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CURRICULUM VITAE

Leonardo Fernandino PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Neurology
Division of General

OFFICE ADDRESS:
Medical Education Building
8701 Watertown Plank Rd
Milwaukee, WI 53226

EDUCATION:
02/1997 - 07/2001 B.A., Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
08/2003 - 03/2005 M.A., University of California, Los Angeles, CA
04/2005 - 11/2009 Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, CA

POSTGRADUATE TRAINING AND FELLOWSHIP APPOINTMENTS:
11/2009 - 11/2010 Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Neurology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
11/2010 - 08/2015 Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Neurology, The Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd, Milwaukee, WI 53226

FACULTY APPOINTMENTS:
07/2016 - Present Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd, MEB 4671, Milwaukee, WI 53226
09/2019 - Present Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd, MEB 4671, Milwaukee, WI 53226
12/2021 - Present Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, The Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd, Milwaukee, WI 53226

AWARDS AND HONORS:
2000 - 2001 PIBIC Fellowship, National Science Council (CNPq), Brazil
08/2001 - 06/2002 International Exchange Fellowship, UFMG, Brazil
08/2003 - 06/2004 Distinguished Achievement Fellowship, UCLA
07/2005 - 08/2005 Excellence in Research Award, Dept. of Psychology, UCLA
07/2006 - 08/2006 Fellow, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Tokyo, Japan
07/2006 - 08/2006 Psychology Summer Mentorship Research Award, UCLA
08/2006 Fellow, Training Course in fMRI, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2007 Fellow, Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, UC Santa Barbara
08/2008 - 06/2009 Dissertation Year Fellowship, Dept. of Psychology, UCLA
04/02/2012 Postdoctoral Fellow Award ($500), Cognitive Neuroscience Society
06/2015 Fellow, NITP Summer Program in Advanced fMRI, UCLA
09/06/2015 Herder/Jan Wind Prize (£5, 000). Theme: Embodied Language and Neuroscience
2019 Community of Innovators, Medical College of Wisconsin

MEMBERSHIPS IN HONORARY AND PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES:
Cognitive Neuroscience Society
Organization for Human Brain Mapping
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Society for the Neurobiology of Language
Association for Psychological Science
Society for Neuroscience

EDITORSHIPS/EDITORIAL BOARDS/JOURNAL REVIEWS:
Editorship
02/21/2022 - 12/01/2023 Guest editor of special issue for the journal Neuropsychologia
Ad-Hoc Reviewer
09/19/2022 Peer review, Journal of Experimental Psychology - General
11/10/2022 Peer review, Scientific Data
11/13/2022 Peer review, Neurobiology of Language
02/10/2023 Review of a book proposal for Cambridge University Press
05/15/2023 Peer review, Brain and Language

LOCAL/REGIONAL APPOINTED LEADERSHIP AND COMMITTEE POSITIONS:
07/01/2021 - Present Department representative, Faculty Council, Medical College of Wisconsin

INTERNATIONAL ELECTED/APPOINTED LEADERSHIP AND COMMITTEE POSITIONS:
01/01/2016 - 12/31/2018 Member, Communications Committee, Organization for Human Brain Mapping

RESEARCH GRANTS/AWARDS/CONTRACTS/PROJECTS:
Active
Peer Review
Title:
Center for Aphasia Research and Recovery
Source:
Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin
Role:
Co-Investigator
PI:
J.R. Binder
Dates:
01/01/2023 - 12/31/2024
Direct Funds:
$250,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Decoding mental concept identities using electrocorticography
Source:
NIH/NIDCD
Role:
Co-Investigator
PI:
W. Gross
Dates:
05/01/2023 - 04/30/2026
Direct Funds:
$585,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Neural Representation of Lexical Concepts
Source:
NIH/NIDCD
Role:
PI
PI:
L. Fernandino
Dates:
04/01/2024 - 03/31/2029
Direct Funds:
$1,979,000 (total for all years)
  
