May 23, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
McCosh Hall, Room 10

Moderator:

Yael Niv
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

Panelists:

Greg Petsko ’70
Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School; Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University

Seemant Chaturvedi ’85
Vice Chair for Strategic Operations, Department of Neurology, University of Maryland School of Medicine; Stewart J. Greenebaum Endowed Professor of Stroke Neurology

Martin Piazza ’10
Assistant Professor, Pediatric Neurosurgery, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh

Danielle Almstead ’20
Ph.D. Student, Thomas Jefferson University

Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University

Participants:

Yael Niv
Yael Niv’s lab studies the computational processes underlying reinforcement learning, focusing on how attention, memory and learning interact to construct task representations that allow efficient learning through optimal generalization. She is co-founder and co-director of the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, where she is applying ideas from reinforcement learning to understanding and treating mental illness. Her proudest career accomplishment is winning a graduate mentoring award. In her nonexistent spare time, she is a mom to two awesome boys and an activist within and outside academia.

Greg Petsko ’70
Greg Petsko’s research aims to develop treatments for ALS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In October 2023, he received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor the United States can bestow on a scientist or engineer, from President Joe Biden. He has founded several biotechnology companies, including ArQule, Ironwood, Aevum Therapeutics and Retromer Therapeutics. His public lectures on brain health have attracted a wide audience; one of his TED Talks has been viewed more than a million times. Petsko has written a widely read column on science and society — the first 10 years are available in book form. He admits, however, that the columns guest-written by his two dogs, Mink and Clifford, are more popular than those he writes himself.

Seemant Chaturvedi ’85
Seemant Chaturvedi’s research interests include stroke prevention, gender differences in stroke outcomes and maintenance of brain health across the lifespan. Chaturvedi is the Stewart J. Greenebaum Endowed Professor of Stroke Neurology and the Department of Neurology’s vice chair for strategic operations at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He is also stroke program director at the University of Maryland Medical System. He has helped create and co-author guidelines related to stroke prevention for the American Academy of Neurology and the American Heart Association (AHA), including the 2024 AHA guidelines for prevention of a first stroke.

Martin Piazza ’10
Marty Piazza is a pediatric neurosurgeon at the University of Pittsburgh and serves as the surgical director of the Pediatric Surgical Movement Disorders and Spine Program at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. He is deeply committed to advocating for children with developmental disabilities—a passion that was nurtured during his undergraduate years at Princeton. Piazza’s clinical and research interests focus on developing individualized management strategies for pediatric patients, emphasizing multidisciplinary care and the use of neurosurgical interventions to enhance quality of life through family-centered decision-making. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry and materials science, followed by a medical degree from Wake Forest School of Medicine. He completed his neurosurgery residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a fellowship in pediatric spinal deformity at Shriners Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and a pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Danielle Almstead ’20
Danielle Almstead is a first-year neuroscience Ph.D. student at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, with a passion for neurodegenerative disease research with a translational focus. Previously, she worked for several years at the University of Pennsylvania coordinating industry-sponsored clinical trials for patients with frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), one of the most common forms of early-onset dementia. In this role, she engaged directly with patients and caregivers, managed first-in-human gene therapy trials and collaborated with clinical research organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Almstead also had the opportunity to serve on an FTD study advisory board for one of these pharmaceutical companies in 2024. Additionally, she spent time working at a private practice office in Princeton specializing in the field of psychiatry, coordinating clinical and research visits for patients with major depressive disorder, treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.