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.

Dr. Lyle Ostrow earned his M.D. and Ph.D. in Biophysics from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed his neurology and neuromuscular training at Johns Hopkins. He served on the Johns Hopkins faculty from 2010–2022, where he developed an ALS-focused clinical and research program and directed the Clinical Neuromuscular Medicine Fellowship. In 2022, he joined Temple University’s MDA/ALS Center of Hope and the ALS Hope Foundation Board. Dr. Ostrow founded the ALS Postmortem Research Core, which combines clinical, pathological, genomic, and autopsy tissue resources for academic and industry researchers. Now based at Temple, he also directs the Temple Neuromuscular Laboratory and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of EverythingALS. He is the longtime Chair of the CDMRP ALS Research Program’s Programmatic Panel and has helped advance therapeutic development, biomarker research, and open data sharing across the ALS field.

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.​