SFARI

John Spiro joined the foundation in 2007. He works with the SFARI executive vice president to oversee all aspects of the foundation’s autism research initiatives, including managing a team of scientists and administrative staff involved in launching requests for applications, evaluating proposals and other projects, organizing scientific workshops and meetings and overseeing SFARI.org. He helped launch the Simons Variation in Individuals Project (now Simons Searchlight) and has spearheaded the foundation’s efforts to promote the use of preprints in the life sciences as well as other initiatives aimed at more open data sharing.

Ilan Dinstein is an associate professor in the departments of Psychology and of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ben-Gurion University (BGU), Israel. He received his Ph.D. from the Center for Neural Science at New York University in 2010 and then completed postdoctoral training in the neurobiology department at the Weizmann Institute and the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Paul Jenkins is an assistant professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School. He received his bachelor of science in general biology from the University of Michigan in 2001 and a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Michigan in 2010 under the mentorship of Jeffrey Martens. He continued his training as a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Duke University under the mentorship of Vann Bennett from 2010 to 2015.

David Anderson is the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Anderson received his Ph.D. from the Rockefeller University under Günter Blobel and was a postdoctoral fellow with Richard Axel at Columbia University, becoming a faculty member at CalTech in 1986.

Adi Mizrahi is the Eric Roland Chair in Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from Ben Gurion University and postdoctoral training at Duke University School of Medicine and established his independent laboratory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2005.

Cagla Eroglu is an associate professor at Duke University, having started her laboratory there in 2008. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg and performed postdoctoral work at Stanford University in Ben Barre’s laboratory.

Paul Wang joined Clinical Research Associates (CRA) and the Simons Foundation in 2016. He helps to oversee portions of SFARI's clinical research portfolio, and CRA's work with the experimental drug arbaclofen.

Alan Packer joined the Simons Foundation in 2009 to work with a team of scientists responsible for SFARI's autism grant portfolio, with a particular emphasis on grants in the area of cell and developmental biology, and genetics.