Research Team

Abigail Koppes

Dr. Abigail Koppes joined the department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in 2014 where her group, the Advanced Biosystems for Neuroengineering Laboratory (ABNEL), harnesses biochemical engineering methods to address challenges in nervous system disorders and dysfunction. She has experience in grantsmithing, mentorship of junior researchers, and teaching.
Website

Aimee Weiss

Alison Cohen

Alison Cohen is an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. She conducts community-driven, policy-relevant applied epidemiology research to document health inequities and identify and evaluate interventions that could improve health and reduce inequities. She has a PhD in epidemiology and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology and biostatistics from UC Berkeley and a AB in community health and education studies from Brown University.

Anisha Sekar

Anisha Sekar is a fintech entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in product management, user experience, and strategy. She received her BA in computer science from Brown University with a focus on applied mathematics and statistics. Her analysis has been cited in Reuters, the Washington Post, Marketplace and more.

Dr. Athena Akrami

Dr. Akrami is a faculty member at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, in University College London, where she runs a large neuroscience laboratory studying learning and memory in rodents, human, and computational models. She has more than 15 years of experience in scientific research and publications, project managements, and international collaborations.

Asmae

Beth Pollack

Beth Pollack is a biomedical Research Scientist at MIT studying infection-associated chronic illnesses. She leads research in an immunoengineering lab on the connections, comorbidities, and shared pathophysiology among Long COVID, ME/CFS, chronic Lyme, connective tissue disorders, and other co-occurring illnesses. She is currently working/collaborating on two clinical studies on Long COVID, ME/CFS, and Lyme disease at MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Beth is a member of the NIH’s ME/CFS Research Roadmap Working Group where she chairs its Less Studied Pathologies Subgroup. The group is tasked with developing a plan to advance ME/CFS research towards clinical trials. Beth also served on PLRC’s Biomedical Research Fund Panel. She is a former Senior Researcher at Harvard where she also went to graduate school.

Charlie McCone

Chris McWilliams

Elisabeth Stelson

Elisabeth Stelson is a licensed social worker and PhD Candidate in Social Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Beth’s research focuses on the occupational health of social and health services workforces, vicarious trauma, and intimate partner violence.

Ezra Spier (he/him)

Ezra Spier is an Oakland, California-based operations and technology consultant who helps organizations thrive through difficult periods of growth. Ezra is the creator of Long Covid Studies (longcovidstudies.net), a website that helps people with Long Covid find opportunities to participate in research studies and clinical trials.
Website
longcovidstudies.net

Hannah Wei (she/her)

Hannah Wei has a background in cognitive science and computer science. Her work focuses on the intersection of global communities, frontier technology and user-centered design. She has led product design and research initiatives on the ground in Indonesia, Ghana, and Taiwan, and has worked with teams at Facebook, MIT Media Labs, Harvard Innovation Labs.

Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia is an information designer. She is a Partner at Pentagram in New York. After receiving her master’s degree in Architecture, she earned her PhD in Design at Politecnico di Milano. In 2011, she co-founded Accurat, an internationally acclaimed data-driven design firm with offices in Milan and New York.

Girish

JD Davids

JD Davids is a health justice and communications strategist for networks of disabled and chronically ill people. A queer and trans person living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), Long COVID and other complex chronic conditions, he is co-founder and co-director of Strategies for High Impact / Long COVID Justice. He also writes and hosts conversations for The Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness. He’s served as an advisor with many groups, including the U.S. Caucus of People Living with HIV, NIH, CDC, and health departments, and was managing editor and director of strategic communications for TheBody.com.

Jerry

V. Jo Hsu, MFA PhD (they/them/theirs)

Jo Hsu (they/them) is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where they study storytelling as political strategy. Right now, they’re working on several projects that examine how discriminatory narratives affect scientific research and medical treatment—and how prejudicial arguments appropriate scientific terms to legitimize social inequity. www.vjohsu.com.
Date of first COVID infection: November 2022, but they’ve had ME/CFS for much longer.

Julia Moore Vogel (she/her)

Julia Moore Vogel is a Long COVID patient-researcher at Scripps Research, where she is leading a study that examines whether wrist-worn wearables can help people with energy-limiting conditions implement pacing. She also oversees inclusive health research efforts through the All of Us Research Program and other initiatives. Julia previously managed genomics initiatives at the New York Genome Center and The Rockefeller University. She has a PhD in Computational Biology and Medicine and an MBA both from Cornell.

Dr. Lauren Shoemaker (she/her)

Lauren Shoemaker is an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, where she runs an ecology lab and teaches quantitative biology. Her research combines mathematical modeling, complex systems science, experiments, and statistics to uncover the mechanisms that structure disease dynamics and ecosystem responses to human impacts.

Leo Liu (he/him)

Leo Liu is a researcher, experimentalist, and data scientist who designs randomized controlled trials primarily studying civic engagement, political persuasion, advocacy, and political activism. He lives in Washington, DC with Long Covid and POTS.

Lúcia

Lúcia is an advocate and researcher with a BA from Barnard College at Columbia University. A first generation American, she previously worked as a communications and development specialist across multiple business sectors, internationally. She is also a patient representative for ME/CFS and other infection-associated chronic condition (IACC) organizations.

Margaret O’Hara

Dr. Megan Fitzgerald

Dr. Megan Fitzgerald holds a PhD in Neuroscience and has a background in human neuroanatomy, developmental neuroscience, and stem cell research. She became ill with COVID in March of 2020.

Dr. Mel Symeonides

Dr. Symeonides is a faculty scientist at the University of Vermont, USA. He is conducting wet lab research, primarily in the fields of virology and immunology, in the context of HIV-1 and Rotavirus. He is also engaged in educating and training early career (undergraduate and graduate level) scientists, both through lecturing as well as in the research lab.

Michael Sieverts

Michael has a background in science and technology policy. He has held senior positions at the National Science Foundation and has also worked for the Congressional Budget Office.
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Myra

Nisa Malli

DVL Padma Priya

Rachel Robles (she/her)

Rachel is a Cornell University graduate with a degree in Operations Research Engineering and 6 years of experience working in sales strategy. She has skills in building data pipelines for the purposes of automation and reporting.

Dr. Signe Redfield

Dr. Redfield received her Ph.D. and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, and a BA in General Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
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Teresa Akintonwa

Tess Falor

Dr. Tess Falor, holds a PhD in Earth and Planetary Science from UC Berkeley. Motivated by her own complex health conditions, she changed her career to work on medical research and patient advocacy. She is cofounder of the community science self-experimentation project, RemissionBiome.org. She’s also a patient representative on three additional ME/CFS and Long COVID research projects and is a member of the PLRC Patient-Generated Hypotheses Journal team.

Tessa D. Green

Dr. Tessa Green is a computational biologist who specializes in machine learning for single-cell immunology and perturbation biology. She earned her PhD in Biophysics from Harvard Medical School, and now works in Biotech in Boston, MA.
Website

Dr. Yochai Re’em