Eyal Aharoni, PhD Rand Corporation
David Dow, JD University of Houston Law
David M. Eagleman, PhD Stanford University
Martha Farah, PhD University of Pennsylvania
Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD East Carolina University
Marc Goodman, MPA, MS-MIS Singularity University
Kent Kiehl, PhD University of New Mexico
Adam Kolber, JD Brooklyn Law School
Read Montague, PhD Virginia Tech Carilion
Pablo Ormachea, JD Baylor College of Medicine
Amanda C. Pustilnik, JD University of Maryland School of Law
Barry Scheck, JD Cordozo Law, The Innocence Project
Francis Shen, JD, PhD Univeristy of Minnesota Law School
Melina Uncapher, PhD Stanford University
Nicole Vincent, PhD Georgia State University
Biographies
Eyal Aharoni, PhD (top)
Rand Corporation
Dr. Aharoni’s research investigates the prediction and deterrence of antisocial behavior and the influence of extra-legal factors on legal decision-making. He has a particular interest in how multiple approaches (cognitive, behavioral, evolutionary, technological, and neurobiological) to these topics may apply to criminal responsibility, jurisprudence, and mental health treatment policy. He also has methodological and management experience in survey research, experimental research, and longitudinal follow-up studies. Dr. Aharoni completed a postdoctoral fellowship with appointments at The MIND Research Network for Neurodiagnostic Discovery and the University of New Mexico Psychology. He has also held research positions at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior and the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, where he studied human-computer social interaction and the perception of agency. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at UCSB where he also served as a research fellow for the MacArthur Foundation's Law and Neuroscience Project.
David Dow, JD (top)
University of Houston Law
Professor Dow is the Cullen Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and Rorschach Visiting Professor of History at Rice University. At the UH Law Center he runs a death penalty clinic in which law students assist in the representation of inmates facing execution. Over the past twenty years, Dow and his team have represented more than one hundred death row inmates at every stage of their state and federal appeals. He is also the founder and director of Texas’ oldest innocence project, the Texas Innocence Network, an organization that uses UH law students to investigate claims of actual innocence brought by Texas pioneers. In 2014, he started the Juvenile and Capital Advocacy Project.
The author of six books and scores of scholarly articles, Professor Dow’s work also regularly appears in such popular publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, and The Daily Beast. His TED talk on the death penalty has been viewed more than one million times. His critically acclaimed memoir The Autobiography of an Execution was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the winner of the 200 Barnes and Noble Discover Award for nonfiction. His most recent book, Things I’ve learned from Dying, was published in January 2014.
David M. Eagleman, PhD (top)
Stanford University
Dr. Eagleman is founder and director of the Center for Science and Law. He has authored dozens of academic publications and eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, which increased awareness of the intersection of science and the law in the public dialogue. Dr. Eagleman regularly speaks about science and the legal system on NPR, BBC, and CNN, and his work has been profiled in venues from the New Yorker to the Colbert Report. He was named Science Educator of the Year by the Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Eagleman is a Guggenheim Fellow, a council member on the World Economic Forum, the Chief Science Officer for the Mind Science Foundation, a research fellow in the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and a board member of The Long Now Foundation.
Martha Farah, PhD (top)
University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Farah is the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society. Although much of her career has been devoted to understanding the mechanisms of vision, memory, and executive function in the brain, her work has shifted to the effects of socioeconomic adversity on children’s brain development. Furthermore, she is an expert in the emerging social and ethical issues in neuroscience. In 2008 she was awarded the lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Sciences.
Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD (top)
East Carolina University
Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg joined East Carolina University’s Department of Bioethics & Interdisciplinary Studies in August 2010. He holds a B.A. with honors in philosophy from Wesleyan University, and received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Houston Law Center in 2002. He clerked for a state supreme court justice and practiced pharmaceutical, hospital, and insurance litigation for several years before earning his Ph.D. with distinction in the medical humanities from the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch in 2009. He is trained as an ethicist and interdisciplinary scholar, and his work centers on applied ethics, public health law, and the history of medicine. More specifically, he is interested in population-level ethics, and his current research agenda focuses on public health policy and health inequities.
In addition, he maintains an active research program in the history of medicine, and focuses primarily on two topics in 19th century America: the history of medical imaging (especially X-rays) and the history of pain without lesion. His doctoral dissertation addressed the undertreatment of pain in the U.S., and he has been actively writing, teaching, and speaking on the subject of pain since 2004.
Marc Goodman, MPA, MS-MIS (top)
Singularity University
Mr. Goodman is a global strategist, author, and consultant focused on the disruptive impact of advancing technologies on security, business and international affairs. Over the past twenty years he has built his expertise in next generation security threats such as cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism and information warfare working with organizations such as Interpol, the United Nations, NATO, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the U.S. Government. He founded the Future Crimes Institute to inspire and educate others on the security and risk implications of newly emerging technologies. Mr. Goodman serves as the Global Security Advisor and Chair for Policy and Law at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, a NASA and Google-sponsored educational venture dedicated to using advanced science and technology to address humanity’s grand challenges.
