Staff
Kate Augenblick joined the Simons Foundation in 2010, having served as executive assistant to the dean of Columbia College, Columbia University for eight years. Since changing her professional path after an early career as a visual artist, Augenblick has worked in a variety of fields, including career counseling for artists affected by 9/11. Augenblick graduated with a B.A. in visual studies from Dartmouth College. |
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Marta Benedetti, who joined the Simons Foundation in 2007, contributes to the evaluation and management of the foundation's research portfolio, as well as the planning of new research directions relevant to autism. Prior to joining the Simons Foundation, Benedetti worked for a number of other health-related foundations in various capacities, including as scientific manager for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research and consultant for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. Her scientific research, first at the University of Rome and then as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Moses Chao at Cornell University Medical College, focused on the structure, function and signal transduction mechanisms of the nerve growth factor receptor. Subsequently, as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Peter Scheiffele at Columbia University, Benedetti studied the molecular mechanisms of synaptogenesis in the central nervous system. While earning her degree at the University of Rome, she also worked on animal behavior and on the neuropharmacology and neurophysiology of the dopaminergic system. Benedetti's professional experience also includes medical writing and editing, and she has translated a number of textbooks and monographs in child neurology, neurobiology and psychiatry from English into Italian. |
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Alexandra Bowe earned her B.A. in English literature from Stanford University, with a minor in psychology. Before joining the foundation staff in 2010, she worked at Project Renewal, a non-profit agency focusing on issues of urban homelessness, mental health and substance abuse recovery. Before that, she worked in publishing for Trident Media Group and the Denise Shannon Literary Agency. |
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Libby Brooks joined the foundation's staff in 2011 and assists Casey White in project management of the Simons Simplex Collection. She began in this role in early 2010 as a member of the multi-site administrative team at the University of Michigan. Brooks graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in African Studies. |
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Marian Carlson received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University. After postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined Columbia University's faculty in 1981, where she became professor of genetics and development in 1987 and, later, professor of microbiology. She served as senior associate dean for research under Gerald Fischbach from 2005-2006 and then as vice dean for research. In 2008, she took a leave from Columbia to serve as senior scientific officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She joined the Simons Foundation in 2010 and continues to maintain a lab at Columbia. Carlson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004) and the American Academy of Microbiology (1995), and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a past president of the Genetics Society of America, and she received the 2009 Genetics Society of America Medal. Her laboratory has used genetic analysis in yeast to elucidate conserved mechanisms of signal transduction and transcriptional regulation. She identified the SNF1 protein kinase pathway, which has highly conserved roles in stress responses and metabolic regulation, and the SNF proteins of the SWI-SNF chromatin remodeling complex. Her work on SNF1 has informed our understanding of its human ortholog, AMPK, which is implicated in type 2 diabetes, obesity and cancer. |
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Dennis Choi was a member of the Simons Foundation SFARI Scientific Advisory Board before joining the foundation in the fall of 2010 as executive vice president. He was formerly vice president of academic health affairs at Emory University, executive vice president of neuroscience at Merck Research Labs, and professor and head of neurology at Washington University Medical School. He remains a visiting distinguished professor in bio and brain engineering at KAIST in Korea. Choi received his M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program, as well as a Ph.D. in pharmacology and neurology residency/fellowship training from Harvard University, before joining the faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine from 1983-1991. His research career began in 1975 as a Ph.D. graduate student in the laboratory of Gerald Fischbach at Harvard, where he and colleagues discovered the physiological mechanism of action of benzodiazepine drugs. Later he was a pioneer in dissecting processes responsible for nerve cell death after ischemic or traumatic insults, identifying key roles for NMDA receptor activation, calcium overload and other ionic derangements, and becoming the 19th most cited neuroscience researcher in the world during the 1990s 'Brain Decade,' according to Science Watch. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and its Board on Health Sciences Policy, the Executive Committee of the Dana Alliance for Brain Research and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a past president of the Society for Neuroscience, and past vice president of the American Neurological Association. His research on mechanisms of brain and spinal cord injury has been recognized with several awards, including the Silvio O. Conte Decade of the Brain Award, the Wakeman Award for Research in the Neurosciences, the Christopher Reeve Research Medal and the Ho-Am Prize in Medicine. |
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Kori Devlin joined the foundation in 2010 as administrative assistant to the SFARI team and Marion Greenup. She previously worked in marketing for the New York software company Information Builders. Devlin has a B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and brings experience in marketing and events management. |
