People

Dr. Steven Schiff is a pediatric neurosurgeon with interests in neural control engineering, sustainable health engineering and global health. He founded the Center for Neural Engineering at Penn State University, wrote the first book on Neural Control Engineering (MIT Press, 2012), and is now developing the Center for Global Neurosurgery at Yale University. He received the NIH Director’s Pioneer and Transformative Awards in 2015 and 2018, respectively, which have enabled him to pursue his interests in the sustainable control of infant infections in the developing world. This work has evolved into an exploration of what Schiff calls Predictive Personalized Public Health (P3H), and included leading the discovery of a new highly lethal infant brain disease in Africa - Neonatal Paenibacilliosis.

Dr. Movassagh is an Associate Research Scientist with a focus on infectious disease computational biology and bioinformatics, at Yale School of Medicine. She got her BS from University of Virginia, Masters in Biochemistry and Bioinformatics from George Washington University and PhD from University of Massachusetts Medical School in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Her post-doctoral fellow ship was at Harvard School of Public Health and Dana Farber Cancer Institute departments of Biostatistics and Data science respectively with a focus on infectious disease computational biology and global public health in under resourced communities and countries. She is also interested in investigating the role of pathogens in development of diseases in neonates, and children such as but not limited to neonatal sepsis, post infectious hydrocephalus, Burkitt Lymphoma and diarrhea using computational biology and bioinformatics analysis and methods development.

Mechanical Engineer and Neuroscientist dedicated to advancing neural engineering solutions for pressing health challenges. With a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, my expertise lies in the modeling and stimulation of brain tissue and the development of next-gen neural prosthetics and control algorithms for therapeutic nervous system interventions.