Jeffrey Milbrandt, M.D., Ph.D., James S. McDonnell Professor and Executive Director of McDonnell Genome Institute, Co-Director of Needleman Center for Neurometabolism and Axonal Therapeutics, and Professor of Pathology & Immunology, Medicine and Neurology. Major discoveries from his lab include identification and characterization of GDNF neurotrophic factor family, establishing the molecular link between metabolism and axon health, and discovering that SARM1, the executioner of damaged axons, is an enzyme that breaks down NAD and is a promising drug target for treatment of degenerative disorders. Jeff is the founder of two startup companies. He has published nearly 300 papers. He has served on multiple scientific advisory boards and won numerous awards throughout his career.

Dr. Bipasha Mukherjee-Clavin is currently an Assistant Professor in the Neurology Department in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She was previously an M.D./Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Johns Hopkins University, during which she earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Gabsang Lee. As part of her dissertation, she modeled Charcot Marie Tooth 1A, a genetic Schwann cell disorder, with three different patient-derived Schwann Cell models: human induced pluripotent stem cells, human embryonic stem cells, and direct lineage converted cells. During her Neurology residency, she received the NINDS R25 award to support an ongoing project in the laboratory of Dr. Ahmet Hoke investigating the relationship between CMT2 and the kinesin KIF16B, a variant of uncertain significance found through whole exome sequencing of two brothers with CMT2. This project won the Jay Slotkin award, given annually to a graduating Johns Hopkins neurology resident for excellence in neurological research. She is pursuing clinical and basic science training in Neuromuscular disorders with the goal of developing a translational and precision medicine program using patient-derived engineered cells to better understand and alleviate peripheral neuropathies.

Atul Rawat, Ph.D., is a postdoc research fellow in Morrison Lab at Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. His research work focuses on modulating macrophage plasticity and their role in nerve repair in peripheral nerve injury models using lipid nanoparticles (LNP). He works on synthesis and characterization of LNPs and testing them in-vitro and in-vivo in control and transgenic animals.

He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India in Biotechnology. His Ph.D. work was on identification and characterization of early diagnostics or discriminatory biomarker of disease like acute myocardial infraction, Takayasu arteritis, breast cancer, drug formulation and toxicity, using NMR based metabolomics. His first visiting research associate position at Indiana-Purdue University in Roy Lab provided the opportunity to train in lipid nanoparticles engineering and targeting to specific cells like macrophage.

Ashley Kalinski, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist with expertise in neural repair and axon regeneration. Dr. Kalinski earned her Ph.D. from Drexel University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of Michigan Medical School. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Ball State University.

Under the direction of Jeffery Twiss MD., Ph.D., her graduate work focused on intrinsic mechanisms that support axon regeneration. There she identified that central axons can upregulate a regeneration program if provided a permissive growth environment. Building from this work, she characterized the microenvironment of the injured sciatic nerve during her postdoctoral work with Dr. Roman Giger, Ph.D. She identified that efferocytosis is a key mechanism for nerve debridement after injury. Dr. Kalinski opened her lab at Ball State University in 2020. Her lab aims to understand the relationship between immune cells, Schwann cells, and neurons following sciatic nerve injury. Further, they are interested in how molecules like SARM1 and DLK are involved in the entire peripheral nerve injury signaling cascade.

Dr. Baohan Pan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His research interests include peripheral neuropathy, neuropathic pain and itch, mechanisms of peripheral nerve degeneration and regeneration.

Dr. Christopher Cashman is excited to join the Merkin Peripheral Neuropathy and Nerve Regeneration Center community with his project investigating acquired mitochondrial mutations in diabetic neuropathy. Dr. Cashman received his B.A. in biochemistry from Bowdoin College in 2007, then completed his M.D. and Ph.D. in neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. At Hopkins, Dr. Cashman worked in Dr. Ahmet Höke’s laboratory studying the ability of derived motor neurons to promote regeneration in chronically denervated nerves.

After his time at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Cashman completed a medicine internship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and neurology residency at Mass General Brigham/Harvard Medical School. He is currently a neuromuscular fellow at Mass General Brigham and a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Craig Blackstone investigating acquired mitochondrial dysfunction in neuropathies. Dr. Cashman will continue this work next year as he joins the faculty of Mass General Brigham as a staff physician scientist.

Brett M. Morrison M.D., Ph.D., received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Mount Sinai Medical School in New York City in 2001 and then enrolled as a neurology resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Following completion of his residency, Dr. Morrison completed a Clinical Neurophysiology fellowship in 2006. Following his training, Dr. Morrison was appointed to the neurology faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 2006 and is currently an Associate Professor in Neurology. He is also the Director of the Inpatient Neurology Consult Service and the Program Director for the Neuromuscular fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Morrison maintains a neuromuscular clinic where he sees adult patients with peripheral neuropathies, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), myasthenia gravis and muscle diseases including myopathy and muscular dystrophy.