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Gerald Fischbach joined the Simons Foundation in early 2006 to oversee the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Formerly, he was dean of the faculty of health sciences and of medicine at Columbia University, and director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1998-2001. Fischbach received his M.D. in 1965 from Cornell University Medical School and interned at the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle. He began his research career at the NIH from 1966–1973. He subsequently served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, first as associate professor of pharmacology from 1973–1978 and then as professor until 1981. From 1981–1990, Fischbach was the Edison Professor of Neurobiology and head of the anatomy and neurobiology department at Washington University School of Medicine. In 1990, he returned to Harvard Medical School, where he was the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and chairman of the neurobiology departments of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital until 1998. Throughout his career, Fischbach has studied the formation and maintenance of synapses, the junctions between nerve cells and their targets, through which information is transferred in the nervous system. He pioneered the use of nerve cell cultures to study the electrophysiology, morphology, and biochemistry of developing nerve–muscle and inter-neuronal synapses. His current research is focused on the roles that neurotrophic factors play in determination of neural precursor fate, synapse formation and neuronal survival. Fischbach is a past president of the Society for Neuroscience and serves on several medical and scientific advisory boards. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a non-resident fellow of the Salk Institute. |
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Stacey Greenebaum has enjoyed a broad professional career that includes work in New York City government, law, publishing, design and consulting to small businesses on matters of brand communication. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, a J.D. from the University of Virginia and a master's degree in industrial design from Pratt Institute. She has worked for the Simons Foundation in various capacities since 2001 before assuming the role of communications director here in 2010. |
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Marion Greenup joined the Simons Foundation in 2007 as vice president of administration. She is responsible for developing and managing administrative systems and policies to support the foundation's programs. Greenup earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Harriet Sophie Newcomb College, an M.Ed. in early childhood development from Tulane University, and an M.P.A. from Columbia University School of Public Health. She has worked in health and university administration for more than 20 years. Most recently, Greenup was administrative director of the New York University Child Study Center and Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Previous appointments include assistant vice president of administration at Columbia University Health Sciences and department administrator of pediatrics at Columbia University. She also served as senior vice president of education and health promotion at the March of Dimes, where she led the development of educational programs for consumers and health professionals. |
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Lydia Jung worked in a variety of industries before joining the SFARI.org team. Following her undergraduate work at Wellesley College, where she earned a B.A. in international relations with a focus on East Asian comparative politics, she worked in publishing, finance, marketing and non-profit organizations, holding positions at Scholastic, Inc., Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital and the Sports & Arts in Schools Foundation. Jung joined the Simons Foundation in 2010. |
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Peggy Kaplin is responsible for uploading content to SFARI.org and Simonsfoundation.org, as well as for general maintenance of the websites. Before joining the foundation in 2010, Kaplin worked at Condé Nast's Bon Appetit and Details magazines. She was ultimately responsible for all web production at Details, managing and implementing the magazine's online content. Kaplin also wrote for a medical trade journal for three years and has published interviews with occupational and physical therapists, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. She earned a B.A. in English literature from West Chester University in 2005. |
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Alex Lash joined the Simons Foundation in March 2012 to lead the further development and dissemination of the foundation's extensive scientific data assets — particularly those related to autism spectrum disorders — as well as to oversee the automation of its scientific administration infrastructure and develop metrics of funding impact. Lash was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York from 2003 to 2012, where he was a laboratory member in the computational biology program and scientific director of the bioinformaticscore facility. By 2012, he had overseen the growth of the bioinformatics core to include more than a dozen doctoral and masters-level personnel who provide research-support services in the areas of high throughput sequence and microarray data analysis, high performance computing, bioinformatics training and research software development. From 1998 to 2003, at the height of the human genome sequencing initiative, Lash was a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. At NCBI, Lash led a group that was responsible for creating the national repository for public gene expression data. Later, the scope of the repository was expanded to include the data generated from a spectrum of high throughput microarray platforms, such as array comparativegenome hybridization, as well as proteomics data. While there, Lash received several awards from the National Library of Medicine and the Department of Health and Human Services. Lash has an M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and completed his residency training in anatomic pathology at the National Cancer Institute in 1998, where he was recognized by the Arthur Purdy Stout Society of Surgical Pathologists. Lash also has a B.S. in biological sciences from the University of California at Irvine. He has been programming in various computer languages since his early teens and has a passion for using information technology to improve human efficiency and reduce the likelihood and impact of human error. |
