Lee Lancashire, MBA

Board Secretary
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Theresa Frangiosa held executive positions in the pharmaceutical industry over a 25 year career before establishing Frangiosa and Associates, LLC in 2013, where she serves as Principal and Chief Executive Officer.  She received her MBA in Pharmaceutical Marketing from St. Joseph’s University.  She is a Dementia patient caregiver and has been active in the Brain Disorder advocacy community for several years.  Theresa also serves on the Board of Living Beyond Breast Cancer.

Allyson Gage, PhD

Chief Medical Officer
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Allyson Gage, PhD, is a neuroscientist and drug development executive who has over 18 years of experience leading teams in all phases of clinical development. She has been responsible for the overall strategic and clinical development of small molecules, biologics, and cellular therapies for the treatment of central nervous system disorders, including depression, alcohol dependence, Alzheimer’s disease, neuropathic pain, traumatic brain injury, and spinal cord injury. Allyson has a proven track record in partnering with therapeutic area clinicians, US and international regulators, patient groups, and data scientists to translate pre-clinical information into human evaluation, design informative clinical trial protocols, and ensure a regulatory path with approvable and clinically meaningful outcome measures. Prior to joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Allyson’s most recent experience was focused in the field of regenerative medicine, working toward the development of a therapeutic for spinal cord injury. Allyson earned her BA from Rutgers College in New Brunswick, NJ, and her MS and PhD in neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.

Magali Haas, MD, PhD

CEO and President
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Dr. Haas founded Orion Bionetworks in July 2012 and serves as its CEO and President. Orion Bionetworks was transformed to Cohen Veterans Bioscience in 2015 to specifically dedicate research to improving the detection and treatment of post-traumatic stress (PTS) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) and related co-morbidities so that the burden of these conditions may be lessened on service members, veterans, and their families.

Magali has over 15 years of pharmaceutical executive and clinical research experience, predominantly at Johnson & Johnson, where she assumed broad end-to-end development leadership roles in medical marketing, full clinical development, early development, and translational and biomarker sciences in psychiatry and neurology. She successfully filed NDAs in the US and Europe for risperidone indications in Autism, Adolescent Schizophrenia, Juvenile Bipolar Disorder and Conduct Disorders. She also led Development Teams evaluating compounds for Depression, Neuropathic Pain, Epilepsy, and Migraine Disorder.

She served 3 years as Chief Science and Technology Officer for One Mind for Research, a nonprofit organization launched in May 2012 by Patrick J Kennedy. She orchestrated the launch of One Mind’s seminal programs, Apollo, an informatics research portal and, Gemini, an international TBI/PTSD research program.

As an “intrapreneur” at J&J she established the first Neuroscience Translational Medicine & Integrative Solutions department, and co-founded the first Companion Diagnostics Center of Excellence as well as J&J’s Healthcare Innovation team. She serves on several advisory boards including Brain Canada, Prophase, Pear Therapeutics, PAASP and IMEC for nanoelectronics.

Magali earned her BS in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and her MD PhD with distinction in neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.

Anthony Hassan, EdD, LCSW

CEO and President
Cohen Veterans Network

As the CEO and President of the Cohen Veterans Network, Dr. Anthony M. Hassan oversees the establishment of 25 mental health clinics nationwide. These clinics are designed to improve the mental health outcomes for post-9/11 veterans and their families, with a particular emphasis on post-traumatic stress, through high-quality, free, and accessible mental health care. In addition, he leads efforts to advance the field through funded research initiatives and training programs to improve care within the network and beyond.

Hassan is a veteran, of enlisted rank in the United States Army and an Air Force officer, with 30 years of experience in military behavioral health, serving as a military social work officer, leader, clinician, and academic. He served during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004 on the first-ever Air Force combat stress control and prevention team embedded with the Army. He also led the largest military substance abuse and family advocacy programs in the Pacific. These programs were recognized as benchmark programs and training sites for all other Pacific bases.

He most recently served as the inaugural Director and Clinical Professor of the Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans & Military Families (CIR) at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. During his tenure at CIR from 2009 to 2015, Hassan was instrumental in the exponential growth of the school’s military social work program and community-based research on veterans and military families. He has strong relationships with the most senior levels of leadership in the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and Washington, D.C.

