Dr. Grafman has been the director of Brain Injury Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab ((SRALab)formally known as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) since 2012 and is on faculty at Northwestern University´s Feinberg School of Medicine in the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer´s Disease Center as well as the Department of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the SRALab, Dr. Grafman was briefly director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research at the Kessler Foundation in West Orange New Jersey. Prior to that appointment in 2011, Dr. Grafman was Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland for many years. His investigation of brain function and behavior contributes to advances in medicine, rehabilitation, and psychology, and informs ethics, law, philosophy, and health policy. His study of the human prefrontal cortex and cognitive neuroplasticity incorporates neuroimaging and genetics, an approach that is expanding our knowledge of the functions of the human frontal lobes, as well as the effects of neurological disorders that impair frontal lobe brain function.
Andres M. Salazar, MD, is CEO, Scientific Director and cofounder of Oncovir, Inc., a pharmaceutical company developing the immunomodulator, Hiltonol® (Poly-ICLC). He is a retired US Army Colonel and formerly Professor of Neurology at USUHS. He was Director of the Vietnam Head Injury Study and Founder, Principal Investigator, and first Director of the Defense and Veterans Head Injury Program, an ongoing U.S. National Head Injury clinical management and research effort. His research background includes neurotraumatology, neurodegenerative diseases, multiple sclerosis (MS), AIDS, and Oncology. He has over 200 publications, several patents, and has conducted multiple clinical studies, including in head injury, AIDS, pilot and pivotal clinical trials of beta-interferon (Avonex) in multiple sclerosis, and clinical trials of Hiltonol® in various cancers, MS, and AIDS. Dr. Salazar is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Jefferson Medical College. He completed Neurology training at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and a Neurovirology Fellowship at the CNSSL, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD.