Prior
Peer Review
Title:
Sensory-Motor Systems and Conceptual Processing in the
Source:
NIH Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
Role:
Post-doctoral researcher
PI:
Rutvik Desai
Dates:
11/01/2010 - 11/30/2012
Direct Funds:
$1,900,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Knowledge Representation as Embodied Abstractions
Source:
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Role:
Post-doctoral researcher
PI:
M. Aguilar
Dates:
09/01/2013 - 08/31/2014
Direct Funds:
$8,400,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
The Epilepsy Connectome Project
Source:
NIH Neurological Disorders and Stroke
Role:
Co-Investigator
PI:
Jeffrey R. Binder
Dates:
08/24/2015 - 06/30/2019
Direct Funds:
$5,100,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
MEG of Lexical Concept Representations
Source:
Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin
Role:
Co-PI
PI:
L. Conant/L. Fernandino
Dates:
01/25/2016 - 02/28/2017
Direct Funds:
$25,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Decoding semantic representations through neural encoding models
Source:
MCW Research Affairs Committee
Role:
Principal Investigator
PI:
Leonardo Fernandino
Dates:
01/01/2018 - 12/31/2018
Direct Funds:
$25,000
  
Title:
Concept Representation in the Human Brain
Source:
NIH Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
Role:
Co-Investigator
PI:
Jeffrey R. Binder
Dates:
08/01/2018 - 07/31/2023
Direct Funds:
$3,000,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Neural Representation of Animal and Artifact Concepts
Source:
Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment
Role:
Principal Investigator
PI:
Leonardo Fernandino
Dates:
12/03/2020 - 12/02/2022
Direct Funds:
$20,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Verb Representation in the Human Brain
Source:
Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment
Role:
Co-Investigator
PI:
Lisa Conant
Dates:
12/03/2020 - 12/02/2022
Direct Funds:
$20,000 (total for all years)
  
Title:
Localizing critical areas for concept identification with fMRI
Source:
CNRP - Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin
Role:
Co-Investigator
PI:
William Gross
Dates:
12/03/2021 - 12/02/2023
Direct Funds:
$20,000 (total for all years)
  

INVITED LECTURES/WORKSHOPS/PRESENTATIONS:
Local
Leonardo Fernandino, The Neural Basis of Semantic Representation and Composition, UCLA Brain Mapping Seminar, University of California Los Angeles, 05/28/2009
Leonardo Fernandino, Testing and Refining the Embodied Simulation Approach to Semantics, Cognitive Forum, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 11/01/2013
Leonardo Fernandino, Investigating the Neural Code of Conceptual Representations, Department of Biophysics Graduate Seminar Series, Medical College of Wisconsin, 11/21/2014
 
International
Leonardo Fernandino, ERP Studies of Compositional Semantics, Department of Germanic Linguistics Seminar, University of Marburg, Germany, 06/11/2010
Leonardo Fernandino, On the representational content and neuroanatomic architecture of conceptual knowledge, PICNIC Seminar, Institut du Cerveau – ICM, Paris, France, 03/22/2022
 

