Alison Gorbatov joined the VA RR&D Center of Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN) team in 2023 as the Regulatory Program Manager, Core C Lead.

Alison holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Psychology from SUNY Cortland and a Juris Doctor (JD) from Massachusetts School of Law.  Alison has background in program management for organizations that serve individuals with disabilities as well as mental illnesses.  She also has professional work experience in clinical research project management and regulatory affairs at both Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as well at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA.

Dr. Barredo holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington (2006) and a PhD in Neuroscience from Brown University (2013). She joined the Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology in 2015 and the faculty of the Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior in 2017. Her research uses neuroimaging and computational approaches to investigate brain signatures of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, disorders of emotional regulation, and treatment response.

Dr. Correia is a Board Certified Clinical Neuropsychologist. His doctorate is from the University of Rhode Island. He completed a clinical internship at the Malcolm Randall VAMC in Gainesville, Florida and then completed clinical and research postdoctoral fellowships at Butler Hospital in Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. His research focuses on diffusion tensor imaging in aging and dementia and early detection of Alzheimer’s disease with secondary foci on traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Benjamin Greenberg is the new Center’s director of the VA RR&D Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN) on March 6, 2024. He earned a PhD in Neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego, and an MD from the University of Miami. He trained in Neurology at Columbia University, and completed a psychiatry residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. After residency, he worked for the Laboratory of Clinical Science at the National Institute of Mental Health where he subsequently became Chief of the Adult Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Research Unit, where he initiated studies in OCD using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). His primary research continues to be developing brain circuit-based therapies for OCD and more recently PTSD.

In 2000, Dr. Greenberg joined the OCD Research Group at Butler Hospital and Brown Medical School in Providence, with research focusing on psychiatric neurosurgery including ventral capsulotomy for OCD and deep brain stimulation for OCD and depression. He became Director of the COBRE Center for Neuromodulation at Butler Hospital in 2019. Previously, he joined the Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology at the Providence VA, becoming its Associate Director in 2016, where his focus is noninvasive brain stimulation. He has treated veteran and non-veteran patients with OCD, PTSD, and related illnesses as a clinical psychiatrist for three decades. He is the former Chief of Outpatient Services at Butler Hospital.

Dr. Hochberg is Associate Director of the VA RR&D Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN), and is a vascular and critical care neurologist and neuroscientist. His research focuses on the development and testing of novel neurotechnologies to help people with paralysis and other neurologic disorders, and on understanding cortical neuronal ensemble activities in humans. In addition to his role at CfNN, Dr. Hochberg has appointments as Professor of Engineering, School of Engineering and Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University; Neurologist, Massachusetts General Hospital, where he attends in the NeuroICU and on the Acute Stroke service; and Senior Lecturer on Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He also directs the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery for MGH Neurology (cntr.mgh.harvard.edu), where he is the IDE Sponsor-Investigator and Principal Investigator of the BrainGate pilot clinical trials (www.braingate.org) that are conducted by a close collaboration of clinicians, scientists, and engineers at Providence VAMC, Brown, Case Western Reserve University, MGH, and Stanford University. Dr. Hochberg is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Neurological Association. Dr. Hochberg’s BrainGate research, which has been published Nature, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Neural Engineering, and others, is supported by the Rehabilitation R&D Service of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health including NCMRR/NICHD, NIDCD, NINDS, and the BRAIN Initiative.

Dr. Jones received her doctorate in mathematics from Boston University, followed by training in neuroscience and human magneto- and electro-encephalography (MEG/EEG) at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Jones’ research program integrates these disciplines to develop biophysically principled computational neural models that bridge the critical gap between human MEG/EEG brain imaging signals and their underlying cellular and network level generators. Her group developed their unique neural modeling into a user friendly software tool for researchers and clinicians to interpret the circuit origin of their human MEG/EEG data: Human Neocortical Neurosolver. A primary goal is to translate an understanding of the network mechanism underlying non-invasively measured brain signals into brain stimulation strategies to improve disrupt brain function.

Dr. Mernoff attended NYU School of Medicine and completed his residency in Neurology at Boston University Medical Center (BUMC) and fellowships in Neurorehabilitation, Memory Disorders and TBI at BUMC/Braintree Hospital. He is a general neurologist specializing in Neurorehabilitation and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and leads PVAMC’s Polytrauma/TBI and Spinal Cord Injury/ALS Teams. Dr. Mernoff is an Investigator at the Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology at PVAMC and an affiliated investigator at the Brown Institute for Brain Science. His research interests include brain-machine interfaces (he is Clinical Co-Investigator at PVAMC for the Braingate project), TBI, and stroke rehabilitation.

Dr. Philip received his BSc from McGill University and his MD from Albany Medical College where he graduated AOA and with a Distinction in the Study of Biomedical Ethics. He completed his psychiatry residency training at Brown University, followed by T32 and Neuromodulation Fellowships at Brown. Dr. Philip’s research interest is to understand therapeutic mechanisms of non-invasive brain stimulation for psychiatric illnesses, and to use this knowledge to improve the treatments of today and design the interventions of tomorrow. Primary areas of study are PTSD, depression and suicide.

