Ed Lein is Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Washington. He received a B.S. in biochemistry from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from UC Berkeley and performed postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2004 and has led the creation of large-scale gene expression atlases of the adult and developing mammalian brain as catalytic community resources, including the inaugural Allen Mouse Brain Atlas and developing and adult human and non-human primate brain atlases. Dr. Lein has driven a number of advances in using the tools of modern molecular genomics to study mammalian brain organization at the regional, cellular and functional level. He leads the Human Cell Types program at the Allen Institute, focused on creating a cellular atlas of the human brain, understanding conserved and specialized features of human brain, developing tools for genetic access to specific cell types in non-genetic organisms including human, and understanding cellular and molecular consequences of brain diseases including Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Lein is a member of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network and the Human Cell Atlas.

Mala Murthy (b. 1975) is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University and leads the Murthy lab in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute – their work focuses on the neural mechanisms that underlie social communication, using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model system. Prof. Murthy received her B.S. in Biology from MIT. She was a Burchards scholar in the humanities and won the John L. Asinari prize for outstanding undergraduate research in the life sciences. She then received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, working with Thomas Schwarz and Richard Scheller - her thesis research centered on mechanisms of vesicle trafficking to synaptic and other cell membranes. She did postdoctoral work in systems neuroscience with Gilles Laurent at Caltech, as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow. Her postdoctoral work initiated a new area of investigation into stereotypy in the central brain of Drosophila, in a region of the brain important for learning in memory. In 2010, she joined the faculty at Princeton University in the Departments of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016 and to Full Professor in 2019. Her research group consists of computational neuroscientists and experimentalists, who collectively study the many neural processes that underlie animal communication, including detection and recognition of multisensory cues, decision-making, and execution and patterning of motor actions. She is involved in an effort to generate a whole brain connectome of Drosophila. Her work has led to the discovery that sensory feedback cues and brain internal state dynamically modulate song patterning in flies, which has opened up the study of how the brain mediates the back and forth exchange of information between individuals, leveraging the tools of the fly model system. Her team has also developed new methods for quantifying animal behavior that have been widely used in neuroscience research. Prof. Murthy has received a number of honors, including an NSF CAREER award, an NIH New Innovator award, an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, a Klingenstein fellowship, a McKnight Scholar award, an NINDS Research Program award, several awards through the NIH BRAIN Initiative, and an HHMI Faculty Scholar award. She has participated in several events for the BRAIN Initiative at the White House and US Capitol. See also: Current Biology Q and A on Prof. Mala Murthy.

Prof. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. Bassett is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Bassett is most well-known for blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. Bassett is currently writing a book for MIT Press entitled Curious Minds, with co-author Perry Zurn Professor of Philosophy at American University. Bassett received a B.S. in physics from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, Bassett was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. Bassett has received multiple prestigious awards, including American Psychological Association's ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow (2014), MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Harvard Higher Education Leader (2015), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER (2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018), OHBM Young Investigator Award (2020), AIMBE College of Fellows (2020). Bassett is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 24,000 citations, as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. Bassett is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts. Bassett’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and the Center for Curiosity.