The Team

Ivan Oransky joined The Transmitter in 2020, having previously served in editorial leadership roles at outlets including Medscape, Reuters Health and Scientific American.

Kristin Ozelli oversees day-to-day operations, manages the editorial team and steers the production of articles, newsletters and multimedia content.

Nicholette Zeliadt manages The Transmitter‘s staff writers and interns, and she commissions and edits news and opinion articles.

Nektaria Pastellas leads The Transmitter’s strategic efforts to engage neuroscientists with The Transmitter’s content, across all marketing channels.

Emily Singer commissions and edits scientist-written content and develops new resources for the community.

Brady Huggett is the enterprise editor at The Transmitter, where he writes and edits features and long-form projects.

Rebecca oversees and directs The Transmitter‘s multimedia operations and commissions illustrations, photography, videos and other multimedia content.

Hope Vanderberg edits articles on The Transmitter for grammar and accuracy.

Shaena Montanari joined The Transmitter as an enterprise reporter in January 2023. She was previously an investigative health reporter at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting in Phoenix.

Angie Voyles Askham is a reporter for The Transmitter, where she covers neural circuits and gene therapy, among other topics. She proposed and writes The Transmitter Launch, a monthly newsletter for early-career researchers.

Elissa Welle is a reporter for The Transmitter, where she covers basic neuroscience research. She has previously written for Reuters, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature and STAT, among other publications.

Sam Schuman is The Transmitter’s associate web producer, working on the publication’s website and newsletters.

Jasmine is the marketing associate for The Transmitter, where she works toward deepening and developing engagement among our audience.

Adrienne Fairhall is professor of physiology and biophysics and adjunct professor of physics and applied mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. She co-directs the Computational Neuroscience Program at the University of Washington with Eric Shea-Brown. Her work focuses on dynamic neural computation, with a particular interest in the interplay between cellular and circuit dynamics and coding in a wide variety of model systems, including Hydra, Drosophila, birds and primates.

Fairhall obtained her honors degree in theoretical physics from the Australian National University and her Ph.D. in statistical physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. She received her postdoctoral training at the NEC Research Institute with Bill Bialek and at Princeton University with Michael J. Berry II.

André Fenton is professor of neural science and director of the Center for Neural Science at New York University. He investigates the molecular, neural, behavioral and computational aspects of memory. He studies how brains store experiences as memories, how they learn to learn, and how knowing activates relevant information without activating what is irrelevant. These investigations are founded in how the brain computes knowledge of space, particularly the locations and directions that are the framework for experience. His investigations integrate across levels of biological organization; his research uses genetic, molecular, electrophysiological, imaging, behavioral, engineering and theoretical methods. This computational psychiatry research is helping to elucidate mental dysfunction in diverse conditions, including schizophrenia, autism, and depression.

Fenton founded BioSignal Group, Corp., which commercialized an FDA-approved portable, wireless and easy-to-use platform for recording EEGs in novel medical applications. He implemented a CPAP-oxygen-helmet treatment for COVID-19 in Nigeria and other low- and middle-income countries, and he develops information technology for the patient-centric coordination of behavioral health services that is desperately needed to equitably deliver care for mental health. Fenton hosted PBS’ “NOVA Wonders,” and he chairs the National Institute of Mental Health’s Board of Scientific Counselors.

Daniel Geschwind is Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. As senior associate dean and associate vice chancellor of precision health, he leads the university’s Institute for Precision Health.

His lab has pioneered the application of systems biology methods in neurologic and psychiatric disease, with a focus on autism and neurodegenerative conditions. His lab has made major contributions to identifying genetic causes of autism, defining the molecular pathology of autism and allied psychiatric disorders, and has worked to increase diversity in autism research. His work in dementia focuses on the mechanisms of tauopathies, where his lab is developing novel therapeutic approaches.

Geschwind sits on the editorial boards of Cell, Science and Neuron, and he is among the highest cited neurologists in the world. He has received several awards for his lab’s work, including the American Neurological Association’s Derek Denny-Brown Neurological Scholar Award, and most recently the Society of Biological Psychiatry Gold Medal Award and the American Academy of Neurology’s 2022 Cotzias Lecture and Award. He is the 2022 National Academy of Medicine recipient of the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health. He is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine.

