Meet our 2025 Jury
The HBI has established an International Review Committee and task them with identification of the most impactful research project.
Dr Fernando Cendes
Fernando Cendes, MD, PhD, FAAN, FAES, is a full Professor of Neurology at University of Campinas – UNICAMP, and Director of The Brazilian Research Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology (BRAINN). This Center focuses on investigating the basic mechanisms that lead to epilepsy and stroke, combining genetics, neurobiology, pharmacology, neuroimaging, computer sciences, robotics, physics, and engineering. Dr. Cendes is Associate Editor of Epilepsia and serves in several editorial boards. His research is focused on Epilepsy, Neuroimaging, and Clinical Neuroscience, with more than 500 full papers published.
Professor Tarja Malm
Prof Tarja Malm is Professor in Molecular Neurobiology and the head of the Neuroinflammation research group at the A.I.Virtanen Institute, University of Eastern Finland. She is the lead of the “In vitro and Ex Vivo electrophysiology core facility” at the Biocenter Kuopio.
Her research focuses on understanding how and why microglia become malfunctional in different neurodegenerative diseases and to elucidate the functional impact of microglia-neuron interactions. Her group uses interdisciplinary approaches and develops novel, human based models to find therapeutic strategies to combat brain diseases. Her research group has pioneered the development of methodologies to differentiate microglia and microglia containing cerebral organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells. In addition, her group has developed a unique multimodal pipeline to evaluate, in layer and cell-type specific manner with spatial resolution, the human neuronal operational properties in surgical resections from idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus and drug-refractory epilepsy.
Malm obtained her PhD in 2006 in Neurobiology in the University of Kuopio with the focus on glial cell biology. She carried out her postdoctoral training at the Case Western Reserve University, USA.
Dr Harold Pincus
Dr. Harold Pincus is a professor of psychiatry and of health policy and management and co-director of the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is also a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation. Dr. Pincus created and has led the Health and Aging Policy Fellowship since 2007 and directed national programs for the Robert Wood Johnson and MacArthur Foundations, as well as served on White House and congressional staffs as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. He also was co-chair of World Health Organization’s ICD-11 Committee on Quality and Patient Safety, vice chair of the Task Force on DSM-IV, and co-chair of the Measurement Applications Partnership under the Affordable Care Act. Dr. Pincus has been appointed to the editorial boards of 13 scientific journals and has more than 500 scientific publications to his credit (h-index 99).
For 22 years he worked weekly at a public mental health clinic caring for patients with severe mental illnesses; he also helped redesign healthcare relationships in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Pincus served as an advisor to Einstein’s Harold and Muriel Block Institute for Clinical and Translational Research for over a decade. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.D. at Einstein, and completed his residency at the George Washington University Hospital.
Prof. Mriganka Sur
Prof. Mriganka Sur is Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, which he founded after 15 years as head of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He is a pioneer in studying the organization, plasticity and dynamics of the brain’s cerebral cortex using experimental and computational approaches. Prof. Sur has discovered fundamental principles by which networks of the cerebral cortex are wired during development and change dynamically during learning. His laboratory has identified gene networks underlying cortical plasticity, and invented high resolution imaging methods for studying cells, synapses and circuits of the intact brain. His group has demonstrated novel mechanisms underlying disorders of brain development and proposed innovative strategies for treating such disorders. The only FDA-approved mechanism-based treatment for Rett Syndrome is based on his laboratory’s discoveries.
Prof. Sur received a B. Tech. degree from IIT Kanpur, and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Nashville. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), the US National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.