Sonya Dumanis

Dr. Sonya Dumanis is the Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Aligning Science and Deputy Director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, a flagship initiative under the Coalitions’ management, whose mission is to accelerate the pace of discovery and inform the path to a cure for Parkinson’s Disease through facilitating collaboration, generating research enable resources, and data sharing.

Previously, Dr. Dumanis was the Vice President of Research and Innovation at the Epilepsy Foundation. While there, she oversaw the growth of the Epilepsy Therapy Project, an entrepreneurship incubator providing seed funding and mentorship to epilepsy startups, launched the Epilepsy Innovation Institute, an innovation incubator tackling high-risk projects in the epilepsy space. Prior to joining the Epilepsy Foundation in 2016, she worked at the Milken Institute Center for Strategic Philanthropy, tasked with identifying philanthropic opportunities poised to have a transformative impact on the state of research and developing research programs.

Dr. Dumanis completed her postdoctoral training at both the Johns Hopkins University and the Max-Delbrück Center in Berlin, Germany. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Georgetown University. She has authored over 25 scientific articles and received several honors, including an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation fellowship, a national research service award from the National Institutes of Health, the Harold N Glassman Award for best science dissertation at Georgetown University, and the Mark A. Smith prize from the Journal of Neurochemistry.