Deborah Backus, PT, PhD, FACRM, is a physical therapist and neuroscientist with nearly 40 years of experience in clinical practice, research, and leadership. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy from Boston University and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Emory University. Currently, she serves as the Vice President of Research and Innovation at Shepherd Center in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Backus has developed a pragmatic research approach that emphasizes translating meaningful evidence into clinical practice. Her work focuses on innovative models of care and rehabilitation interventions that enhance function, health, and quality of life for individuals with neurological conditions, especially those with severe disabilities. She has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the National MS Society. Dr. Backus has an extensive record of publications, invited lectures, and service on various professional and institutional committees. Throughout her career, Dr. Backus has remained committed to empowering patients, students, and colleagues to reach their full potential. She is dedicated to advancing rehabilitation science and improving care for individuals with disabilities resulting from neurological injury or disease.

Michael Borich, DPT, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Division of Physical Therapy, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine in the Emory University School of Medicine. He is also the Vice-Chair of Research for the department. He has a secondary appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint Emory/Georgia Tech department, and is a faculty member Neuroscience Graduate Program at Emory. He received his bachelor’s degree in physiology and doctor of physical therapy, along with a PhD in rehabilitation science and neuroscience from the University of Minnesota. He then completed his postdoctoral training at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Lara Boyd prior to his arrival at Emory and Georgia Tech in 2014.

The Neural Plasticity Research and Precision Neuromodulation laboratories at Emory, both directed by Dr. Borich, offer a transdisciplinary research and training environment generously supported by multiple funding agencies. He also co-directs of the Precision Neural Engineering Laboratory at Emory aiming to understand neural mechanisms of sensorimotor control. His labs emphasize collaborative research in an inclusive training environment. His team utilizes multimodal neuroimaging and neurostimulation techniques to characterize and modulate the structural and functional neuroplastic correlates of learning and experience. The mission of his work is to understand and harness the adaptive capacity of human nervous system to develop effective treatment strategies to improve rehabilitation outcomes and maximize healthy years in the lifespan.

Ansgar Büschges is a full professor for Animal Physiology and Neurobiology at the Institute of Zoology, University of Cologne. His research focuses on the neural and neuromechanical mechanisms underlying animal locomotion with specific emphasis on insect walking. He studied Biology at the University of Bielefeld and finished his PhD at the University of Kaiserslautern in 1989. Between 1989 and 1998, he continued research work during his periods as postdoc and visiting scientist at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Alberta, Canada, at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and at the Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology, Stockholm, Sweden. Since 1998, he is full professor at the University of Cologne. He is convenor of the DFG funded Graduate Programm RTG1960 “Neural Circuit Analysis,” board member of the DFG funded CRC1451 “Key Mechanisms of Motor Control in Health and Disease” and principle investigator in the international research consortium “Coordination, Communication and Control in Neuromechanical Systems” in the NeuroNex program. Between 2014 and 2021 Ansgar Büschges has served his university subsequently as Dean of his Faculty and as Vice-Rector for Academic Career and Equal Opportunities. He is member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of North-Rhine-Westphalia and Vice President of the German Neuroscience Society.

Prof. Matthew Flavin is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he leads the Flavin Neuromachines Lab. Before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 2017 and 2021 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2015 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award (T32) and the Draper Laboratory Fellowship. The vision for his independent research program is to develop powerful peripheral neural interfaces and mechatronic wearables that leverage advanced sensors and intelligent systems to address important and unresolved challenges in patient care.

Aryn Gittis studies neural circuits in the basal ganglia, a brain region involved in movement, learning, motivation and reward. Her research focuses on how neural circuits change in Parkinson’s disease and how function can be restored. She uses preclinical models to study circuit function using a variety of techniques including electrophysiology, optogenetics, histology and behavior.

