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 leads CatalystNeuro's work on data standards and data sharing for neurophysiology, including the NWB standard, the DANDI Archive, and the open-source software around them.
Luiz Tauffer
Lead Neurodata Scientist
Luiz Tauffer has a BSc in Electrical Engineering and an MSc in Biomedical Engineering, and did doctoral research in computational neuroscience. His research focused on mathematical modeling of biological systems and behavior, applying machine learning and data science to the life sciences. At CatalystNeuro he builds data conversion pipelines and software tools for neurophysiology labs.
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 primarily based at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, where he builds standardized pipelines for the analysis of large-scale electrophysiology data, and works with CatalystNeuro on SpikeInterface and electrophysiology projects.
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-Floro
Research Software Engineer
Paul Adkisson-Floro 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.
Szonja Weigl
Research Software Engineer
Szonja comes from the interdisciplinary field between computer science and neuroscience. She holds a BSc and MSc in Info-Bionics Engineering from Pázmány Péter Catholic University Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics. She brings experience in software development and a passion for building reliable, scalable, and maintainable data analysis tools and pipelines. What she enjoys most about assisting labs convert data to NWB is that every project is unique — each one brings new challenges and opportunities to grow. Outside of work, she loves traveling, rock climbing, and painting.
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).
Eivind Hennestad
Research Software Engineer
Eivind Hennestad received an MSc from the University of Oslo, where he studied the vestibular system and gained expertise in diverse neurophysiology data modalities. He is a talented MATLAB developer, and the lead developer for the MatNWB library.
