Chair, Emeritus, Scientific Advisory BoardDistinguished Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Anne B. Young, MD, PhD

Anne B. Young, MD, PhD, is a researcher and clinician whose work at the bench and bedside has concentrated on neurotransmitter systems in the basal ganglia and their role in Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

She holds membership in both the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and is also a member of the Royal College of Physicians in England.

Dr. Young is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Vassar College who completed her medical studies at Johns Hopkins in 1973. She received a PhD in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins in 1974, and then completed residency training in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.

After residency, she joined the neurology faculty at the University of Michigan, where she advanced to professor in 1985. In 1991, she was recruited to Mass General as chief of the neurology service and Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Young stepped down from her position as chief in May 2012.

As a researcher, Dr. Young provided some of the first evidence that glutamic acid is a neurotransmitter. Subsequently, she and her colleagues identified glutamate as a transmitter of corticostriatal and corticospinal tracts. Her laboratory first described techniques to measure subtypes of glutamate receptors autoradiographically and went on to demonstrate receptor alterations in Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Along with her late husband, John B. Penney, Jr., MD, Dr. Young first conceptualized a model of the functional anatomy of the basal ganglia that has been termed the “classical” model.

Dr. Young’s research work includes elucidating cellular and systems mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. She is spearheading an effort at Mass General to accelerate the discovery of effective therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Young has served on the editorial boards of numerous biomedical journals and she has been the recipient of many awards and honors for her work. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards of several voluntary organizations, and the past President of the American Neurological Association and the Society for Neuroscience.

In June 2015, Dr. Young received an honorary membership award which recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of movement disorders or otherwise to the Movement Disorder Society.

Co-Chair, Scientific Advisory BoardJulieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Michael Schwarzschild MD, PhD

Dr. Schwarzschild is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Attending Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed undergraduate training in biochemistry at Princeton University. He went on to medical, and graduate neuroscience training at Harvard Medical School to write his PhD thesis on the neurochemistry of tyrosine hydroxylase, the enzyme controlling dopamine biosynthesis.

His neurology residency and Parkinson’s disease fellowship training were at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has led disease progression studies of the PSG, a consortium of North American clinical trial sites and investigators dedicated to finding improved treatments for Parkinson’s. In 2012, he was elected to lead the PSG, now headquartered in the Massachusetts General Hospital Neurology Department. He works with Parkinson’s patients and their families in his weekly movement disorders clinic at MGH.

Michael Schwarzschild’s lab investigates molecular mechanisms in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease in an effort to develop improved therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. His research extends to the clinic where he conducts trials of novel treatments with the potential to slow progression of Parkinson’s disease. The Schwarzschild lab focuses on a natural class of compounds known as purines, in particular the role of purines — adenosine, caffeine, inosine and urate — and how targeting them may prevent or slow the brain cell degeneration of Parkinson’s.

The lab has developed a non-standard strategy to identify and advance novel therapeutics that could help prevent Parkinson’s or keep it from worsening. Their research relies on convergent epidemiological and clinical clues to the disease deduced through fruitful inter-disciplinary collaborations with the Harvard School of Public Health and the Parkinson Study Group of North America

The lab explores the therapeutic potential for such drug targets and how they may work to protect brain cells in cellular and mouse models of Parkinson’s disease.

Co-Chair, Scientific Advisory BoardChief, MGH Neurology Division of Movement DisordersProfessor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Craig Blackstone, MD, PhD

Craig Blackstone has been Chief of the Movement Disorders Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School since 2020. He received his BS and MS degrees from the University of Chicago as well as MD and PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

After a neurology residency in the Harvard-Longwood Neurology Program, Dr. Blackstone pursued clinical fellowship training in movement disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital and postdoctoral research training in neurobiology with Dr. Morgan Sheng at Harvard Medical School and HHMI. 

In 2001, Dr. Blackstone joined the National Institutes of Health, rising to Senior Investigator and Cell Biology Section Chief within the NINDS Neurogenetics Branch, where his group investigated the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying inherited movement disorders. He was also long-time Director of the NIH MD-PhD Partnership Training Program. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and an elected Fellow and past Vice President of the American Neurological Association.