Dr. Morrison has successfully led several clinical trials in ALS as the site-PI, including Phase 3 trials investigating the potential benefit of lithium, dexpramipexole, and a current Phase 1 trial by Genentech. He is also currently the site-PI for two clinical trials in peripheral neuropathy—a Phase 2/3 trial to identify new treatments for painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy and a Phase 3 trial by Janssen and Janssen to test a new treatment for chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). Dr. Morrison’s basic and translational research interests include ALS and peripheral neuropathy. He led the effort in Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins to understand the unexpected, but major, role played by oligodendrocytes in the pathogenesis of ALS. He also studies the role of monocarboxylate transporters, which are the primary transporters for lactate, pyruvate and ketone bodies in the body, in oligodendrocytes during normal function and disease. In addition to investigating these transporters in ALS, Dr. Morrison’s laboratory is currently focused on studying the role of monocarboxylate transporters in peripheral neuropathies and peripheral nerve regeneration. His most recent publication in Journal of Clinical Investigations demonstrated the critical role for the lactate transporter, MCT1, in macrophages and that upregulating this transporter in macrophages improves nerve regeneration. His lab is currently investigating techniques to translate these findings into potential therapies for patients with severe and untreatable peripheral nerve injuries.

Dr. Hyun Sung is a cellular neurobiologist who has studied the in vivo organelle dynamics in nervous systems. He specializes in axonal transport, mitochondrial life cycle, endoplasmic reticulum dynamics and autophagy process in multiple neuronal types.

Dr. Sung earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Biological Sciences from the Hanyang University (Seoul, Korea) and his Ph.D. in Cellular Neurobiology from the Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN). At Purdue, he completed his dissertation with Dr. Peter Hollenbeck studying axonal transport of mitochondria and its impact on mitochondrial quality control in the Drosophila larval motor neurons.

He joined the Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Lloyd in 2016. As a postdoctoral fellow, he has performed live imaging of axonal and synaptic organelles in Drosophila models of multiple neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease.

In 2022, he was promoted to a research associate in the Department of Neurology, and his current work is focused on understanding the mechanisms of autophagy disruption in Drosophila models of C9orf72-mediated ALS/FTD. He is particularly interested in organelle dynamics underlying innate cellular physiology, with a specific focus on neuronal pathologies.

Throughout his academic training and research in Algeria and France, Dr. Cherief had the chance to develop a scientific background in several disciplines including molecular biology, histology, microscopy, and radiography. His engineering training in Algeria was oriented toward food industry.

He moved to Baltimore in 2019, As a postdoctoral fellow at the James lab. His research interests include perivascular mesenchymal progenitor cells for osteoarthritis repair and the study of the peripheral nervous system and its importance in bone and tendon tissue repair.

The group recently described two perivascular mesenchymal cells subtypes (Pdgfrα+ and Pdgfrβ+) that improved murine osteoarthritis. Pdgfrα+ and Pdgfrβ+ cell preparations improved metrics of cartilage degradation and reduced markers of chondrocyte hypertrophy in a mice osteoarthritis model (5).

Dr. Cherief is studying the role of peripheral nervous system in bone and tendon. He is working on developing a better understanding to the link between diabetic neuropathy and diabetic bone disease using omnics, histology and µCT data.

Qin Zheng, M.D., Ph.D., received her medical degree and Ph.D. degree in China. Now as an instructor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at John Hopkins.

While in graduate school, using rat as a genetic model, she characterized the intrinsic electrophysiological properties and gene expression patterns of primary sensory neurons in bone cancer and identified KCNQ (Kv7) K+ channel as a critical factor in the development of bone cancer pain.

She obtained postdoctoral training with Dr. Xinzhong Dong at Johns Hopkins University. She made a complete change in her approach and developed a new imaging system to visualize large populations of primary sensory neurons activities in vivo in the dorsal root ganglions (DRGs) of live mice. Using this technology, she identified a novel gap-junction mediated neuronal coupling phenomenon following tissue injury, and observed a distinct form of abnormal spontaneous activity in neuropathic pain: clusters of adjacent DRG neurons firing synchronously due to ectopic sympathetic innervation of DRG following nerve injury.

Throughout her academic career, she has received rigorous training on a variety of neuroscientific techniques including rodent behavior, electrophysiology, dorsal root ganglion and spinal cord in vivo imaging and molecular biology. Her research aims to utilize high throughput in vivo imaging to elucidate the neuronal and non-neuronal mechanisms of neuropathy, and to develop new strategies for the treatment of neuropathy and chronic pain.

Simone Thomas received her MS degree in Animal Science from the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany. She started her professional career working as a scientific collaborator at the German Aerospace Center in Cologne and later worked in the human life sciences programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) before joining the Neurology department at Johns Hopkins.

Her research includes peripheral neuropathies caused by different underlying etiologies, including metabolic syndrome and neurotoxic chemotherapy agents. She is the Principal Investigator in several clinical natural history studies to better understand peripheral neuropathies. She is also involved in several efforts to develop better outcome measures to accurately assess efficacy of treatment in different neuromuscular conditions including polyneuropathies and myopathies. She is currently chairing the IMACS special interest group to develop better patient reported outcome measures for Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM).