Who We Are
Our Members
Executed Membership Agreement to support the maintenance of the BRAIN Commons.
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 Partners
BRAIN Commons Leadership 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.
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.
BRAIN Commons Advisors
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 is Chair, CEO and President of Cohen Veterans Bioscience, a non-profit brain research organization based in New York City whose mission is to fast-track diagnostics and therapeutics to advance precision brain health. Magali has over 15 years of pharmaceutical executive experience, predominantly at Johnson & Johnson, where she assumed broad end-to-end development leadership roles in early & late stage neuroscience clinical development, translational medicine, diagnostics and integrative solutions. To pioneer new approaches for precision therapeutics for brain health, she founded Orion Bionetworks in 2012, which was transformed to Cohen Veterans Bioscience in 2015, while also serving as founding Chief Science and Technology Officer for One Mind for Research. She serves on several advisory boards including Alto Neurosciences, Partnership for Assessment and Accreditation of Scientific Practice, VirtualBrainCloud, Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics and IMEC for nanoelectronics. Magali earned her BS in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University, and her MD and PhD in neuroscience with distinction from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
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.