Director, Office of Special InitiativesNational Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)
National Institutes of Health

Danilo Tagle, PhD, MS

Chair, Department of PathologyDana Farber Cancer Institute
Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School

Kathleen H. Burns, MD, PhD

Chief Scientific OfficerLatus Biosciences

Jang-Ho Cha, MD, PhD

Director, Center for Neurosciences
Susan and Leonard Feinstein Professor of Neurology and Neurosciences
Feinstein Institute for Medical Research

David Eidelberg, MD

James and Constance Brown Family Endowed
Chair in Movement DisordersProfessor of Medicine (Neurology)
Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine

Hubert Fernandez, MD

Co-FounderFounder and President
Sunshine Care Foundation, Inc.

Geraldine Acuña-Sunshine, JD, MPP

Geraldine Acuña-Sunshine, JD, MPP, is Co-Founder of the Collaborative Center for X-Linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism (CCXDP) at the Massachusetts General Hospital and President of the Sunshine Care Foundation, Inc (SCF). She leads both organizations in their joint mission to find a cure for X-Linked Dystonia Parkinsonism (XDP) while providing comprehensive support for affected patients and their families. Geraldine has been a US NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes Nonprofit Forum Executive Committee member since 2021.

Geraldine completed an undergraduate degree (AB) at Harvard College, a master’s degree in public policy (MPP) at Harvard Kennedy School, and a juris doctor degree at Columbia Law School. Before working in the social impact space, she practiced corporate law in New York and Boston before becoming Senior Counsel in Derivatives and Alternative Investments at Bracebridge Capital in Boston. She currently applies this background in law, finance, and public leadership to her current focus on public health, humanitarian medical aid, and facilitating biomedical research.

In addition to her work with CCXDP and SCF, Geraldine serves on many boards, including the Massachusetts General Hospital Board of Trustees (where she chairs the Patient Quality and Safety Committee), The Asian American Foundation Board of Trustees, the Women’s Foundation of Boston Board of Trustees, and the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows. She also most recently served for six years on the Harvard University Board of Overseers, both as Vice-Chair of the Board and as Chair of the Institutional Policy Committee. During her time on the Harvard Governing Boards, Geraldine was a member of the Joint Committee on Inspections, the Joint Committee on Alumni Affairs and Development, the Committee on Natural and Applied Sciences, and was on each of the Visiting Committees to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Harvard College.

Associate Professor of Neuroscience at University of Virginia Health System

Scott Zeitlin, PhD

For the past 24 years, Scott Zeitlin has been at the University of Virginia in the Department of Neuroscience studying Huntington’s disease (HD) using a variety of mouse models he has developed and characterized in his laboratory.

He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University and then a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from Columbia University where he studied the mechanism of pre-mRNA splicing. While at Columbia, he met Nancy Wexler who convinced him to begin working on Huntington’s disease and together with his collaborators, he developed one of the first knockouts and conditional knockout of the mouse Huntingtin gene, along with the CAG140 knock-in HD mouse model.

At the University of Virginia, he has continued to develop and use a variety of HD mouse models to understand the function ofthe HD protein, Huntingtin, and to model HD pathogenesis. Recently he and his collaborators developed HD knock-in mouse models that express regulatable versions of the normal and mutant Huntingtin genes to better understand the mechanism of HD pathogenesis and to help determine when during pathogenesis Huntingtin lowering therapies should be administered. In 2019, Dr. Zeitlin was the recipient of the Hereditary Disease Foundation’s Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science.