Nir is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) at the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London and a founding fellow of the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK-DRI). His research aims to transform the lives of people with neurodegenerative diseases by pioneering non-invasive neuromodulatory interventions. He received a BSc in Physics from the Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion), an MSc in Electromagnetic Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, and a PhD in Neuroscience from Imperial College London. He then completed a postdoc training as a Wellcome Trust Fellow with Ed Boyden at MIT and Alvaro Pascual Leone at Harvard. Nir was awarded the Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation for developing the Temporal Interference (TI) technology, which enables non-invasive electrical deep brain stimulation. At the UK-DRI, he is translating the TI brain stimulation technology into therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. Key recent publications: Violante et al., Nature Neuroscience 2023; Rintoul et al., Nature Communications Physics 2023; Schreglmann et al., Nature Communications 2021; Grossman, Science 2018, Grossman et al., Cell 2017.

Mike Kahana is the founder of the Computational Memory Lab and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-founder of nia Therapeutics and co-inventor of Nia’s core technology for treating memory loss.

Caleb Kemere is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice, and holds an adjunct appointment in the Neuroscience program at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Kemere’s lab designs systems to interact with complex neural circuits in vivo in behaving rodents in order to explore how information is processed, stored, and retrieved in both healthy brains and in models of human neurological diseases and disorders. The lab’s current scientific focus is to understand the neural circuits underlying sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Dr. Kemere was a Human Fronteirs Program Young Investigator and NSF CAREER awardee. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.A. in Economics from University of Maryland, College Park, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (working with Profs. Teresa Meng and Krishna Shenoy). Before joining the Rice faculty in 2011, Dr. Kemere was a Sloan-Swartz and Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF, where he worked with Prof. Loren Frank.

Ann Kennedy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. She earned her PhD with Larry Abbott at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, studying neural representations and learning in cerebellum-like structures, and pursued a postdoctoral position as a resident theorist in the David Anderson research group at Caltech, analyzing and modeling the dynamics of hypothalamic circuits. Her lab at Scripps uses methods from dynamical systems, control theory, and machine learning to study how biological neural networks can produce and modify the expression of survival behaviors such as social interactions, feeding, and predator defense.

Albert Lee studied physics and chemistry as an undergraduate at Harvard, and did his doctorate in neuroscience at MIT, working in the laboratory of Matthew Wilson.  He then did a postdoc with Michael Brecht in the Netherlands and Germany.  Afterwards, for 15 years he ran a lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia.  Recently, he moved to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he is an associate professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  His lab focuses on the role of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in memory and cognition, which they have studied using intra- and extracellular recordings and imaging in rodents.

Dr. Levine received an undergraduate degree in biology from Brandeis University in 2000, a Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University in 2008, and an M.D. from Cornell University in 2009. During her graduate research with Dr. Ali Brivanlou, she studied the role of TGF-β signaling during embryonic development and during her postdoctoral research with Dr. Sam Pfaff, she identified a population of spinal interneurons that may encode “motor synergies”. She joined NINDS in 2015 where her lab studies how the molecules, neurons, and circuits of the spinal cord mediate normal behavior.

Dr. Narayanan is the Juanita J. Bartlett professor of Neurology Research and Vice Chair for Basic and Translational Research in the Department of Neurology. He is originally from Seattle, Washington. He received BA from Stanford University and received an MD and PhD from Yale Medical School, where he also completed a residency in neurology. He came to the University of Iowa in 2012 to launch his lab studying the basic mechanisms of prefrontal dopamine. He leads a multidisciplinary clinic focused on Parkinson’s disease.  He received the Donald B. Lindsley Prize for the best dissertation from the Society for Neuroscience, the S. Weir Mitchell Award for best residency research from the American Academy of Neurology, and the Jon Stolk Award for movement disorders research from the American Academy of Neurology.

Tay Netoff is a professor in the department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  He is the co-director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Neuroengineering and organizes the Annual Minnesota Neuromodulation Symposium.  He is also the co-director of the UMN NeuroImaging Postdoctoral T32 fellowship program.  His research focuses on methods of providing patient centered and optimized neuromodulation therapies for indications such as spinal cord injury, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and chronic pain.