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Alice Luo Clayton joined the Simons Foundation in 2011. She earned her Ph.D. in systems neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania in the laboratory of Gary Aston-Jones, and did postdoctoral work at the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program with Roy Wise and Carl Lupica. Luo Clayton is broadly interested in brain connectivity and how information processing within neural networks translates into behavior. Her postdoctoral research focused on the ventral tegmental area, a major source of midbrain dopamine neurons, which modulate reward-associated behaviors and have been implicated in a number of psychiatric disorders, including drug addiction and schizophrenia; she identified and characterized afferent VTA circuits, using primarily electrophysiological and neuroanatomical techniques. Luo Clayton was a 2009-2011 AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the Division of Developmental Translational Research at the National Institute of Mental Health. The division focuses on understanding the mechanisms and developmental trajectories of child- and adolescent-onset psychiatric disorders, including autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and mood and anxiety disorders. Her experience there involved managing grant portfolios, conducting workshops and site visits, organizing scientific review panels, and developing research initiatives. |
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Apoorva Mandavilli joined the Simons Foundation in 2007. In her roles as director and executive editor of SFARI.org, she manages an interactive website for the foundation with the latest news and information on autism research. Mandavilli was senior news editor of the leading biomedical journal Nature Medicine for five years before joining the foundation. She has also worked as U.S. news editor of the online publication BioMedNet, as health editor of the website About.com, as a reporter for a weekly newspaper, and has dabbled in radio journalism. She has an M.S. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in science journalism from New York University. Her work has been featured in a variety of media outlets, including Nature, Discover, Technology Review, Women's Health, O, The Oprah Magazine and National Public Radio's Science Friday. |
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Richard McFarland joined the staff in 2011, having previously served as divisional administrator for the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. Before that, he worked at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International (JDRF) as grants manager and team leader of grants administration. McFarland has a joint bachelor's degree in communications and visual arts from Fordham University, and a Master of Public Administration with a focus in advanced management and finance from Columbia University. |
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Prior to joining the foundation in 2010, Tanja Mrdjen was an accounting associate at David Beahm Design. Mrdjen received a B.S. in finance from St. John's University in New York, where she was recruited to play basketball. Mrdjen has worked as an administrative assistant to the SFARI team, and currently supports the business and accounting teams, in addition to being the foundation's receptionist. |
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Alan Packer joined the Simons Foundation in 2009 as an associate director of research. He earned his undergraduate degree in biology from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in cell biology and genetics from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York City. His graduate work with Rosemary Bachvarova focused on germ cell development using the mouse as a model system. With Debra Wolgemuth at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he carried out postdoctoral work on developmental control genes (HOX genes) and the mechanisms of their regulation in the mouse embryo. In 2000, Packer joined the editorial staff of Nature Genetics, the leading journal in the field of genetics, where he was involved in all aspects of the journal's production. His responsibilities included overseeing peer review of submitted manuscripts, with an emphasis on the genetics of human disease, as well as commissioning reviews, writing press releases and editorials, updating the journal's website, and preparing special issues of the journal. He served as acting editor in 2002-2003. During his tenure at Nature Genetics, he established a wide range of contacts in the genetics community through attendance at meetings and visits with scientists in their labs. Packer has also done freelance writing on a number of topics for Nature and other scientific publications. |
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Lauren Rath joined the Simons Foundation in 2007. She assists in grants administration on proposalCENTRAL for SFARI and other foundation programs. She graduated with a B.A. in psychology and French literature from Rutgers University in 2006 and started at the foundation following a primary school English teaching assistantship in Tours, France. As of August 2010, Rath works remotely from the San Francisco Bay area. |
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A native New Zealander, Annaliese Sharkey has a B.A. in politics and history. She brought to the foundation professional experience in government, news and documentary production, and tourism when she joined our staff in 2010. |