Parker Family Professor of Neurology, Director, MIND Initiative Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Alice Chen-Plotkin, MD

Alice Chen-Plotkin is the Parker Family Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate and English literature major at Harvard University, she began her scientific training as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. At the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, she leads a research group studying the neurodegenerative diseases and maintains a clinical practice caring for Parkinson’s Disease patients. She is the founding director of the Molecular Integration in Neurological Diagnosis (MIND) Initiative, an interdisciplinary effort launched in 2018 to develop precision medicine in the Penn Parkinson’s Disease clinic. Dr. Chen-Plotkin has won top awards from the American Academy of Neurology (Jon Stolk Award, 2014), the American Neurological Association (Derek Denny Brown Award, 2018), and the Doris Duke Foundation (Paragon Award, 2023) for her translational research efforts.

Associate Professor: Genetics and Genomics, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School; Associate Member: The Broad Institute

Eunjung (Alice) Lee, PhD

Interim Chief Scientific Officer FamilieSCN2A Foundation

Jeffrey Cottrell, PhD

Jeffrey Cottrell, PhD, is a neuroscientist with twenty years of experience in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disease research and drug discovery. Jeff received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from MIT in 2004 and has dedicated his career to uncovering the basis of and finding treatments for brain disorders. Following his doctorate, he spent eleven years in a biotech startup, where he led the development of a novel technology for measuring synapses in a high-throughput fashion. He subsequently became the Director of Translational Research at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research within the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. There, Jeff led efforts to translate novel insight of the genetics of brain disorders into new therapeutic projects. Most recently, Jeff was Head of Neurodevelopment and Psychiatry at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, where he was responsible for developing and implementing the company’s strategy for tackling new drug programs in this space.

Jeff has published numerous papers of various aspects of cellular and molecular neurobiology and brain disease therapeutics and holds multiple patents for novel approaches for treating brain disorders

Senior Investigator Head, Section on Mammalian Development and Evolution NICHD, National Institutes of Health

Todd Macfarlan, PhD

Dr. Macfarlan earned his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, where he studied the transcriptional repressive properties of THAP domain proteins, a family of DNA binding proteins that evolved from the DNA binding domain of P-element transposases. After his PhD, Dr. Macfarlan joined the laboratory of Samuel Pfaff at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he demonstrated that endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) play an important role in mammalian pre-implantation development by providing regulatory sequences for an entire network of genes that are coordinately regulated by chromatin modifying factors to control embryonic potential. Dr. Macfarlan won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award in 2012 for these studies.  Dr. Macfarlan was then recruited to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), NIH, in July of 2012 as part of the Earl Stadtman Investigator Program. Dr. Macfarlan was promoted to Senior Investigator at NICHD in 2019, and to Associate Scientific Director for the Division of Developmental Biology in 2023. Todd currently heads the Section on Mammalian Development and Evolution, where he explores the interplay between KRAB-Zinc finger proteins and ERVs and their impact on mammalian development and evolution

DirectorMGH Center for Genomic Medicine
Associate Professor of Neurology
MGH, Harvard Medical School

Michael Talkowski, PhD

The Talkowski Laboratory is seeking to understand the impact of genomic variation on human disease. We study the genetic etiology of disorders affecting prenatal, neonatal, and early childhood development, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and related neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. Our group is particularly interested in alterations to the structure of the genome (structural variation) across human populations and its functional consequences in disease.

Our research program involves an integrated computational genomics and molecular genomics group that is composed of undergraduate and graduate students, post-baccalaureate researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and senior staff scientists performing human genomic research in four primary domains:

1. Defining genomic variation and alterations to genome structure across diverse human populations
2. Discovery of genes contributing to human disease, with focus on neuropsychiatric disorders and congenital anomalies
3. Functional genomic studies to identify altered networks and molecular signatures associated with disease 
4. Translation of genomics technology development into new diagnostic methods for prenatal and pediatric genetics

Associate Professor of NeurologyMassachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Laurie Ozelius, PhD

