External Advisory Committee
UNM FIRST Faculty will be meeting with members of our External Advisory Committee (EAC) throughout the program. Our EAC is comprised of well-established leaders in the fields of neuroscience and data science.
Dr. Malú Gámez Tansey
Malú Gámez Tansey, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of the Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease at the University of Florida, as well as the Norman and Susan Fixel Chair in Neuroscience and Neurology, Investigator at the Evelyn F. and William L McKnight Brain Institute. lab focuses on the role of inflammation and immune system responses in brain health and the development of disease. She studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying neuroinflammation in neurological disorders with a long-term goal of developing better therapies to prevent and/or delay these diseases.
Dr. Tansey obtained her B.S/M.S in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Cell Regulation from UT Southwestern in Dallas, TX followed by post-doctoral work in neuroscience at Washington University Medical School. Prior to setting up her academic research lab in 2002 at UT Southwestern Medical Center in the Department of Physiology, she was head of the Chemical Genetics group at Xencor, a biotechnology company in Monrovia, working on novel TNF inhibitors that she used as tools in academia to investigate the role of neuroinflammation in neurodegenerative disease and which have now advanced to clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease and COVID19 for cytokine storm.
As a Hispanic American, Dr. Tansey serves as a role model to numerous undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate trainees, many of them women from underrepresented minority groups. She served as Co-Director of Emory’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) whose mission is to strengthen institutional efforts to enhance recruitment and retention of diverse student and faculty bodies at Emory, by providing research training and mentoring opportunities to both. Dr. Tansey has earned several mentoring awards from students and faculty for her efforts in this area.
Dr. A. Nayena Blankson
Dr. A. Nayena Blankson is a Full Professor in the psychology department at Spelman College. She is originally from Winneba, Ghana. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in psychology and minor in mathematical sciences from Loyola College in Maryland (now Loyola University Maryland). She earned her Ph.D. in quantitative psychology from the University of Southern California. Her primary advisor was the late Dr. John L. Horn. She also worked with Dr. Rand Wilcox. After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Blankson spent two years as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she specialized in child development research.
Dr. Blankson's research has been published in journals such as Child Development, Early Education and Development, and Learning and Instruction, among others. Dr. Blankson has won awards for her teaching and research, including the Vulcan Materials Company Teaching Excellence Award in 2012 and Spelman's Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2014. She is an elected member of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. Dr. Blankson is a 2022 recipient of the Spencer Mentor Award from the Spencer Foundation, and an invited Full Member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. She is a consultant or advisory board member for several grants and organizations, and she is a certified Data Carpentries instructor. Her computer skills include Mplus, SPSS, R, and Microsoft Office, among others.
Dr. Blankson's quantitative interests include psychometrics, multivariate methods, moderated mediation, the design of psychological research, and structural equation modeling. Her substantive research is focused on cognition, emotion regulation, and classroom experiences as moderators and mediators of early academic achievement. She has consulted on research examining pubertal development, college student friendship formation, dyadic relationships among couples, and maternal depression, among other projects.
Dr. Vince D. Calhoun
Dr. Calhoun is founding director of the tri-institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) where he holds appointments at Georgia State, Georgia Tech and Emory. He is the author of more than 900 full journal articles. His work includes the development of flexible methods to analyze neuroimaging data including blind source separation, deep learning, multimodal fusion and genomics, neuroinformatics tools. Dr. Calhoun is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Institute of Biomedical and Medical Engineers, The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, The Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He currently serves on the IEEE BISP Technical Committee and is also a member of IEEE Data Science Initiative Steering Committee as well as the IEEE Brain Technical Committee.
Dr. Swathi Kiran
Swathi Kiran is the James and Cecelia Ying Professor of Neurorehabilitation in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and the Founding Director for the Center for Brain Recovery at Boston University. Her research interests focus around brain plasticity following a stroke and understanding, diagnosing and treating neurological disorders in general. She has over 130 peer-reviewed papers in these fields and has been funded by NIH and the ASH Foundation. She is the co-founder and scientific advisor for Constant Therapy Health, a software platform for rehabilitation tools after brain injury.
Dr. Alfredo M. Angeles-Boza
Dr. Angeles was born and raised in Peru. He obtained his undergraduate (B.S.) degree from the Catholic University in Lima, Peru, and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Texas A&M University in 2007 (Advisor: Prof. Kim Dunbar). After a short stint at Halliburton, he did postdoctoral work at Texas A&M University (Advisor: Prof. Jean-Philippe Pellois) and Johns Hopkins University (Advisor: Prof. Justine Roth). He joined the Department of Chemistry at The University of Connecticut, where he is an Associate Professor. Dr. Angeles has been the recipient of a NSF Career Award as well as a Fulbright Fellowship. His research interests are in synthetic, structural, and mechanistic inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry, including the development of new catalysts for the reduction of CO2 and the enhancement of antimicrobial activity of peptides.
