Neuroscience Departments and Program Workshop

Lique M. Coolen, PhD, MBA 

Lique Coolen is a neuroscientist in the Brain Health Research Institute and Professor in the department of Biological Sciences at Kent State. She previously held faculty positions at the University of Cincinnati, University of Western Ontario, University of Michigan, and University of Mississippi Medical Center. She has received numerous awards for her research and teaching and has published over 140 papers and book chapters describing her research on spinal cord injury, neuroendocrine function, and drug addiction. Her research has been continuously funded by NIH and other federal agencies, and she is named one of the world’s top 2% scientists in her field by Stanford University. 

Dr. Coolen has served in numerous leadership roles, including Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development, and Director of Office of Postdoctoral Studies at Kent State University and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Currently she serves in the Division of Academic Affairs as Assistant for Special Projects to the Provost and Senior Vice President at Kent State University, where she leads numerous initiatives to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility for STEM trainees and faculty, to enrich professional development for postdoctoral trainees, and to develop new projects for economic and community engagement. In addition, she serves as Chair of the Neuroscience Training Committee for the Society of Neuroscience and develops curriculum for professional development and training for students, faculty, and administrators in higher education. 

Tori Espensen, PhD  

Tori Espensen is the Media Training Manager at SciLine, a program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that aims to facilitate the incorporation of scientific evidence and expertise into news stories. Her scientist and journalist training programs help both groups learn to work better together to bring accurate, engaging scientific evidence to general audiences. Before transitioning to science communication, Tori received a Ph.D. in Biological Psychopathology from the University of Minnesota. 

Gundula Bosch, PhD  

As an interdisciplinary scientist and Research Professor with joint appointments at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health and Education, Dr. Bosch’s scholarly focus lies on intervention and implementation science in graduate and post-graduate education. In her main function as Director of the R3 Center for Innovation in Science Education (R3ISE) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr. Bosch developed and leads the R3 Graduate Science Programs (PMID: 29259084; PMID: 29446388) that stand for “the three R’s” of good scientific practice: Rigor in research conduct, Reproducibility of results, and Responsibility of scientists to society.  

Under Dr. Bosch’s guidance and informed by own and others’ meta-science research, the R3ISE Team brings formal approaches in critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, sound research methodology, interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical decision-making, responsible communication, and social justice into graduate and professional training across the health and STEM disciplines (PMID: 35570294; PMID: 37289659). The R3 Programs are based on a strong ethical and philosophical mandate aiming to develop broadly interested practitioners who will be poised to become role models and mentors for good scientific practice.  

Through the global R3ISEnetwork of scientist-educators, these training experiences are available to all graduate and post-graduate trainees at Johns Hopkins, as well as national and international partner institutions.  

Michael N. Lehman, PhD 

Michael Neal Lehman is the inaugural Director of the Brain Health Research Institute, and Professor of Biological Sciences, at Kent State University in Ohio. Dr. Lehman is an accomplished neuroscientist and reproductive biologist who has made seminal contributions to the fields of neuroendocrinology and circadian rhythms research. He has published over 190 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and reviews, including publications in Science, Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, and Endocrinology. Dr. Lehman’s lab has been funded continually by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation and other national funidng agencies in the U.S. and Canada for nearly 40 years. 

Dr. Lehman received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology-Psychology from Wesleyan University in 1975, and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 1982. His prior academic and professional appointments include positions as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurobiology & Anatomical Sciences, and Chairman of the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC); Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and co-Director of the Reproductive Sciences Program at the University of Michigan; Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada; and Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Anatomy, and Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program, at the University of Cincinnati. An active researcher, Dr. Lehman has served on numerous grant review panels at NIH and other agencies. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Fundamental and Mechanistic Neuroendocrinology strand of the Journal of Neuroendocrinology, and also serves as Associate Editor for Neuroscience for Experimental Biology and Medicine. He also serves as Subject Chair for the Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) of Scopus (Elsevier), the world’s largest database of scholarly literature and citations. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), of the American Association of Anatomy (AAA), and of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine (SEBM). In 2018, he was awarded the Distinguished Scientist Award from the SEBM and is their current President-Elect. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), and is presently FASEB’s Vice President for Science Policy.  

Dr. Lehman has played major leadership roles developing interdisciplinary neuroscience research, education, and healthcare at academic medical centers in the U.S. and Canada. At the University of Cincinnati, he obtained formal accreditation for the Neuroscience Graduate Program and served as Director of its first NIH T32 training grant. He served as President of the Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs from 2007-2008, and Co-Chair of the Professional Development Committee of the Society for Neuroscience from 2010-2014. As Department Chair at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, he led the creation of a university-wide neuroscience institute integrating research, education and healthcare. Joining Kent State in January 2019, he has led development of the Brain Health Research Institute as a multi- and transdisciplinary vehicle for collaborative research and education across a wide range of areas in neuroscience. 

Christophe Bernard, PhD 

Christophe Bernard is Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Inserm U1106, in Marseilles, France. He obtained a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Paris VI university, did his postdoc at Southampton University, and did a sabbatical In Houston (Baylor). His main interest is to understand brain dynamics in health and disease, with a focus on epilepsy (Michael Prize). He participated in the development of organic technologies to record and control brain activity (Felix Innovation Prize) and in The Virtual Mouse Brain (a platform that allows the virtualization of individual mouse brain to study whole brain dynamics in silico). He created and is the Editor in Chief of eNeuro, the online open access journal of the Society for Neuroscience. He acts as a reviewing editor for Science Advances, and formerly for Science and Journal of Neuroscience.