Laurie Ozelius works to uncover genetic causes for movement disorders, especially dystonias and Parkinson’s disease. Dystonias are characterized by involuntary muscle contractions that lead to slow movements or abnormal postures. Dystonias can be localized, as in writers’ cramp or torticollis, or generalized, and they often run in families. In 1997, Ozelius and colleagues identified the first genetic cause for an isolated inherited dystonia, when they found mutations in the DYT1 (TOR1A) gene in patients with early onset isolated dystonia, a rare but severe form of generalized dystonia that begins in childhood. DYT1 dystonia showed incomplete penetrance—not everyone with the causative mutation developed dystonia—and Ozelius and her team went on to identify TOR1A variants associated with this reduced penetrance. Her work subsequently uncovered two additional genes for isolated dystonia (THAP1 and GNAL), and a gene for rapid onset dystonia parkinsonism (ATP1A3). The Ozelius laboratory also played a central role in identifying the G2019S LRRK2 gene mutation as a major cause of Parkinson’s disease in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. 

Ozelius collaborates with movement disorder clinicians worldwide to collect and characterize patients and families with various inherited dystonias and Parkinson’s disease. Her lab applies several genetic strategies, including genome-wide association studies and next-generation sequencing to identify new genes and risk factors involved in isolated dystonia and PD, and genes related to the penetrance of these disorders. Through collaborations, her group is also applying imaging and sensory testing measures to further define dystonia-associated phenotypes in patients and their at-risk relatives in hopes of further dissecting the genetic contributions to disease. Also with collaborators, she is developing and characterizing mouse models that may replicate the non-penetrant phenotype seen in humans. Her work is helping to clarify the underlying mechanisms and basic pathophysiology of dystonias and PD, providing a foundation for better diagnosis and effective treatments.

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Brown University , Laurie Ozelius went on to receive a PhD in Genetics from Harvard Medical School. She did her graduate and postdoctoral training in the lab of Xandra Breakefield, where she identified the TOR1A gene as a cause of hereditary dystonia. In 1998, Ozelius became an Assistant Professor at HMS, and then moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where she rose to the rank of Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics.  In 2007 she became an Associate Professor in Genetics and Genomics Sciences and Neurology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, where she also held the Bachmann Strauss Chair in Movement Disorders.  She returned to Boston in 2015, as an Associate Professor of Neurology at HMS and an Associate Neuroscientist at MGH.  Dr. Ozelius serves on the scientific advisory board of the National Tourette’s Syndrome Association and the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation.

DirectorAssociate Professor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Cristopher Bragg, PhD

Cristopher Bragg, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School (HMS), and serves as the Director for the Collaborative Center for X-Linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism at Mass General. In this capacity, he oversees all CCXDP activities while also maintaining an independent research program focused primarily on XDP and related forms of dystonia.

Dr. Bragg received an undergraduate degree in neuroscience from Duke University and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.    He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Mass General in the laboratory of Xandra Breakefield, PhD, focusing on biochemical analyses of the DYT1 dystonia protein, torsinA.  

Dr. Bragg’s laboratory research program studies genetic forms of dystonia using patient-specific stem cell models and genome editing tools.  Current projects are focused on elucidating cellular mechanisms underlying XDP as well as dystonias linked to mutations in the TOR1A (DYT1) and THAP1 (DYT6) genes.  His group combines transcriptomic profiling of engineered stem cell models with novel in silico discovery tools to predict affected pathways/targets and candidate therapeutics for these diseases.

Head, CCXDP Clinical ProgramHead, XDP Brain BankInstructor in Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Ellen B. Penney, MD, PhD

Ellen Penney, MD PhD, is an Instructor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. She is the Director of the X-linked Dystonia Parkinsonism Brain Bank and oversees dissection, processing and distribution of brain tissue for XDP research.

Dr. Penney completed her undergraduate degree in neuroscience at Oberlin College and received her MD and PhD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her residency in neurology at the joint Partners Neurology Residency Program of Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals. Dr. Penney received fellowship training in movement disorders at Yale New Haven Hospital and MGH.

As part of the MGH movement disorder unit, Dr. Penney sees patients in the MGH Dystonia Clinic and the MGH Huntington’s Disease Clinic. She also conducts research in the Bragg Laboratory studying abnormal RNA and DNA structures that contribute to neurodegenerative diseases including XDP and Huntington’s disease. The goal of this research is to identify common pathways that lead to neurodegeneration and may be targets for drug development.

