Professor Chad Bouton is Vice President of Advanced Engineering and Director of the Neural Bypass and Brain-Computer Interface Laboratory in The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health (New York). Prof. Bouton formerly served as research leader at Battelle Memorial Institute—the world’s largest independent research and development organization—where he spent nearly 20 years researching and developing biomedical technology. During the last 5 years at the Feinstein Institutes, he has been performing groundbreaking research in brain-computer interfaces to treat paralysis and neurotechnology in the field of bioelectronic medicine. Prof. Bouton pioneered the work that allowed a paralyzed person regain volitional movement using a brain implant. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, in the New York Times, the BBC, Wired Magazine, and many other media outlets. He holds over 70 patents worldwide and his technologies have been awarded three R&D 100 Awards (the “Oscars of invention”) and has been recognized by the US Congress. Prof. Bouton has commercialized multiple disruptive technologies in the medical device fields of cancer, diabetes, and paralysis. He has also been named Inventor of the Year and Distinguished Inventor by Battelle, Innovator of the Year in New York (2017), and was selected by the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 as one of the top 100 young engineering innovators in the world.

Ana Maiques is the CEO of Neuroelectrics. She was nominated by IESE as one of the most influential entrepreneurs under 40 in Spain in 2010. She received the EU Prize for Women Innovators from the European Commission EC in 2014. In 2015 & 2016, she was named one of the most inspiring women on the Inspiring Fifty list in Europe. Ana continues breaking the barriers of science and technology in an impactful way with Business Ethics.

Marcus is CEO of Blackrock Microsystems and Board Director of Neuromed. Marcus has an MPhil from Oxford University and an MA from St. Andrews. He is an entrepreneur and investment advisor focused on innovative technologies and alternative investment markets. In 1999, Marcus helped set up his first start-up, Mondus, a pioneering ecommerce platform. Subsequently, Marcus founded BBI, which advises technology companies on funding, commercialization and growth strategies. In 2003, he co-founded one of the leading frontier market asset managers in the Middle East. With Blackrock he is hoping to improve patient impact as it relates to the final frontier of the human body – the brain. He is all too aware of the limits of his own body when it comes to riding and hiking up and down the Wasatch mountains, but that does not stop him from trying to push that frontier too.

Amy Kruse is Principal Biologist and Partner at Prime Movers Lab. As a neuroscientist and biologist, she discovers emerging new companies and performs in-depth due diligence into potential investments across areas including neuroscience, human augmentation, synthetic biology, longevity/regeneration and agriculture. She also supports portfolio companies in evaluating and overcoming scientific and implementation challenges, with a specific emphasis on deploying complex technology into real-world environments.

Amy brings 15+ years of experience to Prime Movers Lab, spanning a broad array of companies and positions. She is formerly the Chief Scientific Officer at Optios, an applied neuroscience company. She built the company’s scientific vision and completed acquisitions that resulted in a robust intellectual property portfolio. Amy also served as the VP and CTO at Cubic Global Defense overseeing innovation and the R&D portfolio across the entire defense enterprise. Early in her career, she served as a government civilian program manager at DARPA where she created and oversaw the Agency’s first performance-oriented neuroscience programs, with a combined budget of over $300M.

Amy is Founding Member of the Loomis Innovation Council and a Guest Lecturer for Singularity University. She earned a BS in Cell and Structural Biology and a PhD in Neuroscience from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, where she was awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship.

Yagna Pathak is a Staff Scientist with the Applied Research team at Abbott Neuromodulation. Since joining the team, she has supported and led several research initiatives. Currently, she is leading the efforts in advancing digital health and targeted analytics in movement disorders and furthering innovation in that space.

Yagna completed her doctoral work with Dr. Christopher Butson at Marquette University and her postdoctoral work with Dr. Sameer Sheth at Columbia University. Her research focus was integrating computational models with neuroimaging and neural signal processing to investigate neuromodulation and brain disorders.

She is passionate for the field and is constantly looking for opportunities to learn and grow.

Experienced Chief Medical Officer with a demonstrated history of working in the medical device industry. Skilled in medical devices, neuromodulation, closed loop brain stimulation, neurology, electrophysiology, epilepsy. Designed, executed and completed feasibility and pivotal PMA trials for a Class 3 medical device that led to panel track approval. Responsible for team conducting pre- and post-market clinical studies, new indication IDE studies and external clinical research collaborations. Also responsible for preclinical research, leading group of engineers and scientists performing machine and deep learning analyses of brain data, brain imaging and network visualization. Directs national team of field clinical engineers supporting physicians and patients. Successful in obtaining NIH and other external funding for research portfolio. Boarded in neurology and in epilepsy and extensively published in medical literature, with multiple national and international presentations.

Chris Berka, CEO and Co-Founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring has over 30 years of experience managing clinical research and developing and commercializing new technologies. She is co-inventor of more than 20 patented and PI or Co-Investigator for grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, ONR, OSD, and NSF that provided more than $37 million of research funds to ABM. As CEO of ABM, she leads the research team in projects designed to advance the design, implementation, and validation of novel EEG-based approaches for assessment of neural activity during sleep and waking. Novel empirically and theoretically derived algorithms are featured in her publications on assessing cognition in healthy participants in laboratory and real-world environments and in patients with sleep, psychiatric and neurological diseases. She is an experienced neuroscientist with over 100 publications on the analysis of the EEG correlates of cognition in healthy subjects and patients with sleep and neurological disorders.