About Us

Mario Masellis obtained his MSc in Pharmacology from the University of Toronto in 1997, completed his medical training at the University of Toronto in 2001 and obtained his board certification (FRCP Canada) in Neurology since 2006. He has completed a clinical research fellowship in Cognitive & Movement Disorders Neurology in 2008 and obtained a PhD in Clinical Neurosciences in 2012. His clinical expertise is in the diagnosis and management of both Alzheimer's and non-Alzheimer's dementias, including Lewy body disorders, frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy and corticobasal syndrome. His research focuses on how genomic factors impact neuroimaging and cognitive phenotypes, and response to drugs in neurodegenerative diseases. His work has been published in high impact journals including Brain, Neurology, Lancet Neurology, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, and Alzheimer's & Dementia. He co-leads the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative and Theme 2 of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging. He serves as a member of the International Parkinson's and Movement Disorders Society Neuroimaging Study Group, and International Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) Consortium. He is the Canadian national principal investigator of the Genetic Frontotemporal Dementia Initiative (GENFI) and oversees the conduct of this project in Canada. He has received several awards for his work including the Maud Menten Institute of Genetics New Investigator Prize from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Science. Dr. Masellis has published 185 peer-reviewed articles, with 6459 total citations, and an h-index of 41 (Scopus).

Steven Arnold is Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Translational Neurology Head and Managing Director of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. After receiving his M.D. from Boston University, Dr. Arnold completed residency training in Psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute / Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York and residency training in Neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. He also completed fellowship training in Cognitive Neuroscience and was a post-doctoral associate in Neuroanatomy in Iowa. Dr. Arnold is board certified in both neurology and psychiatry. After his training, Dr. Arnold joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania where he was Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology until his move to Massachusetts General Hospital in 2015. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Arnold is the neurology lead for the Interdisciplinary Brain Center, a new collaboration of the Departments of Neurology. Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Neuroimaging. Its mission is to facilitate the discovery, development, and implementation of promising therapeutics and associated diagnostics for individuals with complex brain disorders that affect cognition, behavior and emotion. Neurodegenerative diseases are major disease interests of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center. Dr. Arnold has conducted longstanding research on neurodegenerative disease pathology, molecular biomarkers and therapeutics for cognitive decline and psychiatric syndromes in late life and has led broad clinical and translational research programs. He has authored over 300 scientific articles, reviews and chapters. Current scientific interests include biomarkers in brain aging and dementias, metabolic factors driving dementia, and protective factors that account for cognitive resilience, all towards accelerating therapeutics discovery and development in early phase and proof-of-concept clinical trials for neurocognitive disorders. Dr. Arnold's clinical practice at Massachusetts General Hospital focuses on older adults with cognitive disorders, especially Alzheimer's disease and normal pressure hydrocephalus.

Russell Swerdlow is a physician-scientist who primarily studies brain energy metabolism and the role brain energy metabolism plays in neurodegenerative diseases. His main area of clinical expertise includes the neurodegenerative diseases that affect cognition, and especially Alzheimer's disease. His research focuses on why brain bioenergetic function declines with advancing age, why brain bioenergetic changes are accentuated in neurodegenerative disease states, and how to repair and reverse age-and-neurodegeneration-related bioenergetic dysfunction. He began this line of investigation as an undergraduate trainee, and as a medical student I continued his research training as part of my university's Research Honors Program. During his post-graduate neurology training he focused on studies of mitochondrial function and genetics in a basic science laboratory. Upon completing his residency he completed additional formal training in cognitive disorders, and a postdoctoral fellowship in a mitochondria-focused laboratory. With the support of a K08 Award he transitioned to an independent investigator, and since then he has continuously pursued his research program. To date his research has covered several research disciplines, including basic, translational, and clinical research and he has served as a PI on multiple types of NIH grants (K08, R03, R01, P30) as well as a CoI on multiple other grants. The sum of his experience to date puts him in a good position pursue a broad range of research projects relating to brain bioenergetics, brain aging, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Mimoun Azzouz, formerly Director of Neurobiology at Oxford BioMedica plc, is currently Chair of Translational Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield. Azzouz is also Deputy Head of Neurology Unit and Director of Research & Innovation at the Neuroscience Department. His track record of translational research productivity is characterized by publications in top ranking scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, and STM. Several inventions emerged from his research. One of his major achievements is his involvement in a gene therapy approach designed to achieve dopamine replacement in models of Parkinson's disease. This strategy has yielded significant translational impact having entered into phase I/II human clinical trials since 2008. He is currently driving 2 clinical development programs through regulatory tox, GMP clinical manufacturing and regulatory bodies. He recently won top level EU ad hominem prestigious ERC Advanced Investigator (2011) and ERC Proof-of-Concept (2017) Awards. These awards are acknowledging his pre-eminence in European biomedical research. He is/has been advisor for companies and academic institutions. He is currently a member of scientific Panels/Boards for various funding bodies such as the Medical Research Council (DPFS MRC, UK), the French Muscular Dystrophy Association (AFM), the Health Research Board (HRB) of Ireland and the Neuroscience Panel, Germany. He has been recently named as Board member of the British Society for Gene and Cell Therapy.

Joseph Araujo is the President and CEO of InterVivo Solutions, which is focused on optimizing translational services to facilitate the development and approval of novel CNS drugs. His scientific background includes graduate training in pharmacology at the University of Toronto, more than 35 refereed publications and several invited presentations, which focus on natural aged canine models of human disease. Joseph has co-founded, held executive level positions and consulted for Life Science companies including CanCog Technologies, Vivocore, Karyopharm Therapeutics, NPM Pharma, Ketogen, and Epione Animal Health.

Suzanne Hendrix has worked for the past 26 years as a biostatistician focusing on clinical trial research in many different indications. She has extensive experience designing clinical trials, writing statistical analysis plans, running analyses, writing statistical reports, interacting with the FDA and preparing manuscripts for publication. She is experienced at communicating statistical concepts in an understandable way, and has helped develop software for graphically understanding large complex datasets. For the past 14 years, she has specialized in statistical issues in Alzheimer's disease such as identifying appropriate outcomes, addressing measurement issues, demonstrating disease modification and optimizing clinical trial design and analysis. She has been on multiple advisory boards and expert panels addressing current issues in Alzheimer's disease, and has interacted with the division of Neurology products at the FDA and with the EMA through scientific advice regarding these issues. She is currently president and owner of Pentara, a company that provides data management and statistical consultation to the pharmaceutical industry, academic groups and non-profit groups, primarily supporting clinical trial design and optimization in Alzheimer's disease. She has researched methods for discerning disease modification of treatments, and has proposed novel approaches to this problem. She is an active researcher in the Alzheimer's disease field with over 100 publications and presentations.

Kurt Whittemore has pursued a career of biology and aging research. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at Southern Utah University where he also started a team to compete in the iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine) competition. He then obtained his PhD in Biological Design from Arizona State University, where he worked on projects for cancer vaccines and peptide microarrays to diagnose diseases from patient sera. He also developed the technique to calculate the Shannon information entropy of the data obtained from applying antibodies from patients to random peptide microarrays. He found that cancer patients and chronic disease patients had higher entropy values than normal patients. He then joined the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO) institution in Madrid Spain as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Telomeres and Telomerase lab directed by Maria Blasco. He discovered that the telomere shortening rate of various species can be used to predict the lifespan of those species, and he also performed telomerase gene therapy in mice to study the effects on neurodegeneration. Kurt is currently employed at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children's Hospital studying the effects of gene therapy on inflammatory bowel disease.