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.
Kaarli Tasso
Director, Product Management
BRAIN Commons
Kaarli Tasso, director of product management on the BRAIN Commons team is managing the adoption of the BRAIN Commons by target user personas and working to ensure these user personas have a high-quality experience.
Kaarli began her career as a physicist at Bell Labs, where her analysis of the electronic properties of silicon crystals changed the theory of corrosion. Since then, she has worked across a variety of verticals, including fintech, edtech, media and entertainment. Her focus has been on the many ways digital transformation can change how people interact with information and each other.
While driving transformation in the fintech space, she created the 3D Trading Floor for NYSE, which is a fully functional virtual world that provides a dynamic 3D view of shares and financial information. This system is updated every second in the interactive space and is a virtual reality milestone that has yet to be surpassed.
While working in entertainment, Kaarli built The Sunday Night NFL Special, which is a mobile companion to the television broadcast. This application earned the Communication Arts Award for Entertainment.
Kaarli has an A.B. cum laude in physics from Harvard College and was selected to be the IBM Fellow in the Yale Department of Applied Physics and Engineering.
Deepti Cole
Director, Data Engineering
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.
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 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.
