Expanding Chapter Horizons: Connecting Local and International Communities

Tanea Reed, PhD, is a professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry at Eastern Kentucky University. Her main research focus is traumatic brain injury post therapeutic strategies. She earned a BS in biochemistry at Virginia Tech and was then chosen as a Virginia Governor’s Fellow. She worked at the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Consolidated Laboratory Services performing DNA fingerprinting on food outbreak investigations. She then entered the chemistry graduate program at the University of Kentucky and completed her PhD in biological chemistry in 2007. She was awarded the Hermann Esterbauer Award for young investigators for research in the field of lipid peroxidation.

Julia Gerson is a doctoral student at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Her Galveston chapter won SfN’s 2015 Chapter-of-the-Year Award.

Alexandra Colón-Rodriguez is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis. Currently, her postdoctoral research in Megan Dennis’ lab is using zebrafish as a model to characterize epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder candidate genes that are involved in synaptic function. She holds a dual major PhD in comparative medicine and integrative biology, and environmental Toxicology, from Michigan State University. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in microbiology from Universidad del Este-Carolina, Puerto Rico. Colón-Rodriguez’s graduate research in the lab of William Atchison focused on understanding the toxicity of methylmercury, an environmental neurotoxicant, on spinal cord motor neurons.

Chelsea Tiernan is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of translational science and molecular medicine at Michigan State University. Her current research projects investigate the Alzheimer's disease–associated protein tau, and how truncation or phosphorylation events influence the aggregation and toxicity of tau.

Edward Bilsky is a professor of pharmacology and the founding director of the Center of Excellence in Neuroscience at the University of New England. Bilsky's laboratory conducts translational research in the areas of pain, addiction, and other neurological disorders. Bilsky is also the co-founder of a small biotechnology company, Aiko Pharmaceuticals, that is developing a unique class of opioid antagonists for the management of opioid-mediated side effects.

Laura Colgin, PhD, is a professor of neuroscience and director of the Center for Learning and Memory at The University of Texas at Austin. She has over two decades of reviewing and editorial experience, including serving as senior editor at eLife and co-editor-in-chief of Progress in Neurobiology. Her laboratory records neurophysiological activity in rats performing learning and memory tasks to uncover learning and memory mechanisms and how these mechanisms are disrupted in memory disorders.