Meet Our Team
Members of the ACTRU team come from all walks of life, yet we focus on one common goal: improving the lives of individuals impacted by Alzheimer's Disease.
Director/Principal Investigator: Steven E. Arnold, MD
Leadership
Director of Programs and Research Operations: Jessica Gerber, DAc, MS
Dr. Hiroko Dodge joined ACTRU in October of 2022. Before joining the ACTRU, she was a professor of neurology at Oregon Health & Science University and an endowed professor of neurology at the University of Michigan. Between 2010 and 2019, she simultaneously directed the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center Data Core and Oregon Alzheimer’s Disease Center Data Core. Besides her quantitative skills, she has been the PI for NIH-funded behavioral intervention studies for over the past ten years, examining whether social interactions by using video chats can enhance cognitive functions. She enjoys cooking and hiking in the woods.
Dr. Dodge’s website: https://dodgelab.wixsite.com/dodge-lab
Director of Research Analytics for the IBC: Hiroko Dodge, PhD
Preferred Pronouns: she/her/hers
Katie joined the clinical leadership team at ACTRU as a Clinical Research Project Manager in the spring of 2022. Katie graduated from Stetson University with a BS in Biology and minors in Psychology and Health Care Issues. She earned a Master’s degree in Neuroscience from the University of Hartford in 2005 and performed her thesis work in the Blood-brain-barrier lab in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Connecticut Health Center. Building on an early research career in bench neuroscience at Genzyme and clinical research coordination in Cerebral amyloid angiopathy at MGH, Katie is excited to support the design and execution of innovative investigator- initiated clinical studies that will impact the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
Prior to joining ACTRU, Katie spent several years working in Research Project Management at Boston University in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) Brain Aging Program (BAP), where she was involved in the daily research operations of a NIH supported Neuropsychology team working on integrating digital tools of cognitive assessment (digital pen, digital voice, app-based tests) into the FHS generational cohorts. While at FHS, Katie helped transition the Brain Donation program to the BAP; facilitated research collaborations and managed the coordination of ongoing Neuropsych testing and dementia surveillance. She also worked as an Adjunct Professor of Anatomy & Physiology at Bunker Hill Community College, where she proudly groomed many students for matriculation into fields in the health professions. Katie is thrilled to utilize her combination of experiences to make an impact at ACTRU and for the Alzheimer’s research community.
Senior Project Manager: Katie Young, MS
Kayla is the Senior Regulatory Affairs Coordinator at the Alzheimer’s Clinical and Translational Research Unit. She holds a Master of Science degree in Biotechnology from Georgetown University, where she engaged in comprehensive coursework on drug development, covering pre-clinical research to market access for innovative therapeutics.
Her passion for Neurology was sparked during her undergraduate studies as a Psychology major. Through both learning and hands-on work experience in Neurology and Psychiatry, Kayla has recognized the profound impact that new medical therapies can have on patients. This realization fueled her desire to contribute to product development, ensuring that groundbreaking treatments for neurological disorders reach those in need.
In her regulatory affairs role at ACTRU, Kayla enjoys contributing to the startup of new research studies with promising new therapeutic products. Prior to joining ACTRU, she served as a research coordinator, managing clinical trials that assessed the effects of medical device treatments on various neurological and psychiatric conditions.
Outside of her professional commitments, Kayla enjoys spending quality time with family and friends, traveling, and honing her baking skills.
Senior Regulatory Affairs Coordinator: Kayla McEachern, MS
Clinical Research Nurse Manager: Alison McManus, DNP, FNP-BC
Biobank Core Manager: Pia Kivisäkk Webb, MD/PhD
Jake joined the Alzheimer’s Clinical & Translational Research Unit as a CRC I in the spring of 2021, and currently serves as Project Coordinator. In this position, he serves to accelerate clinical operations and is experienced in MR acquisition, data analysis, DevOps, industry relations, and regulatory affairs. He is lead on the MIND GamePack project, which seeks to develop and validate the use of tablet-based games in the cognitive assessment of adults. Broadly, Jake is interested in emerging digital technologies and their integration within the clinical setting.
Jake holds both a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and is concurrently employed at McLean Hospital as a Shift Leader, where he manages an acute residential unit for adolescents. Jake is also involved with The Common Room, an organization which helps foster community amongst young adults on the Autism Spectrum Disorder.
In his free time, Jake enjoys strength training, playing basketball, writing, and traveling.
Publications: ResearchGate
Project Coordinator: Jake Galler, BS
Collaborators
Dr. Edmarie Guzmán-Vélez is an Instructor at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa, and fellowship in neuropsychology and geropsychology at the Boston VA in 2016.
As a graduate student Edmarie examined the dissociation between emotions and memory in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its neural correlates, as well as the effectiveness of a two-day intervention for dementia caregivers. After she completed her PhD, Edmarie worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Multicultural Alzheimer Prevention Program directed by Dr. Yakeel Quiroz at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research as a postdoctoral fellow primarily focused on identifying cognitive tests that are sensitive to early pathological changes in familial AD and that can reliably differentiate individuals in the preclinical stage of AD from adults with no genetic predisposition for AD, and on using neuroimaging techniques to measure changes in functional brain connections in preclinical AD. She has extended her research to investigate lifestyle factors that can protect against the onset of cognitive symptoms associated with neurodegenerative disorders, particularly AD, and its mechanisms. Edmarie is working with Dr. Arnold and his team to examine markers of neuroinflammation in familial AD and their relation to cognition and physical activity in the preclinical stage.
