We are excited to host our next ADDI Researcher Roundtable. Please help us spread the word by sharing this on LinkedIn!
Welcome to ADDI's Researcher Roundtables,
Our series of moderated discussions with key thought leaders on various topics chosen by our ADDI community.
Click here to watch our recent ADDI Researcher Roundtable: Novel Technologies and Their Impact on Dementia Research, held on Thursday June 1.
Our Summer Learning Series is open to all AD Connect members. Register for AD Connect here if you haven't already.
The "Novel Technologies and Their Impact on Dementia Research" roundtable included a moderated discussion with 4 panelists. As follow up to that event, we are hosting a Summer Learning Series for the community to learn more about the novel technologies discussed in the roundtable.
These 60-minute seminars will introduce the technology and include discussion of key findings to-date. Attendees will have opportunity to ask questions throughout.
Summer Learning Series Schedule
| June 8 | 7:00 PDT (10:00 EDT/16:00 CET/20:30 IST) | Long-read sequencing | Cornelis Blauwendraat, NIA-CARD |
| June 15 | 9:00 PDT (12:00 EDT/18:00 CET/22:30 IST) | Retinal imaging | Aaron Lee, University of Washington |
| June 22 | 7:00 PDT (10:00 EDT/16:00 CET/20:30 IST) | Digital voice data | Vijaya Kolachalama, Boston University |
| June 29 | 7:00 PDT (10:00 EDT/16:00 CET/20:30 IST) | Single-cell sequencing | Alan Murphy, Imperial College |
Meet the Presenters!
Cornelis Blauwendraat, PhD
Dr. Cornelis Blauwendraat is the Stadtman Tenure Track Investigator at the NIA where his research focuses on dissecting the genetic architecture of Parkinson's Disease (PD), Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and other neurodegenerative diseases using a wide variety of genomic methods and techniques. Additionally, he is involved in several large consortia including International Parkinson Disease Genomics Consortium (IPDGC), Foundational Data Initiative for Parkinson’s Disease (FOUNDIN-PD) and the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2).
Dr. Blauwendraat received his MSc in biomedical sciences from VU University, Netherlands and his PhD in neuroscience from University of Tübingen, Germany.
Aaron Lee, MD, MS
Dr. Aaron Lee is an assistant professor in ophthalmology at University of Washington. Dr. Lee specializes in vitreoretinal and macular diseases including epiretinal membranes, macular hole repair, retinal detachment repair, and hereditary macular dystrophies. His research focuses on the intersection of large clinical medical datasets and using non-traditional computational techniques to both analyze and visualize the results. He has created programs to process next-generation sequencing data in supercomputing environments and analyzed numerous Big Data sources including CMS, US Census, and NLM MEDLINE archives.
Dr. Lee earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and then attended Washington University in St Louis for his medical degree and also completed a Master's degree in clinical investigations.
Vijaya Kolachalama, PhD
Dr. Vijaya Kolachalama is an Associate Professor at Boston University with appointments in the Departments of Medicine and Computer Science. He is one of the founding members of the Boston University Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. The mission of his research lab is to create methods to fit the science, not the other way around as is often done. Specifically, he is focused on developing software frameworks that can assist with dementia screening in various settings, building clinical-grade software tools to complement the pathologist workflow, developing representation learning frameworks that can generalize across multiple data cohorts, and constructing efficient neural network models on high resolution data.
Dr. Kolachalama received his bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a PhD from University of Southampton, UK. Prior to joining Boston University, he served as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT and as a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Draper Laboratory.
Alan Murphy, MS
Alan is a bioinformatician in Dr. Nathan Skene’s group focusing on the analysis of multi-omic single-cell data in neurodegenerative diseases. The primary focus of his current PhD research is the prediction of cell type specific regulatory effects of genetic variants in neurodegenerative diseases.
Prior to Dr. Skene's group, Alan worked as part of Dr. Overton’s group in Queen’s University Belfast. His research focused on methods of integrating multi-omic patient data, through network biology approaches, to predict the instigated molecular players in differing biological contexts such as the Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) process.
Alan has a background in data analytics and machine learning, receiving his undergraduate degree in the statistics department of Trinity College Dublin. Thereafter, he gained three years of experience in industry, working as a data analytics consultant on numerous statistical projects across a wide range of industries from the public sector to banking.
