Kamal Sharma Ph.D. (Founder and CEO)
Kamal is a trained Neuroscientist. Prior to founding novAIZen Kamal was faculty on the tenure track at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a visiting fellow at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Kamal's research interest is focused on the malfunctioning of synaptic machinery as a substrate for Neuropsychiatric Disorders. He is taking a multidisciplinary approach to bring together Functional Genomics, Systems Biology, Genome Engineering, and Deep Machine Learning.
Muhammet Balcilar Ph.D. (Chief Technology Officer)
Muhammet is an R&I scientist with Ph.D. in computer science. He has strong background in parallel programming, network programming, machine learning and deep learning with several impactful papers to his credit. He has attended international RoboCup competitions every year with his university’s robot team, which won first prize in 2016 and second prize in 2012, 2013 and 2014 in the Virtual Robot Rescue League. His research interest spans from AI driven processing and analysis of biomedical images to application of graph neural networks in processing non-Euclidean structured data.
Maria Grunwald. Ph.D. MBA (Chief Business Officer)
Maria is an executive in the life science industry with almost 20 years of experience in business development and licensing. She has held senior roles at Radius Health, Dyax and other companies, where she gained deep transactional expertise, in particular in strategic partnering. Other companies include AesRx, IsoPlexis, Dicerna, Genevant and QurAlis. In 2009, she was named a mentor for the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. Maria received graduate degrees from the Universities of Hannover and Cologne and performed her Ph.D. studies in neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She also holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Manuel Blanco M.D. Ph.D.
Manuel, a clinician-scientist, is a board certified in Neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and board certified in Neurocritical Care by the United Council for Neurological Sub specialties. His research interests include critical care and neurological emergencies, and acute infectious/inflammatory disorders affecting the nervous system, and scientific framework of clinical trials.
Prof. Richard Huganir, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Prof. Huganir, is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience, Director of Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, and Department of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has authored more than 300 publications in the field of synaptic transmission and memory encoding in the brain. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Institute of Medicine.
Prof. Ann Marie Craig. Ph.D. (Advisor)
Prof. Craig is an authority in the field of synapse development and its underlying role in nephropathy. A Pew Scholar, Dr. Craig currently holds Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology. She is a professor of psychiatry and medicine at the University of British Columbia, BC, Canada. Dr. Craig's ultimate goals is to see the development of molecular interventions that limit the pathological effects of neurological disorders and stroke and promote regeneration of synaptic connections following injury.
Prof. Randal Burns. Ph.D. (Advisor)
Prof. Burns is Professor and Chair of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests lie in building the high-performance, scalable data systems. He is a co-founder of NeuroData a free, cloud-based collection of web services that facilitates exploration of terabytes of brain images in multiple formats. He is also a co-founder of Gigantum that makes developing, sharing, and extending data-driven science and data science easier than ever before.