Sheena Josselyn is senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and professor of psychology and physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada. She holds a Canada research chair in brain mechanisms underlying memory, and she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.

Josselyn is interested in understanding how the brain encodes, stores and uses information. Her primary model organism is mice. Because several conditions (ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease) may stem from disrupted information processing, this basic knowledge in mice is critical not only for understanding typical human brain function, but for developing new treatment strategies for these conditions.

She received her undergraduate degrees in psychology and life sciences and an M.Sc. in clinical psychology from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She received a Ph.D. in neuroscience/psychology from the University of Toronto, with Franco Vaccarino as her supervisor. She conducted postdoctoral work with Mike Davis of Yale University and Alcino Silva of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Josselyn has received numerous awards, including the Innovations in Psychopharmacology Award from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the Effron Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences, and the Betty & David Koetser Award for Brain Research.

Russell Poldrack is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University in California and director of the Stanford Center for Open and Reproducible Science. His research uses a combination of neuroimaging, behavioral research and computational modeling to understand the brain systems underlying decision-making and cognitive control. His lab also develops neuroinformatics tools to help improve the reproducibility and transparency of neuroscience, including the Openneuro and data-sharing projects and the preprocessing workflow fMRIPrep. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and did postdoctoral work at Stanford. He subsequently held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Stanford faculty in 2014. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Statistical Thinking: Analyzing Data in an Uncertain World.”

Nicole Rust is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on understanding the brain’s remarkable ability to remember the things we’ve seen and using that knowledge to develop new therapies to treat memory dysfunction. She is also writing a book on the types of understanding of the brain that will ultimately be required to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions. In it, she argues that effective progress in brain research will require ambitious and unprecedented multidisciplinary conversations of the type that will appear in The Transmitter.

Rust received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from New York University and completed her postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been recognized by the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the McKnight Scholar Award, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award, and election to the Memory Disorders Research Society.

Joshua Sanes is professor of molecular and cellular biology and founding director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. He and his colleagues study the formation of synapses. They have also pioneered new ways to mark and manipulate neurons and the synapses they form.

For the past 20 years, Sanes and his team have focused on the retina, in which specific patterns of connections form the complex circuits that underlie the initial steps in visual perception. Most recently, they have extended this work to comprehensive classification of retinal cell types in multiple species, including humans. Sanes received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He served on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for more than 20 years before returning to Harvard in 2004.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has been published in more than 400 papers, and he has been honored with the Schuetze Award, the Gruber Neuroscience Prize, the Cowan Award, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, as well as an honorary doctoral degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.

Anthony Zador is Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. The goal of his research is to understand the neural circuits underlying sensorimotor decision-making. His laboratory pioneered the use of rodents in complex decision-making tasks and developed a novel suite of approaches, including MAPseq and BARseq, for determining brain wiring using high-throughput DNA sequencing. His current research interests include neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence. He is the co-founder of several meetings, including Computational and Systems Neuroscience and From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems.

Zador received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Yale University and did postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, before joining the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, is director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and publisher of its award-winning science magazine, Undark.

Marion Greenup joined the Simons Foundation in 2007 as senior vice president for administration and provided support for The Transmitter since its inception. She has a Master of Public Health from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Education in Early Childhood Development from Tulane University. Previous positions included administrative roles at the NYU Child Study Center, Columbia University Health Sciences, and the Department of Pediatrics. She also served as senior vice president of education and health promotion at the March of Dimes.

David Gresham is professor of biology and vice dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. His lab focuses on genome evolution and plasticity, post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression and control of cell growth.

Laura Helmuth is editor-in-chief at Scientific American and vice president of the National Association of Science Writers.

Rebecca Jones is a senior clinical research scientist at Imagen Technologies and clinical assistant professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.

Robin Marantz Henig is a science journalist and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and is president of the National Association of Science Writers.

Temitayo Oyegbile-Chidi is associate professor of neurology at the University of California, Davis.

Jason Penchoff is senior director of marketing and communications at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, where he focuses on content strategy and physician engagement.