Building the Blueprint for Scientific Discovery

Randy Buckner is the Sosland Family professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Harvard University and is affiliated with the Harvard Center for Brain Science. He is also a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director for Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University and then trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, where he pioneered new functional MRI methods to study human cognition. His work expanded to include studies of aging and mental health that led to description of the brain’s default network. He also developed widely used neuroinformatics tools to facilitate open data sharing. Dr. Buckner’s awards include the Wiley Young Investigator Award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the 2007 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2010 Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer’s Disease from the MetLife Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Robert C. Malenka is the Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Director of the Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, and a founder of Stanford University’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. His laboratory conducts research on the synaptic and circuit mechanisms that mediate motivated behaviors of relevance to a range of brain disorders including addiction, autism, and depression. Currently, he is on leave from Stanford to serve as the Chief Scientific Officer at Bayshore Global Management.

Dr. Malenka is an elected member of the United States’ National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American College of Neuropsychoparmagology. He has served on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse and as a Councilor for the Society for Neuroscience and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Dr. Malenka has received numerous awards including the Pasarow Foundation Award for Extraordinary Accomplishment in Neuropsychiatry Research, the Society for Neuroscience Julius Axelrod Prize, and Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize. His papers have been cited more than 100,000 times and have provided foundational knowledge about the mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and modulation in the mammalian brain. He graduated from Harvard College with an MD and from Stanford University School of Medicine with a PhD in neuroscience.

Dr. Sonya Dumanis is the Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Aligning Science, where she provides strategic guidance on the design and implementation of portfolio programs. She also serves as the Deputy Director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), providing operational oversight to the programs under the ASAP umbrella. Previously, Dr. Dumanis was the Vice President of Research and Innovation at the Epilepsy Foundation, where she spearheaded the growth of the Epilepsy Therapy Project and the Epilepsy Innovation Institute. Dr. Dumanis completed her postdoctoral training at both the Johns Hopkins University and the Max-Delbrück Center in Berlin, Germany. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience from Georgetown University.

Dr. Ekemini A. U. Riley is the Founder and President of the Coalition for Aligning Science, an organization she founded in 2020 to centralize efforts to design and implement research programs across multiple disease areas. Dr. Riley sets overall strategy across major philanthropic portfolios focused on accelerating discovery and therapeutic development in biomedicine. She serves as the Managing Director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), an initiative whose development she led from inception to launch. She is a member of the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council (2020-2024). Previously, Dr. Riley was a Director at the Milken Institute Center for Strategic Philanthropy. She helped shape and co-direct the center’s medical research practice, with a portfolio focused on oncology, circulatory, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions, and gene therapy. Dr. Riley earned her BA in Natural Sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in Molecular Medicine from the University of Maryland School of Medicine.