Our Team
Meet the skilled professionals behind CatalystNeuro's innovative solutions.
Ben Dichter, PhD
Founder
Ben Dichter is the Founder of CatalystNeuro. He received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Program in Bioengineering, in Dr. Edward Chang's lab. There he used electrocorticography (ECoG) to study the neural control of speech in humans. Much of this work focused on how we control the pitch of our voice when we speak and sing. He is now a data scientist consultant for neuroscience labs, focusing on building systems for sharing of data and analyses.
Luiz Tauffer
Lead Neurodata Scientist
Luiz has a BSc in Electrical Engineering, MSc in Biomedical Engineering and am currently at the late stages of his PhD in Computational Neuroscience. His research work has been focused on mathematical modelling of biological systems and behaviour, i.e. machine learning and data science applied to the life sciences. He is currently expanding my work to cover for more general machine learning / data science consultancy and software development.
Alessio Buccino, PhD
Lead Neurodata Scientist
Alessio Buccino has a BSc and MSc in biomedical engineering and an MSc in computer science. During his PhD at the University of Oslo, he explored the use of advanced modeling techniques and engineering solution to improve the state-of-the-art methods in extracellular electrophysiology for high-density neural probes, from spike sorting to selective electrical stimulation. Alessio is the lead architect of the SpikeInterface platform. He is currently an Electrophysiology Pipeline Development Engineer at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, where he builds standardized and efficient pipelines for the analysis of large-scale electrophysiology data.
Heberto Mayorquin, PhD
Sr. Research Software Engineer
Ramón Heberto Martinez Mayorquin holds a B.Sc. in Physics, an M.Sc. in Complexity Science, and a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience. His doctoral research focused on the theoretical and computational study of associative neural networks, such as Hopfield Networks. Throughout his academic journey, he developed a strong interest in software practices that ensure efficient, reproducible, and robust scientific simulations. Combined with his passion for statistics and data wrangling, this has led him to pursue a career at the intersection of research and software engineering, where he continues to refine and expand these interests.
Paul Adkisson
Research Software Engineer
Paul Adkisson holds a B.S. in Neuroscience from UCLA and an M.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins, where he researched electrical stimulation effects on neuronal networks. At CatalystNeuro, he specializes in Python development and data standardization for neuroscience research. He helps labs convert data to NWB and share it on DANDI, making research more accessible worldwide. Outside work, Paul enjoys rock climbing and backpacking.
Anna (Szonja) Weigl
Neurodata Programmer
Szonja comes from the interdisciplinary field between computer science and neuroscience. She holds a BSc and MSc in Info-bionics Engineering, and has experience in software development. She is keen to learn about and to build reliable, scalable, and maintainable data analysis tools and pipelines. Besides working at CatalystNeuro, she is also working at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL) as an Engineer in a research group interested in learning and memory in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Alessandra Trapani, Ph.D.
Research Software Engineer
Dr. Alessandra Trapani received her Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, in the NearLAB. Her thesis project aimed at modeling cerebellar motor functions in a large-scale spiking neural network (CerebNEST project).
Previous Team Members
Cody Baker, Ph.D.
Former Neurodata Scientist
Cody Baker was the lead developer of NeuroConv and NWB Inspector. He led several lab engagements, building custom conversion pipelines for leading labs using state-of-the-art data acquisition equipment.
Julia Sprenger, Ph.D.
Former Research Software Engineer
Julia Sprenger specialized in building efficient, universal API support for diverse electrophysiology data formats using python-neo.
Vincent Provosto
Former Research Software Engineer
Vincent Provosto contributed to CatalystNeuro's software development and data conversion projects.
Garrett Flynn
Former Software Engineer
Garrett Flynn was the lead developer of the NWB GUIDE project at CatalystNeuro.
Felix Pei
Former Research Software Engineer
Felix Pei contributed to CatalystNeuro's data standardization and conversion tools.