PEER REVIEWED WORKSHOPS/PRESENTATIONS:
International
Fernandino, L., Conant, L., Binder, J.R., Blindauer, K., Hiner, B., Spangler, K., Desai, R.H., Parkinson's Disease Selectively Disrupts Processing of Action Verbs, 3rd Neurobiology of Language Conference, Annapolis, 11/11/2011
Fernandino, L., Conant, L., Binder, J.R., Blindauer, K., Hiner, B., Spangler, K., Desai, R.H., Where Is the Action? Action Sentence Processing in Parkinson's Disease, Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting, Chicago, 04/02/2012
Fernandino, L., Humphries, C., Seidenberg, M.S., Conant, L., Binder, J.R., Decoding Conceptual Information from Heteromodal Cortex, 45th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Chicago, 10/19/2015
L. Fernandino, J. Tong, S. Mazurchuk, L. Conant, J. Binder, Experiential features outperform taxonomic and distributional models in predicting neuroimaging and behavioral data, 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA, 04/24/2022
J.-Q. Tong, L. Fernandino, S. Mazurchuk, L.L. Conant, J.R. Binder, A Common Neural Mechanism Underlying Object and Event Concept Representation, 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA, 04/26/2022
Stephen Mazurchuk, Leonardo Fernandino, Jia-Qing Tong, Lisa L Conant, Jeffrey R Binder, An Experiential Basis for Posterior Middle Temporal Gyrus Body Part Concept Representation, 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA, 04/26/2022
Gross, W.L., Fernandino, L., Conant, L.L., Krucoff, M.O., Mueller, W.M., Raghavan, M., Binder, J.R., Electrocortical activity during semantic retrieval is modulated by feature modality, 28th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Glasgow, Scotland, 06/19/2022
Stephen Mazurchuk, Leonardo Fernandino, Jia-Qing Tong, Lisa L Conant, Jeffrey R Binder, Activation of Speech, Taste, and Visual Scene Experiential Content During Concept Retrieval, 13th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neurobiology of Language, Philadelphia, PA, 10/07/2022
Jiaqing Tong, Leonardo Fernandino, Stephen Mazurchuk, Lisa L. Conant, Jeffrey R. Binder, Category-specific representation of animal, food, tool, and vehicle concepts in the brain, 13th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neurobiology of Language, Philadelphia, 10/07/2022
 

COMMITTEE SERVICE:
Medical College of Wisconsin
08/01/2017 - Present Member, Departmental Website Committee, Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin
08/07/2022 - Present Member, Curriculum & Programs Committee, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Medical College of Wisconsin
 

MEDICAL COLLEGE TEACHING ACTIVITIES:
Medical Student Education
10/18/2022 Patient-Based Discussion facilitator
 
Resident and Fellow Education
11/18/2016 Lecture on principles of functional MRI
 
Continuing Medical Education
01/20/2023 Neurology Grand Rounds presentation
 
Graduate Student Education
03/30/2021 - 05/30/2021 Co-instructor - Course 16277 Cognitive Neuroscience
03/28/2023 - 05/04/2023 Co-instructor for INBS 16277 Cognitive Neuroscience. Three lectures, 2 exams.
 

MCW STUDENTS, FACULTY, RESIDENTS AND CLINICAL/RESEARCH FELLOWS MENTORED:
Medical Students
Shana Snarrenberg, Medical College of Wisconsin, 05/15/2019 - 08/15/2019 MD/PhD summer research rotation, Data analysis pipeline in Python
 
Graduate Students
PhD Students Advised
Jia-Qing (Tony) Tong, Medical College of Wisconsin, 06/01/2017 - 09/27/2022
Stephen Mazurchuk, Medical College of Wisconsin, 2019 - Present
 

EXTRAMURAL STUDENTS, FACULTY, RESIDENTS, AND CLINICAL/RESEARCH FELLOWS MENTORED:
High School Students
A. Murali, Shorewood High School, 06/2013 - 08/2013 (Research mentor)
 
Undergraduate Students
T. Abaryan, UCLA, 03/2007 - 12/2007 (Research mentor)
A. Cho, UCLA, 01/2008 - 10/2009 (Research mentor)
H. Schwimmer, UCLA, 04/2008 - 06/2009 (Research mentor)
M. Frias, UCLA, 09/2008 - 06/2009 (Research mentor)
M. Lyseight, UCLA, 10/2008 - 06/2009 (Research mentor)
T. Kalmus, Carroll University, 02/2017 - 05/2017 (Research mentor)
E. Tong, UCLA, - 2009 winter 2009 (Research mentor)
T. Shevavesh, UCLA, - 2008 spring 2008 (Research mentor)
F. Basson, UCLA, - 2008 spring 2008 (Research mentor)
R. Veliz, UCLA, - 2008 spring 2008 (Research mentor)
E. Huang, UCLA, - 2009 spring/summer 2009 (Research mentor)
J. Dickenson, UCLA, - 2009 spring 2009 (Research mentor)
A. Robin, UCLA, - 2009 spring 2009 (Research mentor)
N. Okamoto, UCLA, - 2006 spring 2006 (Research mentor)
D. Garcia, UCLA, - 2009 summer 2009 (Research mentor)
E. Garcia, UCLA, - 2008 summer 2008 (Research mentor)
Y. R. Kang, UCLA, - 2008 fall 2008 (Research mentor)
F. Rahmani, UCLA, - 2008 spring 2008 (Research mentor)
 