Edmarie Guzman-Velez, PhD
Dr. Anna Goodheart joined the MGH Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease in July 2019, where she is completing a two-year post-residency fellowship program as an American Academy of Neurology clinical research scholar. Clinically, she is undergoing fellowship training in both Memory Disorders and Movement Disorders, primarily seeing patients with Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, and related disorders. From a research perspective, she is interested is translational and clinical research in the neurodegenerative diseases. Her primary research focus as a fellow is using molecular neuroimaging tools to map epigenetic molecules in patients with Parkinson disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. She is excited to collaborate with ACTRU in clinical trial work in dementia with Lewy bodies.
Dr. Goodheart graduated from the University of Connecticut with a BS in Biology in 2011, where she completed her Honors research thesis in a neural stem cell laboratory, examining populations of stem cells in mouse models of Parkinson disease. She obtained her MD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. As a medical student, she worked in an Alzheimer disease research group, doing molecular neuroimaging biomarker research with the beta-amyloid tracer Pittsburgh Compound-B. She completed her internship in Internal Medicine at MGH in 2016 and her residency in Neurology at the combined Harvard MGH-BWH residency program in 2019. After her current fellowship, she plans to pursue a career as a clinician-researcher.
Anna Goodheart, MD
Clinical Team
Nursing
Preferred Pronouns: she/her/hers
Kelli Devitte-McKee is an Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (AGACNP) who has been working with ACTRU since November 2020. She graduated from Vassar College with her degree in Neuroscience in 2012. She then moved on to get her Bachelors of Nursing in 2015 and her Masters of Nursing in 2017, from MGH Institute of Health Professions. Her previous work before this includes heading a student run volunteer medical clinic for the Somerville community, and working as a staff nurse at McLean Hospital on the Bipolar and Schizophrenia unit. She also currently works with a second research lab in the Navy Yard that focuses on imaging in aging and dementia related processes. She is passionate about patient education and healthcare empowerment and hopes to work as an educator in her future work.
Kelli Devitte-McKee, MSN
Data Analytics
Dr. Chao-Yi Wu is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. She has over ten years of experience in the field of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias research - spanning biostatistics, home sensing technologies, and occupational therapy. Her work leverages multimodal digital and fluid biomarkers to improve early detection, making home-based disease monitoring feasible and accessible. Her research has received support from multiple National Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, and she is a Research Education Component scholar in both Massachusetts and Oregon, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Her contributions to heterogeneity testing methods in the context of Alzheimer’ trials have led to invited talks at leading Alzheimer’s scientific forums. She also serves as a grant reviewer for several international scientific foundations. To date, she has published over 30 scientific articles in her field.
Chao-Yi Wu, PhD
Dr. Liu Chen is a research fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He joined ACTRU in March of 2024. Holding a PhD in Computer Science from Oregon Health & Science University, he is a driving force in applying artificial intelligence to cognitive research. His expertise encompasses crucial AI domains including automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, image processing, and speech synthesis. Beyond the lab, he is a passionate amateur street photographer, finding visual harmony within the world's complexities.
Liu Chen, PhD
Translational Team
Postdoctoral Fellows and PhD Students
Preferred Pronouns: he/him/his
Dr. Mahesh Chandra Kodali is a Research Fellow in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He joined the lab in Feb 2021 and is working with Dr. Arnold, Dr. Weinberg, Dr. Kivisakk and the team at Alzheimer’s Clinical & Translational Research Unit (ACTRU) to explore novel interventions that could potentially modify/halt/slow-down the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. He is primarily involved in studying the peripheral and Central Nervous System (CNS) specific effects that develop in response to the trained immunity induced by BCG vaccination in older adults. He performs ex-vivo experiments on the cells derived from peripheral blood to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating trained immunity. Besides, he also analyzes cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF) samples to develop novel cellular assays to understand the neuro-immune signatures and epigenetic modifications in the cells derived from the CSF.
Mahesh obtained his doctorate in Biomedical Sciences with a concentration in Molecular and Systems Pharmacology from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC, Memphis, TN, USA) in December 2020. During his PhD, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Francesca-Fang Liao where he modelled the earliest sequential events during the advancement of systemic inflammation into the CNS. This work helped to better understand the interplay between the vascular and glial cells in initiating and driving acute neuroinflammatory cascade during Sepsis Associated Encephalopathy. He also studied the contribution of peripheral blood circulating exosomes to neuroinflammation during systemic inflammatory conditions. Additionally, he has experience in preclinical testing of novel compounds aimed to modify microglial activation states during neuroinflammation and evaluated the pharmaco-therapeutic effects of those compounds in several transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Earlier, he obtained a Master of Science degree in Pharmacology and Toxicology from Wright State University, (Dayton, OH, USA).
