored the interaction between subjective and objective measures of human performance.

Isabel Curro

Device Lab Manager,
Technology Development

Isabel is working with the Digital Health team on device validation, data analysis and protocol development for internal testing and Sleepwell projects. Previously, she completed an engineering internship with VERO Biotech, a medical device start-up based in Atlanta. Isabel also conducted research on how to combat antibiotic- resistant bacteria and how to develop nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery at the Lab for Synthetic Immunity at Georgia Tech. She also interned with Siemens in Erlangen, Germany. Isabel received a BS in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology where she participated in the honors program and international plan. In addition, Isabel studied abroad at UC3M in Madrid, Spain.