Leadership
Ramon Diaz-Arrastia
Director, PTERC
Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, John McCrae Dickson Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, where hedirects the Clinical TBI Research Center, and is Associate Director for Clinical Research of Penn’s Center for Brain Injuryand Repair (CBIR—a collaboration of over 60 Penn faculty across the School of Medicine, School of Engineering, and School of Arts and Sciences focused on TBI research). Dr. Diaz-Arrastia is an epileptologist with important contributions to the TBI field over the past 25 years,7-13 focusing on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neural injury and neuroregeneration, with the goal of developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERP-funded Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI) Epileptogenesis Project (WX81XWH-19-1-0861), which leverages resources of the TRACK-TBI Consortium to identify novel imaging and molecular biomarkers of PTE, and prospectively assess how PTE and associated comorbidities affect outcome afterTBI. He is also co-PI and Biomarkers Core Leader of TRACK-TBI, a multi- institutional observational study designed to develop precision medicine tools, including neuroimaging and biomarkers, to improve the next generation of clinical trials in TBI. Dr. Diaz-Arrastia has served on several national and international committees related to TBI clinical research and practice, convened by NIH, DoD, VA, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), and the International TBI Research Consortium (InTBNIR). Dr. Diaz-Arrastia also has a long track record of mentoring junior investigators in neurology and TBI, and has been the primary mentor of for 5 NINDS K23 career development awards, and co-mentor of additional career development awards from
Mary Jo "MJ" Pugh
Deputy Director, PTERC
Dr. Mary Jo Pugh, Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah, and the VA Salt Lake City Medical Center. Dr. Pugh is a retired Air Force nurse and a developmental psychologist who studies the long-term sequelae of military exposures. Dr. Pugh is a Fellow of the American Epilepsy Society and the American Academy of Neurology. She is the Principal Investigator of four ERP funded projects, which integrate DoD and VA data with data from self-report surveys, ecological momentary assessment, neuroimaging, and biomarkers from post-9/11 Veterans with TBI, epilepsy, andcontrols. Her work was the first to examine the association of mild TBI and epilepsy in Post-9/11 Veterans, and she has made many seminal contributions to the PTE field.