Program ManagerMassachusetts General Hospital

Christine Vaine, PhD

Christine A. Vaine, PhD is a program manager in the laboratory of Cristopher Bragg, PhD. Her research interests include understanding the role of inflammation in neurodegenerative diseases through iPSC-modeling and developing high throughput assays to study potential therapeutics. Dr. Vaine currently oversees all internal and external CCXDP collaborations and research projects within the Bragg laboratory.

Dr. Vaine received her undergraduate degree in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her PhD in Immunology from the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Mass General in the laboratory of Roy J. Soberman, MD, focusing on immune cell activation and signaling. She then joined the Bragg laboratory as an instructor where she identified dysregulated immune signaling in XDP neural stem cells and assisted in the identification of the XDP causal locus.

Assistant Professor of NeurologyMassachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Christopher D. Stephen, MB, CHB

Dr. Stephen is a board-certified attending neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital and is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Stephen treats patients with dystonia, parkinsonism, ataxia and other movement disorders.

Dr. Stephen serves as a clinical investigator in an ongoing natural history study of XDP. His current research involves quantitative motor assessment of patients to better study the clinical course of XDP and other degenerative movement disorders in collaboration with the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. He has been heavily involved in clinical studies with the CCXDP.

Dr. Stephen obtained his medical degree at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, UK and completed internal medicine residency training in the UK at the University of Edinburgh and University of Nottingham programs. He pursued further training as a specialist registrar in neurology at the University of Cambridge and was an Honorary Specialist Registrar at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London, UK. He completed his internship and Neurology residency at the Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Children’s Hospital Harvard Neurology Program followed by a Fellowship in Movement Disorders and Ataxia at the combined Partners Mass General Brigham Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital program with additional pediatric experience at Boston Children’s Hospital. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 2022.

Instructor in NeurologyMassachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Aloysius Domingo, MD, PhD

Aloysius Domingo, MD, PhD is an instructor with Dr. Michael Talkowski, Chair of Genomic Medicine at MGH with a research focus His research focuses on the integration of cellular biology and functional genomics to unravel the genetic architecture and transcriptional mechanisms surrounding X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism and other forms of genetic dystonia.

Dr. Domingo obtained his medical degree from the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and his training in Clinical Neurology at the Philippine General Hospital. He then pursued PhD studies in Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Lübeck, Germany.

Instructor in NeurologyMassachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Rachita Yadav, PhD

Dr. Yadav completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Laurie Ozelius in Neurology and Dr. Michael Talkowski in the Center for Genome Medicine (CGM). As a postdoc, she led part of the study which narrowed down the XDPassociated region as defined by recombinations and discovered the role of SVA as the genetic cause of XDP by integrating genome and transcriptome sequencing using short-read and long-read technologies (Aneichyk, Yadav, et al., 2018, Cell, Bragg et al., 2018, PNAS).

In 2021, Dr. Yadav was promoted to Instructor in Neurology at MGH and her current research focus is the integration of multi-dimensional genomics datasets associated with the genetic etiology of neurological disorders. The pathogenesis of neurological disorders often involves multiple genes, complex interactions thus, the functional genomics aspect of my project employs genome-wide and targeted transcriptomics analysis of neural cell lines and post-mortem brains from different neurological disorders to investigate common pathological mechanisms which concur among these disorders. Prior to joining MGH, Dr. Yadav trained in bioinformatics in India and earned a PhD at Denmark Technical University focusing on understanding the effect of genetic, epigenetic and clinical variations on the molecular mechanisms in complex phenotypes.

Clinical Research Program ManagerMassachusetts General Hospital

Trisha Multhaupt-Buell, MS, CGC

Trisha Multhaupt-Buell, MS, LCGC is a Genetic Counselor and Clinical Research Program Manager at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Neurology. She received her undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Michigan and completed her Master of Medical Genetics degree and genetic counseling training at the University of Cincinnati.

