Mathew Birdsall Abrams, PhD, is director of science and training at the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), a global organization dedicated to open, FAIR, and citable neuroscience. Abrams is a neuroscientist with over 25 years of experience in both experimental neuroscience and clinical psychiatry, as well as 12 years of experience in community coordination, community building, and product development in neuroinformatics. He conducted his doctoral thesis research at Tulane University and Karolinska Institutet, obtained his MPH in health systems management at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and completed his undergraduate education at the University of Richmond.

Denise J. Cai, PhD, is a neuroscientist and associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She completed her PhD in experimental psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles. Her lab at Mount Sinai focuses on how memories are both stable enough to last a lifetime, but flexible enough to update with new experiences, using cutting-edge tools (like in vivo calcium imaging, optogenetics, chemogenetics). Her team has shown that memory ensembles aren’t fixed snapshots, but dynamic networks that constantly link and reshape our past experiences. Cai is also passionate about making neuroscience accessible and co-developed the Miniscope platform and other open-source tools now used by hundreds of labs around the world, helping the field push forward faster and more collaboratively.