About the Contributors

Taura Barr

My career began as a registered nurse in the Neurovascular Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the University of Pittsburgh Presbyterian Hospital. In a short period of time at the bedside, I realized that clinical care of stroke and brain-injured patients could be improved. Because of these gaps in clinical care, I became passionately motivated to help my patients realize their full recovery potential starting with the care they received under my shift in the ICU. After critical discussions with a nurse scientist mentor, I recognized that a career in research would help me reach my end goal of decreasing the burdens of brain injury by changing the way brain injuries are studied and then ultimately treated. Within a year of undergraduate graduation, I entered a BSN-Ph.D. program at the University of Pittsburgh and became the first Graduate Partnership Program (GPP) fellow at the university (www.training.nih.gov/programs/gpp). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) GPP program allows graduate students to complete coursework at their home institution, and then complete dissertation work on the intramural NIH campus with NIH mentors and unlimited research resources. As a graduate student of the intramural National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) program, I was part of a cutting-edge research team that was fully integrated into clinical practice of stroke patients in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), Stroke Diagnostics and Therapeutics Section. The mentoring I received and the experience of developing and implementing a genomics-based biomarker study for ischemic stroke as a graduate student was critical to my development as a clinical translational neuroscientist and my subsequent program of research. After completion of my dissertation, Biomarkers of Acute Stroke, I was offered a Nurse Specialist appointment in the intramural NINR program to develop and implement a partnership with the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine (CNRM) at the Uniformed Services University (USU), Bethesda, MD. I was part of a team of clinicians and researchers setting the research agenda for traumatic brain injury (TBI) in military patients in the national capital area. Severe TBI and concussion (or mild TBI) affects over 30% of all deployed military personnel and can result in significant long-term morbidity and psychological health issues. The long-term complications of TBI are not just a problem in the military; civilian TBI can also result in posttraumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and postconcussion syndrome (PCS) in 24-80% of cases. We have yet to define the underlying physiology that puts patients with TBI at risk for these debilitating psychological health issues and I believe the mechanisms begin during the acute injury period. Using my prior clinical knowledge of civilian TBI, my experience as a graduate student in the stroke program, observations with clinical practice at Walter Reed and through collaboration with CNRM investigators I became extremely motivated to study the physiological underpinnings of these conditions post-TBI. Our team designed a study and received funding to partner with a Sleep Medicine physician at an Army Medical Center in Tacoma, WA to study sleep and identify a genomic profile in the peripheral blood of post-deployed military personnel who had suffered a TBI in the theater of war. We wanted to know if a combination of sleep disturbances and a specific genomic expression profile could be used to predict patients who went on to develop PCS and/or PTSD. Unfortunately, when I left the NIH to begin my faculty appointment at West Virginia University I had to transfer the principal investigator role to a colleague in the intramural NINR program. She kept the study going until its completion in Fall 2013. We have recently published some of this work, while the remainder of the data is being analyzed. This work had a tremendous impact on the clinical care of patients at MAMC and our goal is to integrate the findings in other settings, both military and civilian, to raise awareness of sleep disorders in brain-injured patients and identify novel treatment approaches to mitigate the increased risk of psychological health problems. Since this study, I have continued my work on ischemic stroke and TBI with the goal of identifying novel biomarkers that can be used in clinical care for diagnosis, but then taken back to the bench to study their functional relevance. My program of research starts with the patient at the bedside, and all of the variability and clinical issues that come with them; brings those issues back to the bench to identify treatment strategies; and then ends with industry partnerships to commercialize and fully translate our results. Given the paramount important of increasing the speed and efficiency of clinical translation, the changes in our medical system that will come with the Affordable Care Act, and decreasing sources of research funding, the future of brain injury research will depend on innovative partnerships between academia, hospitals, government and industry to tackle the challenges of brain injury recovery together. It will be imperative for future investigators in the field to be well-rounded and have knowledge in best clinical practice and industry initiatives to ensure the work they are doing at the bench does indeed make it to the patient at the bedside.

George E. Barreto

I earned my B.Sc. in physical therapy in 2002 and M.Sc. in biochemistry in 2005. A year before finalizing my M.Sc. training, I was already thinking about the next step to pursue in my academic career. I looked over some good Ph.D. programs in Brazil, but none attracted me. As I have had a clinical influence in my entire research career in college, I wanted to study something that could be translated into a clinical approach. I was particularly sensitive to patients with neurological impairment after some types of brain injury. My idea was to have a molecular/cellular basis background of these neurological alterations to broaden my knowledge, and target some possible therapeutic interventions to ameliorate and improve neurological outcomes. With this in mind, I searched for good laboratories. Finally, I was told that the Cajal Institute in Madrid was known for its reputation in the neurosciences field, especially my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Luis Miguel Garcia-Segura. Since I have always been into neurological sciences and had positive feelings for pursuing such an education abroad, with such great perspectives in brain research, the next step was to find a fellowship that could support me financially. I was awarded a prestigious and competitive Western European Research Committee (WERC)/Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS)/International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) Ph.D. fellowship (2006-2008). I successfully finalized my Ph.D. studies on January 9, 2009 from Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain). During my Ph.D. studies, I addressed the effects of neurosteroids on reactive glia with aging. My postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine (2009-2011) focused on addressing the role of astrocyte activation following stroke and enhanced astrocytic functions targeting neuronal protection. My research interests relate to how potential therapeutic strategies may control astrogliosis and therefore improve neuronal survival, focusing particularly on the two-sided role of reactive astrocytes, which is an experimental paradigm helpful in discriminating destructive from protective mechanisms during the normal aging process and after brain injury.

Suzanne R. Burstein

Currently, I am a graduate student at Weill Cornell Medical College. I became interested in the neuroscience field as an undergraduate student studying biology at Lehigh University, and began working in the neuroendocrinology laboratory of Colin Saldanha, Ph.D. After realizing in my undergraduate courses that there is still so much that remains unknown about the complexities of the human brain, I was excited about a future in neuroscience research. In the Saldanha lab, I studied sex differences in cytokine induction and aromatization after traumatic brain injury in the zebra finch. After graduating, my interest in the role of estrogens in neuroprotection remained and I decided to pursue a Ph.D, where I now study the role of estrogen in mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegeneration and stroke.

Francisco Capani

Since I am a physician, my interest in neuroprotection began early in my career with my graduate training at the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. I trained during my Ph.D. studies with Prof. Dr. Jorge Pecci Saavedra in a model of perinatal asphyxia in rat using different protocols of experimental hypothermia. After my postdoctoral formation at the Department of Neuroscience, University of San Diego, and at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, I returned to the School of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires, in 2006, where I obtained a faculty position. Together with some talented students and in collaboration with Dr. Luis Miguel Garcia Segura, we found that estrogen was neuroprotective on the long-term alterations induced by perinatal asphyxia, this experimental therapeutic approach being more specific than the effect of hypothermia. These results still have a strong influence on our current research, developing new therapeutic approaches to find a cure for the devastating consequences of perinatal asphyxia.

Laura L. Carruth

The hormonal regulation of brain and behavior in vertebrates has fascinated generations of scientists, including myself, my interest germinating as an undergraduate student and subsequently...