Ms. Multhaupt-Buell provides clinical genetic counseling for patients and their familymembers in the MGH Charcot-Marie-Tooth/Hereditary Motor Neuropathy Clinic and MGH Dystonia Clinic. Much of her time and energy is dedicated to coordinating multiple human subjects research protocols related to research participants with X-linked Dystonia Parkinsonism and other dystonia-related movement disorders.

A major focus of her work involves the oversight of Dystonia Partners Research Bank (DPRB) research standard operating procedures, subject enrollment, and data & sample collection. The DPRB provides high-quality phenotypic data and tissue samples to medical researchers and laboratory scientists for movement disorder investigations.

Senior Clinical Research CoordinatorMassachusetts General Hospital

Patrick Acuña, MD, MPH

Patrick Acuña earned his Bachelors degree in Biology and Anthropology from Emory University and his medical degree from the University of Texas. He is currently pursuing a Master degree Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His interests include clinical research and quality improvement programs. 

Dr. Acuña serves Vice President of the Sunshine Care Foundation in Manila.  He is also a critical member of the XDP clinical research team at MGH. Dr. Acuña frequently travels between Boston and  Panay serving as an important liaison between teams at MGH and SCF.  On Panay.  Dr. Acuna participates in longitudinal clinical research projects with the goal of improving XDP patient outcomes, identifying biomarkers, and preparing for eventual clinical trials. 

Research ScientistMassachusetts General Hospital

Nicolas Bravo-Vasquez, DVM PhD

Dr. Nicolas A. Bravo Vasquez is a DVM and Ph.D. research scientist in the laboratory of Cristopher Bragg at the Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the use of 2D and 3D-cell culture models derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and other cell types, to study the underlying mechanisms behind XDP and other dystonia. Dr. Bravo Vasquez obtained his Doctor in Veterinary Medicine, Master’s in Animal Sciences, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chile (Santiago, Chile). Later on, Dr. Bravo Vasquez completed his first postdoctoral training at the Department of Infectious Diseases, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis, TN), followed by a second postdoctoral training at the Mitchell Center for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Brain Disorders, Department of Neurology of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (Houston, TX), studying Alzheimer’s and HIV-Associated Neurodegenerative Disorder in iPSC derived-cerebral organoids.

Research ScientistMassachusetts General Hospital

Hoang-Dai Tran, PhD

Dr. Hoang-Dai Tran serves as a Research Scientist in Prof. Cristopher Bragg’s laboratory within the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is currently working on several projects to model and understand the pathological mechanisms of X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism (XDP) and other dystonias using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Dr. Tran earned his PhD in Biochemistry/Neurology from the National University of Singapore and completed a subsequent fellowship at the National Neuroscience Institute- Singapore, focusing on Parkinson’s disease through neuronal models. Prior to his current role, he was part of the Stem Cell and Organoid Research Group at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), which collaborates closely with two units: the Brain Mechanism for Behavior Unit and the Optical Neuroimaging Unit. At OIST, his research centered on dissecting Parkinson’s disease pathology using advanced CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology and different brain organoid systems.

Clinical Research Coordinator Massachusetts General Hospital

Caroline M. Splangler-Sakata

Caroline Spangler-Sakata is a Clinical Research Coordinator at the Collaborative Center for X-Linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism (CCXDP) at Massachusetts General Hospital. In this role, she supports clinical and translational research efforts focused on advancing the understanding and treatment of XDP.

Caroline received a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University. During her undergraduate training, she developed a strong interest in neuroscience and translational medicine, leading her to pursue research in neurodegenerative and movement disorders.

At CCXDP, Caroline contributes to a variety of research initiatives, including supporting the XDP Brain Bank through tissue processing, sectioning, and distribution of specimens for research studies. She also assists with clinical research aimed at understanding disease mechanisms and advancing therapeutic development for individuals affected by XDP. Her professional interests include neurodegenerative disease research, translational medicine, and the integration of scientific discovery with patient care.