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Emily Singer writes, commissions and edits news and blog items for SFARI.org. Before joining the foundation in 2011, Singer spent six years as the biomedical editor at Technology Review, an international magazine and website affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she wrote and edited a variety of pieces for the website and magazine. Prior to that, Emily freelanced for Nature, Nature Medicine, New Scientist and the Los Angeles Times. She has won fellowships from the Coalition for the Advancement of Science Writing, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A graduate of the science communications program at University of California, Santa Cruz, Singer has an M.S. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. in biology, also from from the University of California, Santa Cruz. |
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Before joining the Simons Foundation in 2011, Julia Sommer completed her Ph.D. in cellular physiology and biophysics in the laboratory of Peter Scheiffele at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she began her studies with Scheiffele. Sommer's broad interest is in understanding the structure-function relationship of neural circuits and how its perturbation can lead to neurodevelopmental disorders. During her graduate work, she used biochemical, cell biological and genetic tools applied to mouse models to dissect the role of select GTPase-activating proteins in signal transduction pathways during axonal guidance as well as synapse formation, both essential steps of neural circuit assembly. Her interest in neurobiology was originally triggered during a research stay at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California in the laboratory of Cary Lai. Before entering the neurobiology field, Sommer did her diploma work in molecular biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, during which time she studied the role of histone modifications as epigenetic regulators of gene expression in the laboratory of Frank Sauer (now at University of California, Riverside). In 2007, Sommer was a fellow of the neurobiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she acquired in-depth knowledge of available research tools in neurobiology. |
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John Spiro joined the Simons Foundation in 2007 and is involved in all aspects of the foundation's research initiatives in the field of autism. He earned his undergraduate degree in biology from Haverford College and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. His thesis was based on work in the laboratory of the late Walter Heiligenberg, and his postdoctoral work was with Richard Mooney at Duke University. His research interests were in cellular and systems neuroscience, and he focused on preparations where it was possible to forge links between cellular neurobiology and behavior. In 2000, Spiro joined the Nature Publishing Group as an editor at Nature Neuroscience, a leading neuroscience journal, where he was involved in evaluating research findings across the field of neuroscience, including autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. In 2004, he joined the prestigious general science journal Nature as a senior editor on the biology team, where he oversaw a group of editors responsible for editorial decisions and peer review of manuscripts across all areas of neuroscience — ranging from molecular development to functional imaging and behavior. In addition, he gained experience in communicating science to both professional scientists and the public through his involvement in commissioning, editing and writing editorials, book reviews and other material for the journal and related web-based resources. Throughout his time as an editor, he maintained close ties to the research community by regularly attending meetings and making laboratory visits in the U.S. and abroad. |
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As project manager for the Simons Variation in Individuals Project (Simons VIP), Jennifer Tjernagel is responsible for managing study progress from initiation through data analysis. Previously, she was project manager for the Simons Simplex Collection, working through the University of Michigan. Before her work with the foundation, Tjernagel spent ten years in the pharmaceutical industry as an associate director of statistical analysis and reporting at Pfizer Global Research and Development, and also worked as a biostatistician for the University of Michigan Cardiology Department. She earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.S. in biostatistics from the University of Michigan. Tjernagel joined the staff in 2010. |
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Casey White joined the Simons Foundation in 2011 as project manager of the Simons Simplex Collection. Previously she served in this role at the University of Michigan, managing the Simons Simplex Collection and other clinical research grants. White is responsible for managing the collection as it transitions from active data collection to its current phase involving new re-contacting projects, and community building and maintenance. White earned her undergraduate degree from the University of South Carolina, Columbia in experimental psychology. She also holds an M.A. in psychological science (clinical specialty) from James Madison University in Virginia and an M.S. in biomedical science (neuroscience specialty) from the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. |
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Jessica Wright joined the SFARI.org team in 2010. As research editor, she edits research highlights, workshop reports and opinion pieces. Wright has an undergraduate degree in molecular biology and biochemistry from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University. Her thesis work there combined two previously unrelated fields: nuclear transport and prion biology. Before joining the foundation, Wright worked as a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of George Cross at Rockefeller University, where she studied the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, gaining first-hand experience with whole-genome sequencing and analysis. |
Kate Augenblick, B.A. 