Mahesh is from the southern part of India, from a place called Hyderabad (Telangana State, India). He obtained his Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, (Hyderabad, Telangana, India). He is excited to continue his research in translational neuroimmunology together with the diverse team at ACTRU and hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the immunomodulatory mechanisms to target neurodegenerative diseases.
Mahesh Chandra Kodali, PhD
Pronouns: he/him/his
Matthijs is a PhD student from The Netherlands at the Alzheimer's Clinical & Translational Research Unit since spring 2021. In his project he focuses on proteomics of cerebrospinal fluid samples from Alzheimer's disease patients to find potential novel biomarkers and to better understand the molecular mechanisms underlying these biomarkers. Spanning the full translational research spectrum, he performs bioinformatic analyses on large scale datasets with machine learning algorithms, develops novel immunoassays for clinical measurement of potential targets, and studies the underlying molecular mechanisms using in-vitro iPSC models of AD.
Matthijs completed his bachelor's degree in Neuroscience and his master's degree in Molecular Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. For his master's thesis he worked in the lab of Dr. Frank Jacobs where he studied recent genomic changes in human evolution and their effects on the complexity of the human brain.
Matthijs grew up in a small town in the northern part of The Netherlands and maintains his Dutch roots by biking all through the city of Boston. He hopes to stay in the area after his graduation and transition into industry.
Matthijs de Geus, MSc
Research Technicians
Johanna is a Research Technician at the Alzheimer’s Clinical and Translational Research Unit. She completed a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and a master’s degree in neuroscience at the University Industrial of Santander in Bucaramanga, Colombia. Before joining Massachusetts General Hospital, Johanna worked as the coordinator of the Clinical Research Lab at the Cardiovascular Foundation of Colombia, where she supervised the collection, processing, analysis, and shipment of biological samples for multiple clinical research studies. After receiving her master’s degree in Neuroscience, she was the coordinator of the Neuroscience Research Laboratory at the Universidad de Santander in Bucaramanga, Colombia. In this role, Johanna was involved in pharmacological experiments in animal models and supervised the training of undergraduate students and lab technicians. At the ACTRU, Johanna is responsible for the coordination of the biobank, the supervision and training of Co-ops, and the monitoring of research documentation in accordance with IRB requirements.
Johanna Celedon, MSc
Preferred Pronouns: he/him/his
Bruno is a Research Technician at the Alzheimer’s Clinical and Translational Research Unit. In 2023, he graduated with highest honors from Emory University with a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and a minor in Neuroethics. As an undergraduate, he was a research assistant at the Wharton Laboratory, where he studied biomarkers of neurodegeneration in cognitively normal minority populations with elevated risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Back in his home country of Panama, Bruno worked with the Panama Aging Research Initiative (PARI) conducting dementia-related biomarker research in an underserved cohort of Latin-American older adults. His interests lie in the intersection of neurodegenerative diseases with human life and behavior, especially in minority communities, and he plans to pursue a PhD in clinical neuroscience following his time at MGH.
Bruno Hammerschlag, BS
Graduated from Bates College in 2022 with a BS in Biochemistry. For my senior thesis, I did yearlong research on the phosphoinositide (phospholipid) metabolism in HEK-293, exploring the effects of two knockout proteins - PITPNA and PIP5K1C- on the phosphoinositide synthesis in the cell membrane. The phosphoinositide metabolism is hypothesized to be altered in neuropathological diseases like epilepsy, Alzheimer's, and Huntington's diseases. I look forward to learning about the different biomarkers under investigation, to understand the pathophysiology of the Alzheimer's disease and intend to pursue a PhD in clinical neuroscience.
Hadia Fatima, BS
Co-Ops
Noah Brenman is an Undergraduate student at Northeastern University pursuing a bachelor's degree in health science. As a co-op, he collects, processes, and organizes CSF, blood, and plasma for the Alzheimer's biomarker bank. He also consolidates the freezer space, assists with sample pickup/shipping, and ensures the freezer space remains accurate. Noah loves running, cooking, and playing bass in his free time.
Noah Brenman
Isabelle Kessock is a Co-op student at the Alzheimer’s Clinical and Translational Research Unit. Isabelle is a third-year honors student from Northeastern University studying Behavioral Neuroscience. She spent her first Co-op as a Genetic Counseling Assistant within the Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and hopes in the future to investigate genomic influences on neurodegenerative diseases. She is excited for the opportunity to learn more about biomarkers and their relationship to Alzheimer’s disease.
Isabelle Kessock
Administration
Laurie Paris is the administrative assistant to the Director\Principal Investigator Dr. Steven E. Arnold and the Alzheimer’s Clinical & Translational Research Unit. In this position, Laurie provides administrative assistance with correspondence, meeting scheduling, travel arrangements, file maintenance, processing expense reports, managing invoice payments, reimbursements and assisting with the prescreening of the LifeSpan BioBank Study.
Laurie joined the Alzheimer’s Clinical & Translational Research Unit in September 2018. Prior to her position at MGH, she served as administrative assistant to the Director of Revenue Cycle and Director of Patient Accounts\Finance for Winchester Hospital for over 19 years.
Laurie Paris