DR. ELEFTHERIA K. PISSADAKI
Eleftheria is a systems neuroscientist and research manager at the Biogen Inc’s Digital Health Department in Cambridge, MA. At Biogen, she leads the semantics and speech analytics strategy to build novel digital screening tools derived from big data speech samples for the Alzheimer’s disease drug compound portfolio.
Prior to working at Biogen, Eleftheria was research scientist at the Life Sciences and Healthcare Department at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Eleftheria led and conducted the experimental human studies design of an unprecedented IBM and Pfizer project partnership for digitally monitoring the efficacy of a novel Parkinson’s disease compound. She also led an international team of IBM data scientists and machine learning experts to win the Biobank Disease Challenge, an AI and machine learning data analytics competition launched by the Partners HealthCare Biobank Disease Challenge. Eleftheria also initiated and delivered a neuroscience-inspired paradigm for AI architectures to capture System 1 and System 2 thinking, and was a co-inventor of patents of a multi-agent platform for trusted computation of models and data using blockchain technology.
Before joining IBM, Eleftheria was a Medical Research Council Investigator and a research fellow at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford. While there, Eleftheria spearheaded a new hypothesis to explain the origins of Parkinson’s disease pathology and built the first time ever computational model of dopamine neurons to examine the hypothesis, leading to seminal publications and scientific predictions later verified by world top experimental laboratories.
Eleftheria is also a mentor with the New York Academy of Sciences and the United Technologies Aerospace Challenge, curated by the New York Academy of Sciences.