Dr. Swaney is the Proteomics Core Project Lead. Dr. Swaney is Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology. She is an expert in the methods of protein and phosphorylation site identification using mass spectrometry and bioinformatics. She runs the Thermo Fisher Scientific Proteomics Facility for Disease Target Discovery at the Gladstone Institutes.
Dr. Lea T. Grinberg is the Human Biology Validation Core Project Lead. Dr. Grinberg is a neuropathologist with extensive expertise in neuropathology and brain banking. Her research focuses on early stages of neurodegenerative diseases in humans and method development.
Dr. Timothy Chang is the Data Core Project Lead. Dr. Chang is an Assistant Professor in Neurology with extensive bioinformatics experience in multi-omic (e.g. transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic) data storage and analysis, including data quality control, differential expression analysis, pathway analysis and multi-omic integrative analytical methods in order to identify biological mechanisms of disease. He will coordinate and augment data collection, sharing and analysis using computational servers and other databases implemented in the Informatics Center for Neurogenetics and Neurogenomics.
Dr. David Elashoff is the Data Core Project Lead. Dr. Elashoff is Professor of Medicine, Biostatistics and Computational Medicine at UCLA. He has been the Director of the Department of Medicine’s Statistics Core for 10 years and the Biostatistics Core in multiple collaborative NIH grants, including the previous UCLA Alzheimer’s disease Research Center. Dr. Elashoff will be coordinate data storage and sharing.
Dr. Le Qi is a postdoc and Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellow working in the Geschwind lab at UCLA. His main focus in this project is to profile human post-mortem brains from H1 and H2 background using single-cell multiome.
Dr. Yin is a project scientist in the Geschwind lab. She has worked in the field of neurogenetics since 2011 with both experimental and computational expertise. In the CWOW project, Dr. Yin drives the 3D chromosome conformation studies and assists multi-mic data analysis.
Sarah Weitzman is an MD/PhD candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, pursuing her PhD in Genetics and Genomic Sciences in the Goate Lab. Her research focuses on the computational analysis of the 17q21.31 H1 and H2 haplotypes, investigating differences in gene expression across diverse cell types, ancestries, and diseases. Sarah has been involved in neurodegeneration and tauopathy research since 2011, with experience at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Pedicone is a postdoctoral fellow in the Goate Lab, she has a PhD in Immunology and expertise in genetics and neuroscience. She supervises the production of iPSC-derived cells (microglia, astrocytes, and neurons) with European, African, and Asian ancestry, which are used for RNA seq, Iso-seq , Hi-C, ATAC-seq, and proteomics for this project. She has performed gene editing to introduce MAPT mutations (V337M and P301L) in H2 and H1 lines and has also managed brain requests for control H1/H2 brains, facilitating the completion of institutional certification documents. Her research focuses on understanding the functional differences driven by haplotypes in brain cells using iPSC models and brain tissue. Her research goal is to integrate knowledge of protective genetic traits with cellular functions in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) to advance translational research.
Mr. Jablonski serves as Center Administrator and primary Program Coordinator providing administrative support to Dr. Goate for all aspects of the Center in project and budget management of all Center components across multiple institutions, with assistance from Administrative Coordinator Ellie Zhang. He manages Goate’s grants and works with the department financial analysts to manage the financial aspects of the Center, including personnel actions, and budgeting in coordination with Dr. Goate. He serves as liaison with business administrators and Project/Core Leaders at all sites (UCLA and UCSF) and coordinates with Project and Core Leaders to ensure timely delivery of scientific/financial progress reports. He is responsible for budgeting and managing grant spending and projections for all Cores and Projects; ensures requlatory compliance and works with Dr. Goate to prepare and submit annual progress reports. He works with Dr. Goate, Center Director, and Drs. Geschwind and Kampmann (Center Associate Directors) to plan the agenda, distribute critical materials for each meeting, take and distribute minutes, and is responsible for ongoing follow-up of all issues identified during the meetings. He will organize the annual CWOW meeting in conjunction with Rainwater Charitable Foundation and NIH staff. For the Center website and digital marketing and social media outreach, he will serve as the liaison between Jen Gutierrez and Dr. Timothy Chang (Data Core Lead) who will be developing and hosting the CWOW website at UCLA through the support of the Administrative Core to coordinate all related effort.
Ms. Zhang is the Administrative Assistant to Dr. Goate and has extensive experience in routine administrative tasks including scheduling meetings, generating meeting agendas, organizing on-site meetings and travel arrangements for attendance at meetings. In the proposed Core A activities, she will serve as the primary administrative assistant for Core A, assisting both Center Director Dr. Goate and Mr. Jablonski in carrying out administrative tasks. She will be responsible for scheduling meetings for Center Director and Associate Directors, the Executive Steering Committee, and the External Advisory Committee. She will also work with Rainwater Charitable Foundation staff to organize travel for External Advisory Committee (EAC) members and CWOW faculty not already at the Tau Consortium Investigators’ Meetings (TCIM) to attend annual CWOW meetings.