Kent Kiehl, PhD (top)
University of New Mexico
Dr. Kiehl’s laboratory has worked diligently with correctional facilities in New Mexico and beyond to establish the world’s largest database of brain data from incarcerated populations. His lab utilizes a state of the art mobile scanning unit, which can be deployed to remote locations thus reaching populations for which functional brain imaging might otherwise be impossible or severely impractical. These resources and relationships have been instrumental in the investigation of mental health issues that are particularly prevalent in those who are incarcerated, including psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, substance abuse, and externalizing disorders. Dr. Kiehl maintains several ongoing projects with an overall goal of achieving a better understanding of the interaction between brain function, genetics, and environmental factors ultimately informing improved interventions and prevention strategies and promoting better mental health as a whole.
Adam Kolber, JD (top)
Brooklyn Law School
Professor Kolber writes and teaches in the areas of health law, bioethics, criminal law, and neurolaw and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Health, Science, and Public Policy and the Center for Law, Language & Cognition. In 2005, he created the Neuroethics & Law Blog and, in 2006, taught the first law school course devoted to law and neuroscience. He has also taught law and neuroscience topics to federal and state judges as part of a MacArthur Foundation grant. Professor Kolber has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and at NYU Law School's Center for Research in Crime and Justice. His work has been frequently discussed in the media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Read Montague, PhD (top)
Virginia Tech Carilion
Dr. Montague’s work centers broadly on human social cognition, decision-making, and willful choice with a goal of understanding the detailed underlying neurobiology of these functions in health and disease. His work particularly focuses on computational neuroscience—the connection between physical mechanisms present in real neural tissue and the computational functions that these mechanisms embody. Dr. Montague directs the Roanoke Brain Study, a project aimed at understanding decision-making through the lifespan and its relationship to brain development, function, and disease.
Pablo Ormachea, JD (top)
Baylor College of Medicine
Mr. Ormachea is a Research Fellow at the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law and graduate of Harvard Law School, where he won its largest student writing prize, served as co-Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Latino Law Review, and co-Chair of the Harvard Latin American Law Society. He has won several fellowships for international work, both for public service and for research abroad. Mr. Ormachea studies patterns of crime and the efficacy of legislation using qualitative research blended with large-scale database analysis.
Amanda C. Pustilnik, JD (top)
University of Maryland School of Law
Ms. Pustilnik is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law, where she teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Law & Neuroscience. Her current research includes work on models of mind in criminal law, evidentiary issues presented by neuroscientific work on memory, and the role of pain in different legal domains. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, she was a Climenko fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. Before entering the legal academy, she practiced litigation with Covington & Burling and with Sullivan & Cromwell, where she focused on white collar criminal matters. During Spring 2015, Professor Pustilnik will be serving as a Senior Fellow in Law & Neuroscience of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, a collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Law School.
Barry Scheck, JD (top)
Cordozo Law, The Innocence Project
Professor Scheck is known for his landmark litigation that has set standards for forensic applications of DNA technology. Since 1988, his and Peter Neufeld’s work in this area have shaped the course of case law across the country and led to an influential study by the National Academy of Sciences on forensic DNA testing, as well as important state and federal legislation. He and Neufeld coauthored with Jim Dwyer Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted (2000).
Professor Scheck is a commissioner on New York’s Forensic Science Review Board, a body that regulates all of the state’s crime and forensic DNA laboratories. He is first vice-president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and serves on the board of the National Institute of Justice’s Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. In addition to the work he has done through Cardozo’s Innocence Project, which has represented dozens of men who were exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, Scheck has represented such notable clients as Hedda Nussbaum, O. J. Simpson, Louise Woodward, and Abner Louima. Prior to joining the Cardozo faculty, he was a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of New York.
Francis Shen, JD, PhD (top)
University of Minnesota Law School
Professor Shen conducts empirical and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of law and the brain sciences. He is co-authoring the first law coursebook on law and neuroscience (forthcoming, Aspen Publishers), and has explored the implications of cognitive neuroscience for criminal law, tort, and legislation in the United States. Additional research areas of focus are criminal law and crime policy, and education law and policy. In 2009, Dr. Shen joined the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project, at the University of California Santa Barbara, as a post-doctoral research fellow. In 2010-11 he became associate director of the Project and a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt Law School. In 2011-12 he was a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University Law School and The Murphy Institute. His research has been published in a variety of outlets in law, political science, psychology, and education, and he has made more than 50 professional presentations. He has co-authored two books, The Education Mayor (Georgetown, 2007) and The Casualty Gap (Oxford, 2010), and has authored or co-authored 14 articles and 9 book chapters.
Melina Uncapher, PhD (top)
Stanford University
Dr. Uncapher is the CEO and co-founder of the Institute for Applied Neuroscience, a nonprofit dedicated to translating research into real-world impact. The Institute provides pathways for thought leaders in the public and private sectors to connect with academic scientists in order to build programs that solve critical public and social problems. At Stanford University she conducts brain research on how individuals learn and remember with a focus on the role attention plays in memory.
Nicole Vincent, PhD (top)
Georgia State University
Dr. Vincent’s research spans the fields of neuroethics, neurolaw, ethics, philosophy of tort and criminal law, and political philosophy. She has written about such topics as the different meanings of “responsibility,” the compatibility of responsibility and determinism, and medical interventions to make criminal offenders competent for execution. Recent publications include “Restoring Responsibility: Promoting Justice, Therapy, and Reform through Direct Brain Interventions” in the journal Criminal Law and Philosophy and an edited book entitled Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility published in 2013.