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.

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.

Raquel (Kely) Norel, PhD, is a Research Staff Member in the Computational Biology Center at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. She received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad de Chile, a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute, Israel and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, Israel. After a postdoctoral position at Columbia University, she worked as staff at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and later at Columbia University. Dr. Norel joined IBM at the T. J. Watson Research Center in 2011. In 2015, she received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (OTAA, the highest technical award of IBM) for work on "Crowdsourcing As a New Paradigm for Biomedical Research: the DREAM and Improver Projects", in 2016 she earned an A level Science Accomplishment Award at IBM for "Speech and Text Analytics for Detecting Neuropsychiatric Conditions", in 2017 she was recognized with an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (OTAA) by demonstrating the Practice: Restlessly Reinvent IBM and Ourselves for work on “Psych-e”. In 2019 Kely earned the Research Division Award (RDA) for her work on Parkinson's Disease Monitoring and Measurement. Dr. Norel is coauthor of 5 awarded patents and over 50 peer reviewed publications one of them with more than 800 citations. Dr. Norel is a contributor to Faculty of 1000 and a member of Society of Women Engineers.