Iosif M. Gershteyn, MA, MBA
Iosif Gershteyn is the originator of the Decoherence via Demyelination Hypothesis, which he developed over more than a decade of interdisciplinary thinking about the biological basis of consciousness. He serves as Chief Executive Officer of ImmuVia Inc., a Cambridge-based company developing next-generation oncology therapeutics, and holds affiliations with the Medical University of South Carolina and the Ajax Biomedical Foundation in Newton, MA. His scientific interests span immunology, neuroscience, and the timing-based architecture of cognition — unified by a conviction that breakthroughs in medicine come from bringing together fields that rarely speak to each other.
Nikola T. Markov, PhD
Nikola Markov is a neuroscientist whose work has fundamentally shaped our understanding of the structural organization of the cerebral cortex. His landmark studies on feedforward and feedback pathways in macaque visual cortex, and on the high-density counterstream architecture of interareal connections, established quantitative frameworks now widely used across systems neuroscience. At the Buck Institute he leads efforts to link structural connectivity and oligodendrocyte biology to cognitive aging, bringing together diffusion imaging, tract-level anatomy, and multivariate statistics. He brought to the DDH project both the methodological rigor and the human brain data that turned a hypothesis into a testable claim.
Joel Kramer, PsyD
Joel Kramer has spent more than three decades studying how aging and neurodegenerative diseases reshape memory and cognition. He earned his doctorate at Baylor University and completed postdoctoral training at the Martinez VA before joining UCSF, where he now directs the neuropsychology program at the Memory and Aging Center. His research integrates neuropsychology, neuroimaging, neuroimmunology, and genetics to identify the earliest markers of cognitive decline and their behavioral correlates. He leads the Brain Aging Network for Cognitive Health (BrANCH) study, and his widely used neuropsychological assessment tools have shaped how cognition is measured in aging research worldwide.
Kaitlin Casaletto, PhD
Kaitlin Casaletto is a board-certified neuropsychologist and a leading voice in the study of cognitive resilience in aging. She trained in the UC San Diego / San Diego State Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology before completing postdoctoral work at UCSF, where she now leads research on the biobehavioral pathways that can prevent neurodegenerative disease. Her lab combines proteomics, neuroinflammation biology, and digital health tools to identify why some brains age more gracefully than others, with a particular focus on sex differences and modifiable lifestyle factors. Her work grounds the abstract question of "what makes a resilient brain" in measurable biology.
Lisa M. Ellerby, PhD
Lisa Ellerby is a founding faculty member of the Buck Institute, where her laboratory investigates the fundamental mechanisms of age-related neurodegenerative disease. She trained in chemistry at UC Santa Cruz and completed postdoctoral work at UCLA with National Academy member Joan Valentine, where she co-invented a novel biosensor technology published in Science. Her lab now uses patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, single-cell genomics, and high-throughput screening to dissect Huntington's, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease at the molecular level. With more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and over eight patents, she has helped translate basic discovery into therapeutic programs spanning academia and industry.
David Furman, PhD
David Furman studies how the immune system shapes the trajectory of aging and chronic disease. He earned his doctorate in immunology summa cum laude at the University of Buenos Aires, where his dissertation focused on cancer immune-surveillance, before building a computational and systems-level research program at Stanford and the Buck Institute. He directs the Stanford 1,000 Immunomes Project — one of the largest longitudinal studies of human immunity ever conducted — and developed the inflammatory aging clock (iAge), a deep-learning model that predicts multimorbidity from immune signatures. His work has shown that systemic chronic inflammation, driven by environmental and social exposures, is a root cause of age-related disease including neurodegeneration, making him uniquely positioned to connect immunology to the DDH framework.