天美传媒

Brandon Bentzley, M.D., Ph.D., is a co-founder and chief scientific officer of Magnus Medical. His interest in neuroscience led him to begin the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), which is the birthplace of clinical transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. At MUSC, he completed his dissertation research with Gary Aston-Jones, Ph.D., studying the behavioral economics and neuroeconomics of substance use disorders. Simultaneously, he conducted clinical research on buprenorphine maintenance therapy, focusing on how patient perspectives influence treatment. He completed his residency in adult psychiatry and his postdoctoral training at Stanford University, where he focused on the development of SAINT technology. Dr. Bentzley has published articles in high-impact peer-reviewed journals, including Brain, American Journal of Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

In parallel with his clinical work, Dr. Bentzley has over 15 years of experience in developing advanced automated systems that range from plasma reactors used in variable gravity experiments at NASA, to high-powered magnetically confined plasma reactors at Princeton University. He has developed and built a highly advanced neuro-behavioral recording system, which is currently in full-time use at the Malenka Lab in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medicine.

Dr. Bentzley received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from The College of New Jersey, and his M.D. and Ph.D. from MUSC. His academic appointments include Clinical Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. His areas of clinical focus are treatment-resistant depression, substance abuse disorders, and suicidality.

Michael Yassa's laboratory is interested in how the brain learns and remembers information, and how learning and memory mechanisms are altered in aging and neuropsychiatric disease. The central questions in their research are:

What are the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory?
How are memory circuits and pathways altered in the course of aging, dementia, and neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety?
How can we identify early preclinical biomarkers that can distinguish between normal and pathological neurocognitive changes so that we can better design diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

To address these questions, Yassa develops and refines cognitive assessment tools that specifically target memory processes and computations, such as pattern separation. Yassa's lab also develops, optimizes, and uses a host of advanced brain measurement techniques including high-resolution structural, functional, and diffusion MRI, PET, EEG, and intracranial recordings (ECoG) in patients, to explore the brain鈥檚 architecture at very fine levels of detail.

Yassa's lab combines these approaches with more traditional psychophysics including measurements of galvanic skin response (skin conductance), heart rate variability, and eye tracking. They are also working with collaborators to develop novel platforms for cellular resolution functional imaging in awake, behaving animals using novel MRI tracers. Finally, we are actively developing and testing several pharmacological and nonpharmacological cognitive enhancement interventions in older adults at risk for dementia, including studies of physical exercise.