Columbia Synapse's Annual Expert Panel Discussion of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Research and Current Treatments.
Speakers:
Dr. Peter Bergold received his B.S.in Biology from Trinity College in 1977 and his PhD in Molecular Biology from Cornell Medical College in 1986. He did a post-doctoral fellowship in Neuroscience with Dr. James Schwartz at the Howard Hughes Institute at Columbia University. He joined the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology of Downstate in 1990 as an Assistant Professor and became a Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neurology in 2009. His research interest in the last ten years has focused on traumatic brain injury. A major research focus of his laboratory has been the development of drug combinations to treat brain injury.
Amanda L. Sacks-Zimmerman, Ph.D., ABPP-CN, is a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist who has had extensive experience in assessing and treating neurological disorders with cognitive remediation as well as researching the cognitive impact of brain injury. She treats a variety of patients who suffer from cognitive and emotional difficulties that may be the result of epilepsy; radiation or chemotherapy; cardiopulmonary bypass procedures; surgery; cerebrovascular disease; stroke; silent infarcts; brain tumor resection; movement disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and Huntington’s disease; metabolic disorders; infectious processes such as encephalitis or Lyme disease; chemical toxin exposure; traumatic brain injury; and dementia diagnoses including mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, multi-infarct dementia, and frontal temporal dementia.
Dr. Koliatsos, Professor of Pathology and Neurology and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, is the head of the Laboratory. Dr. Koliatsos trained in systems neuroscience with Mahlon DeLong and cellular and molecular neuropathology with Don Price. His main interest is mechanisms of neural injury and repair relevant to human disease. He has previously characterized a number of neurotrophic factors for key populations of neurons in the brain and spinal cord and initiated experimental therapies of spinal cord diseases with stem cells and their progenies. In recent years, Dr. Koliatsos has turned to the problem of traumatic brain injury, both as morbidity in and of itself and as model for neurodegenerative disorders. He serves on the faculty of the Ph.D. graduate program of Pathobiology of Disease and leads the TBI Research Center in the Department of Pathology. A clinical neuropsychiatrist, he also sees patients with TBI and degenerative dementias. Dr. Koliatsos has received a Leadership and Excellence in Alzheimer’s disease Award and the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from NIH and a 2018 Discovery Award from Johns Hopkins University.