Kacie Kelly, MHS

Program Director, Health & Wellness
George W. Bush Presidential Center

Kacie Kelly is the Program Director, Veterans’ Health and Wellness for the George W. Bush Institute. In this role, Kacie oversees and manages policy, operational, and programmatic efforts on Veteran health and well-being, including the Warrior Wellness Alliance. She also manages strategic efforts to promote partnerships, collaboration, and alignment among organizations that are so crucial to fostering the health and well-being of post-9/11 Veterans. Prior to this role, Kacie served as the National Director for Public-Private Partnerships in the US Department of Veterans Affairs Office for Suicide Prevention, where she was responsible for developing a comprehensive and integrated public health approach to preventing suicide among the 14 million Veterans not engaged in VA healthcare. Throughout her 15-year career with the VA, she led innovative programs to serve more Veterans and their families through strategic partnerships within government and across public and private sectors. In addition, she has had leading roles in promoting military culture competence in the community, outreach efforts to reduce the stigma associated with seeking mental health care, and enhancing provider proficiency in evidence-based mental health care. She earned her Master of Health Sciences (MHS) at Louisiana State University and has a Graduate Certificate in Women in Public Policy and Politics from the University of Massachusetts – Boston.

Roman Kotov, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Statistics
Stony Brook University

Roman Kotov, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Statistics at Stony Brook University. He also is a director of Translational And Clinical Epidemiology (TrACE) division. He is a scientist and a licensed clinical psychologist with particular expertise in assessment of mental disorders. His research seeks to advance the understanding of psychiatric nosology using psychometric and biomarker approaches. He has served as PI of 8 RO1-equivalent projects, in addition to numerous smaller studies. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as JAMA Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, and World Psychiatry. He is a head of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium to advance classification of mental disorders. Also, he leads longitudinal studies on adolescent mental health, psychotic disorders, and PTSD in responders to World Trade Center disaster. In addition, he investigates psychological impact of Superstorm Sandy. Clinically, he has worked with patients at Veterans Affairs Medical Centers and World Trade Center Health Program.

Lee Lancashire, PhD

Chief Information Officer
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Lee Lancashire, PhD has over 15 years of experience in machine learning and statistics. His PhD was focused on the development of artificial neural network based methodologies where he was involved in many of the first applications of neural nets to high dimensional datasets in bioinformatics.

Prior to joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Lee spent over five years within the IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters where he established and led the machine learning and statistical data analysis team. Here he held global responsibility for managing and delivering analytical projects, serving the majority of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, as well as government, academic and non-profit organizations. These projects focused on utilizing advanced machine learning approaches in the molecular profiling of disease for biomarker discovery, patient stratification and drug target identification.

Lee completed his post-doctoral research in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, a Cancer Research UK core facility. He has also worked as a bioinformatics project lead in personalized medicine and diagnostics companies CompanDX and Almac Diagnostics. He has published in over 30 key industry journals and holds several patents around the use of neural networks in the biomedical domain.

In his free time Lee devotes time volunteering as a trustee for the Ichthyosis Support Group, a charity that supports individuals and families affected by a group of rare skin disorders.

Brian P. Marx, PhD

Psychologist and Researcher
VA National Center for PTSD
Boston University School of Medicine

Brian P. Marx, PhD, is a psychologist and researcher at the VA National Center for PTSD and a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. He has studied PTSD and related conditions for the past 20 years. His early work focused on the identification of risk factors for sexual revictimization. This work led to the development of a prevention protocol that was tested in funded trials and endorsed by the World Health Organization. More recently, he has explored the importance of pre- and post-deployment neurocognitive functioning and mild traumatic brain injury for PTSD symptoms, functional impairment, and suicidality. His work in this area has been published in journals including Archives of General Psychiatry (now JAMA Psychiatry). Currently, he is Co-PI on a large Department of Defense–funded national registry of returning veterans with and without PTSD who are using VHA services. One aim of this project is to examine trajectories of PTSD symptoms and diagnosis among combat-exposed service members and identify predictors associated with trajectory classes. Using data from this project, Brian has published a number of papers on the DSM-5 PTSD diagnostic criteria. He is a co-author of the recently revised PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) and Clinician Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5), two of the most widely used measures to assess PTSD symptoms. Finally, Brian is a co-developer of Written Exposure Therapy (WET), a brief psychotherapy for PTSD that has been tested in several externally funded randomized controlled trials.

Rebecca Miksad, MD

Senior Medical Director
Flatiron Health

Rebecca Miksad, MD, is senior medical director at Flatiron Health, where she focuses on real-world evidence generation. Rebecca’s academic research has focused on improving cancer treatment decision-making through better characterization of patient outcomes, increasing relevance of clinical trial endpoints and evaluating economic implications of cancer therapy. A nationally recognized clinician and health services researcher, Rebecca publishes in leading medical journals and serves on national clinical and research committees.

Prior to joining Flatiron Health, Rebecca was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, a senior scientist at the Institute for Technology Assessment at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the director of gastrointestinal oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).

Rebecca earned a BA cum laude in economics from Harvard University and an MD with honors in research from Cornell University. She completed her internal medicine residency training at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Hematology/Oncology fellowship at BIDMC. With a focus on translating between clinical trial and outcomes research, Rebecca earned a MMS from Harvard Medical School and an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health in Clinical Effectiveness. She also completed the NCI-funded post-doctoral fellowship in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Program in Cancer Outcomes Research Training (PCORT).

