Who We Are
Our Members
Executed Membership Agreement to support the maintenance of the BRAIN Commons.
Data in the BRAIN Commons will include data related to PTSD, TBI, Neurodegenerative Diseases, Mental Health, MS, and rare diseases, as well as genomics, imaging and wearables data.
Our Sponsors
Providing funding for the BRAIN Commons infrastructure and expansion.
Our Partners
Providing Vision and resources (e.g. analytics, data, in-kind resources, etc) to the BRAIN Commons.
Our Vendors
BRAIN Commons Team
Stephen Larson, PhD
Chief Executive Officer
MetaCell
Executive Director (Consulting)
BRAIN Commons
Stephen Larson is the CEO of MetaCell, global leaders in neuroscience software, with clients ranging from top-20 academic institutions to big pharma. He is a cofounder of the international OpenWorm project that is constructing a detailed digital simulation of a whole animal in an open science fashion. He has and co-developed a patent, presented at more than two dozen forums and published over a dozen articles in academic journals such as Nature and Frontiers in Neuroscience. Stephen has had his work featured in the Economist, the New York Times, Wired, the Atlantic, at two TEDx forums and a Science Channel show with Morgan Freeman. He holds a Bachelor and Masters from MIT in Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and received a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.
He previously served as the Chief Information Officer of One Mind for Research, a non-profit dedicated to eradicating brain disease through innovative public-private partnerships. He has worked as a professional software engineer for a major global investment bank He has served as a mentor in the Google Summer of Code program, a volunteer leader in the Startup Leadership Program, an entrepreneurial incubator, and the INCF, an international organization for coordinating the information science of neuroscience.
Dan Knudsen, PhD
Senior Consultant
MetaCell
Program Director (Consulting)
BRAIN Commons
Dan Knudsen is a distinctive 21st Century mix of neuroscientist, technologist, and entrepreneur who strives to build systems that stimulate understanding. He is a Senior Consultant at MetaCell, global leaders in neuroscience software, with clients ranging from top-20 academic institutions to big pharma. Dan has spent more than 15 years engineering software and hardware tools to study the brain and behavior, working with neuroscience data, and publishing peer-reviewed papers and patents.
Dan co-founded CleverPet, Inc., a consumer technology company that uses smart hardware to teach companion animals automatically through advanced cognitive and behavioral science techniques (a ‘game console for dogs’). He designed and built the hardware and software systems and organized the teams and activities leading to commercial adoption and engagement of thousands of dogs and millions of interactions monthly.
Dan holds a PhD in Neurosciences from The University of California San Diego and a bachelor of science in Behavioral Neuroscience from Northeastern University. He is an alumnus and former Program Lead of the San Diego Startup Leadership Program, and he graduated from the EvoNexus technology incubator and the Qualcomm Robotics Accelerator powered by Techstars. He has a passion for spreading ideas and for using technology to bring important scientific advances to the public.
Deepti Cole
Associate Director, Data Science
BRAIN Commons
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.
Terri Gilbert, PhD
Engagement Director
BRAIN Commons
Dr. Gilbert is a neuroscientist passionate about scientific communication, education and the open science movement. She has over 20 years’ experience effectively communicating high- level concepts to groups with a wide range of education and background, from non-scientific audiences to highly technical researchers. As the leader of outreach and training at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, she was an advocate for the user; including specifying friendly user interfaces, managing user support as well as launching their world-renowned educational programs. Her early experience researching the complex signal transduction mechanisms in G protein coupled receptors in both the immunological and neurological systems sparked her desire to share the elegance and beauty of complex systems, and to impart the joy of discovery to people around the world.
Dr. Gilbert obtained her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, and her BS in Physics from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
BRAIN Commons Leadership Team
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.
Tom Oberst
Chief Technology Officer
Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Thomas P. Oberst brings 35 years of computer systems experience in high tech and financial services, most recently as the CTO of Advanced Strategic Technology. He is providing vision and technical leadership in the area of Big Data and Cyber Security in support of Cohen Veterans Bioscience’s mission. His career has spanned 20 years in high tech working, mostly in research and product development for startups which were later purchased by Hewlett Packard and EMC. His more recent career was spent working in the Enterprise Architecture and Technology Group at Fidelity Investments, where he helped design, develop, and deploy some of the most advanced systems used anywhere in Financial Services. Tom has expertise in computer and server architecture, system design, development, systems engineering and deployment of secure, extremely scalable, globally deployable information infrastructure.
Magali Haas, MD, PhD
CEO & President
Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Dr. Haas has over 15 years of pharmaceutical executive and clinical research experience, predominantly at Johnson & Johnson, where she assumed broad end-to-end development leadership roles in medical marketing, full clinical development, early development, and translational and biomarker sciences in psychiatry and neurology. She served 3 years as Chief Science and Technology Officer for One Mind for Research, a nonprofit organization launched in May 2012 by Patrick J Kennedy. She orchestrated the launch of One Mind’s seminal programs, Apollo, an informatics research portal and, Gemini, an international TBI/PTSD research program. She has driven the development of novel platforms for TBI/PTSD analysis, and the extension of this into a cross-disease platform.
External Technical Advisory Committee
Robert Grossman, PhD
Founder & Director
Open Commons Consortium
Dr. Grossman is the Founder and Director of the Open Commons Consortium. He is also the Chief Research Informatics Officer (CRIO), the Director of the Center for Data Intensive Science and a Professor in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is also a Core Faculty and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology (IGSB) and the Computation Institute. Dr. Grossman’s research group focuses on big data, data science, bioinformatics, cloud computing and related areas. Dr. Grossman is also the Founder and Chief Data Scientist of Open Data Group. Open Data Group has provided analytic services so that companies can build predictive models over big data since 2002.
Tom Oberst
Chief Technology Officer
Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Thomas P. Oberst brings 35 years of computer systems experience in high tech and financial services, most recently as the CTO of Advanced Strategic Technology. He is providing vision and technical leadership in the area of Big Data and Cyber Security in support of Cohen Veterans Bioscience’s mission. His career has spanned 20 years in high tech working, mostly in research and product development for startups which were later purchased by Hewlett Packard and EMC. His more recent career was spent working in the Enterprise Architecture and Technology Group at Fidelity Investments, where he helped design, develop, and deploy some of the most advanced systems used anywhere in Financial Services. Tom has expertise in computer and server architecture, system design, development, systems engineering and deployment of secure, extremely scalable, globally deployable information infrastructure.
