Keynote Speakers
We are honored to welcome a distinguished faculty of international experts and pioneering investigators to iCSD 2026. These leaders in the field will share groundbreaking insights into the mechanisms, clinical implications, and therapeutic targets of spreading depolarizations.
Maiken Nedergaard, MD, DMSc
Department of Neuroscience and Neurology
Maiken Nedergaard is a jointly appointed professor in the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center with a part-time appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery within the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine. She is most well-known for discovering the glymphatic system, which eliminates toxins from the brain, earning one of Science Magazine’s ten “Breakthroughs of the Year” in 2013 and went on to win the Newcomb Cleveland Prize in 2015. Shifting the focus from neurons to neuro-glia, Dr. Nedergaard and her lab have emphasized the role of neuro-glia past its simplified role of scaffolding for neurons. Presently, her research holds major implications for therapy development of neurological diseases.
Brynne Sullivan, MD, MSc
Department of Pediatrics
Brynne Sullivan is director of the Center for Advanced Medical Analytics (CAMA), Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Neonatology. Her work primarily revolves around cardiorespiratory signatures in the NICU, where she found that a mathematical analyses of the heart rate characteristics index (HERO) score and cardiorespiratory monitoring data revealed signatures of illness due to sepsis in premature infants. She works on developing algorithms to integrate physiologic and demographic data to predict multiple adverse outcomes in infants. Currently, she is a primary investigator studying Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (NOWS) on a team of neonatal researchers at UVA, University of Alabama-Birmingham, and Washington University in St. Louis.
Jeff Elias, MD
Department of Neurosurgery
Jeff Elias serves as the Director of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery and on the medical advisory board for the International Essential Tremor Foundation (IETF). His research primarily focuses on using MR=guided focused ultrasound as treatment for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. This focus led him to complete the first ever focused ultrasound clinical trial for essential tremor which then got FDA approval and opened the doors for further image-guided investigations using laser interstitial thermal therapy and MRI-guided deep brain stimulation. He won UVA’s Innovator of the Year in 2018. Currently, his focus is on chronic pain interventions using focused ultrasound and neuromodulation.
Madhav Marathe, PhD
UVA Biocomplexity Institute
Madhav Marathe is Executive Director of the Biocomplexity Institute, an endowed Distinguished Professor in Biocomplexity, and a tenured Professor of Computer Science at UVA. He focuses on studying large-scale biological, information, social, and technical (BIST) systems by developing scientific foundations and associated engineering principles. Dr. Marathe and his team develop algorithms to describe optimization and control of BIST networks, understand the co-evolution of these networks and their dynamics, understand the form and structure of these dynamical processes, as well as construct BIST networks from noisy or incomplete data. With this, he and his team can develop models and compute solutions and deliver them to end-users and policymakers.