Amy Orsborn is a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of Washington. Her research explores sensorimotor plasticity in brain-computer interfaces and how plasticity is influenced by the algorithms used. She completed her Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Graduate Program in Bioengineering and her postdoctoral training at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. She recently received the NSF CAREER award and was named an Emerging Leader by the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. Her research is has been supported by a range of federal (NSF, NIH) and private (Simons Foundation) agencies, along with industry (Google, Meta).

Chethan Pandarinath is a tenured Associate Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Neurosurgery at Emory University and Georgia Tech. He directs the Systems Neural Engineering Lab, whose research sits at the intersection of neural engineering, systems neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, with dual goals of better understanding the nervous system and designing assistive devices for people with paralysis.

Prof. Pandarinath received undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering, Physics, and Science Policy from NC State. During his PhD in EE at Cornell, his research focused on the early visual system and creating novel retinal prosthetic approaches to restore vision. His postdoc at Stanford with Jaimie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy, as a part of the BrainGate clinical trial, focused on improving the performance of brain-computer interfaces to restore function to people with paralysis due to spinal cord injury and ALS. He is a 2019 Sloan Fellow and K12 Scholar in the NIH-NICHD Rehabilitation Engineering Career Development Program. He is also a recipient of the 2021 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2). His work has been funded by the Neilsen Foundation, NSF, DARPA, Air Force, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Simons Foundation, and NIH.

Jacob Robinson graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.S. in Physics in 2003. While at UCLA, he worked in the Electrical Engineering and Physics departments in the laboratories of Professors HongWen Jiang, David Saltzberg, and Yahya Rahmat-Samii. In 2003 he entered the Applied Physics Ph.D. program at Cornell University where he worked with Professor Michal Lipson developing nanoscale silicon devices that confine light to small volumes and thereby enhance the interaction between light and matter. He also developed a novel scanning probe technique to image highly confined optical modes with nanometer spatial resolution.

Upon completing his Ph.D. in 2008, Robinson joined Professor Hongkun Park’s research group in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard University. As a postdoctoral researcher he helped develop arrays of vertical silicon nanowires that can penetrate the cellular membrane without affecting cell viability. His work at Harvard showed that vertical silicon nanowires can be used to deliver biomolecules into a cell and interrogate a cell’s internal electrical activity. His current research interests include nanoelectronic, nanophotonic and nanomagnetic technologies to manipulate and measure brain activity. His work has been recognized by several agencies including the DARPA Young Faculty Award and the John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award.

Dr. Tian is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience. The Tian Laboratory for Optical Neurophysiology engineers biosensors and optical probes for monitoring and controlling brain activity in living, behaving research animals. Dr. Tian and her team have created a novel class of genetically encoded indicators to sense neuromodulators, enabling the precise measurement of spatiotemporal dynamics of neuromodulator release. These tools, when combined with behavioral and circuit manipulations, can reveal the brain mechanisms underlying the control of various behaviors in health and disease and serve as drug discovery platforms for the identification of novel therapeutic targets.

Aaron Young is an Associate Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and has directed the Exoskeleton and Prosthetic Intelligent Controls (EPIC) lab since 2016. Dr. Young received his MS and PhD degrees in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on neural and rehabilitation engineering from Northwestern University in 2011 and 2014 respectively. He received a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University in 2009. He also completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Human Neuromechanics Lab working with lower limb exoskeletons and powered orthoses to augment human performance. His research area is in advanced control systems for robotic prosthetic and exoskeleton systems for humans with movement impairment. He combines machine learning, robotics, human biomechanics, and control systems to design wearable robots to improve the community mobility of individuals with walking disability. He has received an NIH New Innovator Award, NIH NCMRR New Investigator award and IEEE New Faces of Engineering award, and his EPIC lab group recently won the International VIP Consortium Innovation Competition.