COMMUNITY SERVICE ACTIVITIES:
10/2012 - 01/2013 Science fair mentor to students at St. Matthias Parish School
11/2013 - 01/2014 Science fair mentor to students at St. Matthias Parish School
12/2015 - 04/2016 Science fair mentor to students at Wauwatosa STEM School
08/01/2016 - 05/30/2017 Lead organizer of the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center Science Club.
01/2017 - 04/2017 Science fair mentor to students at Wauwatosa STEM School
12/01/2017 - 03/31/2018 Lead organizer of MCW BrainExpo 2018.
09/01/2018 - 03/31/2019 Lead organizer of MCW BrainExpo 2019.
01/07/2023 - 03/05/2023 Created all the content for an exhibit on brain evolution for the MCW BrainExpo 2023 (2 large posters, 7 hominid skull replicas, brain models for 7 vertebrate species, and descriptive labels for each one).
02/13/2023 Presentation on the neuroscience of language meaning at the Sugar Maple (Bayview), organized by the Underground Science Society.
03/10/2023 - 03/11/2023 Lead organizer of MCW BrainExpo 2023, a 2-day event with 60 volunteers, 3 speakers, 11 exhibits, and over 500 attendees from Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha, and Chicago.
03/10/2023 Lecture on the principles of neuroscience at MCW BrainExpo.
05/18/2023 Presentation on brain development and memory at Pureal Ministries (2122 N Halyard St) as part of the CTSI Science Café.
 

ROBERT D. AND PATRICIA E. KERN INSTITUTE FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF MEDICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONAL TRANSFORMATION NETWORK ACTIVITIES:
07/19/2021 - 06/02/2022 2021-2022 KINETIC3 Teaching Academy (Excellence in Teaching Track)
 

FELLOWSHIP REVIEWER:
05/08/2023 Expert review of fellowship application, Graduate Women in Science (GWIS) National Fellowship Program (https://www.gwis.org).


