Sonya B. Dumanis, PhD

Dr. Sonya Dumanis is the Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Aligning Science, where she provides strategic guidance on both the design and implementation phases of portfolio programs and mentors scientific staff across the initiatives under the Coalition’s management. She also serves as the Deputy Director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), providing operational oversight to the programs under the ASAP umbrella. 

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, and the Epilepsy Innovation Institute, an innovation incubator tackling high-risk projects in the epilepsy space. She continues to co-direct the Epilepsy Startup Accelerator Course and serves as an advisor for the Diagnostics & Tracking Research Roundtable for Epilepsy.

Dr. Dumanis completed her postdoctoral training at both the Johns Hopkins University and the Max-Delbrück Center in Berlin, Germany. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from Georgetown University. She has authored numerous scientific articles and received a number of 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.