Scientific Advisory Board

James Berry, MD, MPH, is a Winthrop Family Scholar in ALS Sciences at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); Director, MGH Neurological Clinical Research Institute; and Chief, Division of ALS and Motor Neuron Diseases. In these roles, he provides care for people with ALS and works as an ALS researcher designing, overseeing and implementing trials focused on the identification of markers of ALS in digital, blood and spinal fluid. He also collaborates broadly with researchers around the globe on these biomarker efforts.

Raquel (Kely) Norel, PhD, is a Research Staff Member in the Computational Biology Center at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. At the Digital Health Lab, Dr. Norel and team implements automatic language-based analysis for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative assessment by using machine learning, signal processing and natural language processing. Their work aims to gain insight in disease detection and progression.

Amir Lahav is a Digital Health Innovation Advisor and a leading innovator at the forefront of neurological diseases. Amir has nearly two decades of experience in the biotech and healthcare industries. He currently sits on the Advisory Board of leading HealthTech startups, and holds several consulting roles with pharma companies, including Head of Strategic R&D and Digital Health Innovation at Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, and Chief of Digital Health Strategy at Redenlab. Formerly, Amir served as the Head of Digital Innovation for Rare Diseases at Pfizer, and prior to pharma, was a PI on numerous clinical trials as a Neurology Faculty and Professor of Pediatrics and at Harvard Medical School.

Ernest Fraenkel, PhD, is a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, where he oversees a laboratory developing computational and experimental approaches to search for new therapeutic strategies for diseases, especially diseases of the central nervous system. Their work uses machine learning, AI and bioinformatics to integrate molecular, clinical and behavioral data to understand how diseases develop and to suggest new directions for drug development.

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As Chair of the DOD ALS Research Programmatic Panel, he led recent efforts to develop and refine funding mechanisms to help novel treatments move though the drug development pipeline, prioritize biomarker development, and encourage open data and resource sharing. He also Directs an ALS Postmortem Tissue Research Core in collaboration with the CDC National ALS Registry which integrates clinical, pathological, and genomic data with autopsy tissue samples and slides – all made broadly available to researchers around the world.