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Refereed Journal Publications/Original Papers
1. Fernandino L, Iacoboni M, Zaidel E. The effects of bilateral presentations on lateralized lexical decision. Brain Cogn. 2007 Jun;64(1):60-7.
2. Fernandino L, Iacoboni M. Are cortical motor maps based on body parts or coordinated actions? Implications for embodied semantics. Brain Lang. 2010 Jan;112(1):44-53.
3. Cho S, Moody TD, Fernandino L, Mumford JA, Poldrack RA, Cannon TD, Knowlton BJ, Holyoak KJ. Common and dissociable prefrontal loci associated with component mechanisms of analogical reasoning. Cereb Cortex. 2010 Mar;20(3):524-33.
4. Fernandino L, Conant LL, Binder JR, Blindauer K, Hiner B, Spangler K, Desai RH. Parkinson's disease disrupts both automatic and controlled processing of action verbs. Brain Lang. 2013 Oct;127(1):65-74. PMCID: PMC3574625
5. Fernandino L, Conant LL, Binder JR, Blindauer K, Hiner B, Spangler K, Desai RH. Where is the action? Action sentence processing in Parkinson's disease. Neuropsychologia. 2013 Jul;51(8):1510-7. PMCID: PMC3731159
6. Fernandino L, Humphries CJ, Seidenberg MS, Gross WL, Conant LL, Binder JR. Predicting brain activation patterns associated with individual lexical concepts based on five sensory-motor attributes. Neuropsychologia. 2015 Sep;76:17-26. PMCID: PMC4638171
7. Fernandino L, Binder JR, Desai RH, Pendl SL, Humphries CJ, Gross WL, Conant LL, Seidenberg MS. Concept Representation Reflects Multimodal Abstraction: A Framework for Embodied Semantics. Cereb Cortex. 2016 May;26(5):2018-34. PMCID: PMC4830284
8. Fernandino L, Humphries CJ, Conant LL, Seidenberg MS, Binder JR. Heteromodal Cortical Areas Encode Sensory-Motor Features of Word Meaning. J Neurosci. 2016 Sep 21;36(38):9763-9. PMCID: PMC5030346
9. Binder JR, Conant LL, Humphries CJ, Fernandino L, Simons SB, Aguilar M, Desai RH. Toward a brain-based componential semantic representation. Cogn Neuropsychol. 2016;33(3-4):130-74.
10. Anderson AJ, Binder JR, Fernandino L, Humphries CJ, Conant LL, Aguilar M, Wang X, Doko D, Raizada RDS. Predicting Neural Activity Patterns Associated with Sentences Using a Neurobiologically Motivated Model of Semantic Representation. Cereb Cortex. 2017 Sep 01;27(9):4379-4395.
11. Anderson AJ, Lalor EC, Lin F, Binder JR, Fernandino L, Humphries CJ, Conant LL, Raizada RDS, Grimm S, Wang X. Multiple Regions of a Cortical Network Commonly Encode the Meaning of Words in Multiple Grammatical Positions of Read Sentences. Cereb Cortex. 2019 Jun 01;29(6):2396-2411.
12. Anderson AJ, Binder JR, Fernandino L, Humphries CJ, Conant LL, Raizada RDS, Lin F, Lalor EC. An Integrated Neural Decoder of Linguistic and Experiential Meaning. J Neurosci. 2019 Nov 06;39(45):8969-8987. PMCID: PMC6832686
13. Anderson AJ, Kiela D, Binder JR, Fernandino L, Humphries CJ, Conant LL, Raizada RDS, Grimm S, Lalor EC. Deep Artificial Neural Networks Reveal a Distributed Cortical Network Encoding Propositional Sentence-Level Meaning. J Neurosci. 2021 May 05;41(18):4100-4119. PMCID: PMC8176751
14. Fernandino L, Tong JQ, Conant LL, Humphries CJ, Binder JR. Decoding the information structure underlying the neural representation of concepts. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Feb 08;119(6). PMCID: PMC8832989
15. Tong J, Binder JR, Humphries C, Mazurchuk S, Conant LL, Fernandino L. A Distributed Network for Multimodal Experiential Representation of Concepts. J Neurosci. 2022 Sep 14;42(37):7121-7130. PMCID: PMC9480893
16. Fernandino L, Conant LL. The Primacy of Experience in Language Processing: Semantic Priming Is Driven Primarily by Experiential Similarity. bioRxiv. 2023 Dec 18. PMCID: PMC10055357
17. Mazurchuk S, Conant LL, Tong JQ, Binder JR, Fernandino L. Stimulus repetition and sample size considerations in item-level representational similarity analysis. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 2023: 1-12.
18. Uddin LQ, Fernandino L, Neta M, Greene DJ, Mooshagian E. Hemispheric specialization and interhemispheric interaction - From perception to consciousness: Introduction to a special issue in honor of Eran Zaidel (1944-2021). Neuropsychologia. 2023 Dec 15;191:108725.
19. Fernandino L, Binder JR. How does the "default mode" network contribute to semantic cognition? Brain Lang. 2024 May;252:105405.
 
Books, Chapters, and Reviews
1. Binder, J.R., Fernandino, L. Semantic Processing. In A. W. Toga (Ed.), Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference (pp. 445–454). 2015. Elsevier. http://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-.
2. Binder, J. R., Fernandino, L. . Neural processing of word meaning The Cognitive Neurosciences VI. Binder, J. R., Fernandino, L. (2020). Neural processing of word meaning. In: The Cognitive Neurosciences VI, Poeppel D, Mangun GR, Gazzaniga MS, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge..