Co-Director
Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC), Department of Neurological Surgery, Weill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California San Francisco (UCSF); San Francisco Veterans Affairs Healthcare System (SFVAHCS)
I work specifically at the interface of data science and disease-centered neurobiology. This has given me a unique opportunity to serve as a translator between basic research and data science, a skill set that I will bring to bear on the proposed project. During my PhD in psychology/neuroscience, I specialized in neuroplasticity, as well as multivariate quantitative methods. I then completed postdoctoral research in cellular and molecular neuroscience, including an individual NIH NRSA (F32) dedicated to synaptic biology in the spinal cord after injury (SCI). I joined the faculty of UCSF in 2010 with an NIH early-stage investigator award (R01) for synaptic biology after CNS injury and concurrent established investigator BISTI award (R01) to develop a neurotrauma data repository and data science tools. My laboratory has successfully pursued both data science and bench research ever since. Among our notable contributions, we developed the Open Data Commons Traumatic Brain Injury (odc-tbi dot org) and Spinal Cord Injury (odc-sci dot org), cloud-based data infrastructures hosting shared data from over 84 laboratories (10,000+ research subjects); and the translationally-focused private data commons for SCI (pdc-sci dot org) for late-stage large animal models and regulatory compliance. I am jointly appointed to the San Francisco Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System and have VA Merit Awards to further develop data science tools for chronic traumatic brain injury (cTBI) and nonhuman primate SCI translational models. I also serve as UCSF contact PI on the NIH TOP-NT UG3/UH3 project for multicenter biomarker discovery in preclinical TBI; and data science Co-I on multicenter clinical precision medicine projects including the NIH U01 Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI/TED), TRACK-SCI and the U19 UCSF-REACH low back pain project, among others. I also have a history of successful work with NINDS on TBI common data elements, Department of Energy in neurotrauma data science, and NASEM workgroups on sustainability of the biomedical data lifecycle. Collectively this work has produced >150 published peer-reviewed papers in preclinical, clinical, and data scientific neurotrauma research.
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