Updated January 2025
Editor-in-Chief
Christophe Bernard INSERM
Christophe Bernard is the director of research at INSERM U1106 in the Institute of Systems Neuroscience. Bernard has performed research at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, conducted postdoctoral research at Southampton University, and received his PhD from the University of Paris VI in 1990. Bernard is interested in mechanisms underlying the construction of an epileptic brain as well as seizure genesis and propagation, focusing on temporal lobe epilepsy. Bernard's lab is designing and using new tools to help with epileptic research. He was awarded the Michael Prize for epilepsy in 2007, and the Felix Innovation Prize for the development of the organic transistor to record brain activity in 2013, and has received fellowships from NATO, the Simone and Cino del Duca Foundation, and the Philippe Foundation. Bernard has been a reviewing editor for The Journal of Neuroscience and Science, and he has served on the Program Committee at SfN and the Program Committee at the Federation of European Neuroscience.
Advisory Board
Robert Calin-Jageman, PhD, Statistics Editor Dominican University
Robert Calin-Jageman is a professor of psychology and neuroscience program director at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. He completed a BA in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Albion College, an MA in Developmental Psychology at Wayne State University, a PhD in Physiological Psychology with Thomas Fischer at Wayne State University, and a postdoc with Paul S. Katz at Georgia State University. Calin-Jageman is co-PI of an undergraduate-powered lab that explores the mechanisms of learning and forgetting; the lab has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2010. Calin-Jageman is also active in promoting Open Science, replication, and rigorous statistical practices; he is the co-author of an undergraduate textbook on statistics (Introduction to the New Statistics) and has published software and online tools to support the estimation approach to statistics. Calin-Jageman has twice been awarded the Distinguished Service Award from the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience for contributions to the teaching of neuroscience.
Sacha Nelson, MD, PhD Brandeis University
Sacha Nelson is the Tauber Professor of Biology and Chair of the Program in Neuroscience at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He received his MD, PhD (Biology) from UCSD in 1991 working in the laboratory of Simon LeVay at the Salk Institute and then did postdoctoral work at MIT with Mriganka Sur. He has been at Brandeis University since 1994. He has received awards from the Sloan, McKnight, and Rett Syndrome Research Foundations. His current research focuses on transcriptional networks underlying neuronal plasticity and excitability in the mammalian neocortex. Sacha has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology, as a Reviewing Editor and Senior Editor for eLife, as a Councilor for the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), and as a member and Chair of the SfN Publications Committee.
Jeanne Nerbonne, PhD Washington University Medical School
Jeanne Nerbonne received a B.S. in Chemistry from Framingham State College and a Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry from Georgetown University. After completing postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, she joined the Department of Pharmacology at Washington University. She is presently the Alumni Endowed Professor of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology in the Departments of Medicine, Developmental Biology and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University. She is the Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Research, Co-Director of the Center for the Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases, and Director of a NHLBI-sponsored Training Program in Integrative and Systems Biology of Cardiovascular Disease. Research in the Nerbonne lab explores the molecular, cellular and systemic mechanisms involved in the regulation of voltage-gated K+ (Kv) and Na+ (Nav) channels that shape cardiac and neuronal action potentials, the critical determinants of signaling and cell-cell communication in the cardiovascular and nervous systems. She and her colleagues have provided critical insights into the molecular and cellular mechanisms contributing to the diversity of native cardiac and neuronal Kv and Nav channels, the roles of these channels in controlling normal physiology and behavior, and the functional impact of derangements in the expression and/or the biophysical properties associated with inherited and acquired disease.
Lorna Role, PhD NINDS
Dr. Role joined NINDS February 2019 as the Scientific Director and a Senior Investigator. She obtained an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a Ph.D. in physiology from Harvard Medical School (Boston). She did her postdoctoral training in pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis) with Gerald Fischbach, who later served as the director of NINDS (1998–2001). After her training, she became an assistant professor at Columbia University in 1985 and rose to the level of professor before moving to SUNY Stony Brook in 2008. Dr. Role was a full professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and then a SUNY Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook. She was also co-director of SUNY Stony Brook’s Neurosciences Institute. She has earned many awards and honors, including being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 and a Fellow in the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2009. She received three separate awards from the McKnight Foundation at different stages of her career and was twice named a Distinguished Investigator by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, now the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. In 2010, she received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which “supports scientists with outstanding records of creativity pursuing new research directions to develop pioneering approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research.” She has been the principal investigator on numerous NIH-funded grants, supported continuously since 1982; an early recipient of an NINDS Javits award; and more recently received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. She has published more than 100 scientific articles. Over her career at both Columbia University (New York) and the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook (Stony Brook, New York), Role has mentored nearly 20 undergraduate students and more than 50 postdoctoral fellows, graduate, and medical students..
Daniela Schiller, PhD Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD at Tel Aviv University where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. Schiller joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the laboratory of affective neuroscience since. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships. Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has been the recipient of many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences. Schiller served as Reviewing Editor for The Journal of Neuroscience between 2019-2024, and she is the Chair of the program committee for SfN’s 2025 annual meeting.
Yavin Shaham, PhD NIDA-IRP/NIH
Yavin Shaham received his BS and MA from the Hebrew U, Jerusalem, and his PhD from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD. His postdoctoral training was at Concordia U, Montreal, in the laboratory of Dr. Jane Stewart. Prior to joining the NIDA Intramural Research Program as a tenure-track investigator, he was an investigator at the Addiction Research Center in Toronto. He is currently a tenured Branch Chief and a Senior Investigator. His major awards include the NIDA Director’s Award of Merit (2001), the Society of Neuroscience Jacob Waletzky award for innovative research in drug and alcohol addiction (2006), the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Grant Award (2016), and the European Behavioral Pharmacology Society Distinguished Achievement Award (2017). He was a Reviewer and Senior Editor for The Journal of Neuroscience between 2008 and 2018 and currently serves as a Handling (Reviewing) Editor of Neuropsychopharmacology. He is also an editorial board member of Biological Psychiatry, Psychopharmacology, and Addiction Biology. His group currently investigates mechanisms of relapse to drug use, as assessed in rat models developed in his lab..