Dr. Resnik received her Ph.D. in physical therapy from Nova Southeastern University, her MS in physical therapy from Sargent College, Boston University, and her BS from Hampshire College. She is the 2017 recipient of the Paul B. Magnuson Award and is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association. Dr. Resnik’s research, informed by nearly 20 years of clinical experience as a physical therapist, links the fields of rehabilitation and health services research, focusing on three specialized areas: 1) design and evaluation of upper limb prosthetic devices; 2) development, evaluation and deployment of rehabilitation outcomes measures; 3) study of delivery and effectiveness of rehabilitation services.

Dave Rosler joined the BrainGate Research Team at the VA Providence Healthcare System in 2009 and functions as the Director of Technology Development and Innovation. He has been a member of the CfNN Executive Committee and Leadership Committee for the Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology at PVAMC since its inception in June 2012. In addition to his appointment at the VA, he holds appointments at Brown University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dave is a biomedical engineer with extensive medical device research and development experience. He has a strong academic and industry based background, leading collaborative efforts to bring novel medical devices to market readiness. Before joining the BrainGate team, he was Director of Research and Development at Archus Orthopedics, a privately held medical device company in Redmond, Washington, where he was responsible for managing product development and applied research programs. He has been published in leading journals such as The Spine Journal, Clinical Biomechanics, and The Journal of Orthopaedic Research. Dave has been the recipient of awards for his work from ASTM and the International Society for the Advancement of Spinal Surgery. He received both his MS (1997) and BS with Honors (1996) from Tulane University.

Dr. Sanes received his PhD from the University of Rochester, while investigating startle reflexes. He then worked at the National Institutes of Mental in the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, led by Edward Evarts, where he begin his studies in human motor control. After several more years at NIH, Dr. Sanes came to Brown University, where he’s been since, and has continued his independent research. Dr. Sanes has investigated brain control of visual-motor integration, focusing of the brain mediates voluntary movements and motor learning in healthy adults and patients with brain disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and cerebellar dysfunction.

Dr. Simeral is a leading authority on neural interface systems research and development with degrees in electrical engineering and neuroscience. His research focuses on the development and evaluation of innovative hardware and software systems for the real-time interpretation of the brain’s electrical signals in assistive and diagnostic applications. As Chief Systems Engineer for the BrainGate2 Neural Interface System project and clinical trial, his work aims to leverage state-of-the-art advances in computer science, machine learning, and neuroscience toward the neural control of computers and next-generation prosthetic arms and hands. Dr. Simeral’s research has been published in leading scientific journals such as Nature, the Journal of Neuroscience, Hippocampus, and the Journal of Neuroengineering, and has been presented at scientific conferences ranging from ‘The Conference on Quantum Electronics and Laser Science’ in San Jose, CA to ‘The European Future Technologies Conference’ in Budapest, Hungary. Teaching contributions range from a Microelectronic System Design course at U.C. San Diego to a gross neuroanatomy series for first-year medical students at the Brown Medical School. Dr. Simeral’s former experience includes nearly a decade in industry developing high-performance VLSI microprocessors and massively parallel computer systems for NCR, Teradata, and AT&T. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and holds patents for a high-speed microelectronics circuit design. Dr. Simeral received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1985, a Master of Science in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, and a PhD in Neuroscience from the Wake Forest School of Medicine in 2003.

Dr. Shea received her PhD in psychology from Catholic University in 1981. She was formerly at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she was chief of the Personality Disorders Program, and Associate Coordinator of the NIMH Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program. Currently, she is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, and a staff psychologist at the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders Clinic and Director of PTSD Research at the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Current Research Interests: Psychosocial treatments for PTSD and other trauma-related psychopathology.

After completing medical school at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, Dr. Chodhary went to Michael Reese Hospital for residency in Internal Medicine. He did his cardiovascular diseases fellowship from Emory University. The focus of his Vascular Research Laboratory at the VA Providence Healthcare System is to evaluate the mechanisms underlying vascular, cardiac, and skeletal muscle dysfunction seen in pulmonary vascular diseases. The laboratory uses a variety of in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo approaches utilizing the preclinical models of pulmonary hypertension and emphysema. In clinical research, the Vascular Research Laboratory team is attempting to characterize the role and impact of cardiac dysfunction in settings of lung diseases and study the epidemiology of pulmonary hypertension.

Kate Barnabe is the Administrative Officer for CfNN. Ms. Barnabe holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Master of HealthCare Administration from Simmons University in Boston, MA. She has over twenty years of research experience in drug and device studies. Prior to joining CfNN, Ms. Barnabe served as Supervisory Program Specialist for Dr. Linda Resnik’s Prosthetics and Orthotics Research Laboratory as well as Project Coordinator of the multi-site studies of the DEKA Arm. Kate began her research career with the Translational Pain Research Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA, where she served as both Lead Study Coordinator and Program Coordinator for over 20 single center and multi-site Phase I-III clinical trials.