Nikolaos Daskalakis, MD, PhD

Director, Data Science and Translational Medicine
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Dr. Nikolaos (Nikos) P. Daskalakis is a neuroscientist, who has over 13 years of experience in translational stress research. The major goal of his studies has been to identify key central and peripheral biological mechanisms perturbed in PTSD and other stress-related mental disorders that can be candidates for biomarkers or therapeutic targets. He has deep knowledge of the state-of-the-art genomic techniques, and systems biology analytic pipelines, which can be applied, in parallel, to a variety of human studies and to animal or cellular models of disease.

Dr. Daskalakis is also an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, member of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division and associate scientist in the Laboratory of Molecular Neuropsychiatry. In the summer of 2017, he will move his academic research at the Department of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School, joining the Division of Depression and Anxiety Disorders and the Neurobiology of Fear Laboratory at McLean Hospital. Finally, Nikos is an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Neuroscience and Frontiers in Endocrinology.

Dr. Daskalakis earned his MD from University of Athens (Greece). He completed his PhD in Neuroscience at Leiden University (The Netherlands) under the guidance of Dr. E. Ron de Kloet studying the impact of gene-environment interactions on rodent behavioral and neuroendocrine stress response. He also completed clinical research training in neuroendocrinology at the Leiden University Medical Center (The Netherlands). Finally, he received post-doctoral training in molecular psychiatry and bioinformatics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai studying molecular and endocrine mechanisms of PTSD and intergenerational transmission of trauma in the labs of Drs. Rachel Yehuda and Joseph D. Buxbaum.

Dr. Daskalakis has earned young investigator awards by many national and international scientific societies and foundations (ACNP, ADAA, A.A. Martinos Foundation, BBR Foundation, EBBS, ECNP, FENS, IBRO, ISDN, ISPNE, SOBP).

Retsina Meyer, PhD

Manager, Clinical Programs
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Dr. Retsina Meyer pairs pursuit of scientific endeavors with the passionate execution to make real her vision to develop cures for mental illness.

Dr. Meyer is a translational neuroscientist, scientific founder of Resilience – a startup focused on novel treatments for PTSD and other brain diseases, and is currently consulting Scientific Program Manager for Cohen Biosciences. An active member of the biotech entrepreneurship community, Retsina works on local, national, and international programming to inspire scientist-entrepreneurs. Dr. Meyer has produced over 40 articles, abstracts, and lectures. Her academic discoveries gained international press, earned her a speaking engagement at the local TEDx conference, and served as the instigating discovery to found Resilience.

As an entrepreneur, Retsina is an alumna of MassBIO’s MassCONNECT program and SpringBoard’s Life Sciences Accelerator and is the 2014 champion of the international OneStart competition awarded by GSK’s SR One.
She obtained a Neuroscience Ph.D. at MIT where she earned five named fellowships, was a Presidential Fellow, Imperial College of London Global Fellow, and a Graduate Woman of Excellence. She served as a science advocate with the Science Policy Initiative, performing outreach, giving lectures, and meeting with members of congress to appeal for science and scientific funding.
Prior to her work at MIT, Dr. Meyer was a Fulbright Scholar, serving as a representative of the U.S. to Norway, where she worked in the lab of 2014 Nobel Prize winners Drs. May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. She holds bachelor’s degrees in applied mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics, and biopsychology from the University of Arizona where she was a Baver Scholar, and worked in the laboratories of Dr. David Rowe, Dr. Carol Barnes, and Dr. Bruce McNaughton.

Nicole joins CVB to oversee development and engagement of strategic partnerships, grant management, events and the Brain Trauma Blueprint to further the CVB mission.    

Jessica Wolfe, PhD, MPH

Senior Clinical Advisor, Trauma Research Programs
Cohen Veterans Bioscience

Dr. Jessica Wolfe has been a behavioral researcher, neuropsychologist and executive in health sciences and public health for over 30 years.  She is currently a senior consultant to ESC (formerly Executive Service Corps), focusing on non-profit strategy and management and professional Research Associate at Harvard Medical School, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.  Prior to that, she served as Senior Research Advisor to Spaulding Hospital Rehabilitation Network’s Institute of Lifestyle Medicine and Senior Research Program Advisor to Partners Healthcare System’s Center for Connected Health where she focused on clinical and research productivity involving wellness and technology innovation.

Jessica helped found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center for PTSD where she subsequently developed and directed the National Center’s Women’s Health Sciences Division. There, she led competitively funded, large scale, research initiatives in war trauma, military sexual assault, and Gulf War illnesses.  She has over 70 peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Jessica received her Doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia University.  She completed her Master’s in Public Health from Harvard University (HSPH).  Other interests include interactive health technologies, user-centered design (UX), neuroimaging in PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI), and stress adaptation across the lifespan.