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
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.
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.
