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JBRF Board of Directors

THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF JBRF

Jeanne Langer, President
Sisalee M. Hecht, Vice President/Secretary

Keith Franz, Esq., General Counsel

Eugene M. Matalene, Jr., Treasurer
Demitri F. Papolos, M.D.
Janice Papolos
J. Mark Rubenstein

Jeanne Langer

Jeanne Langer brings over fifteen years of business expertise to JBRF. She received her undergraduate degree in marketing and business administration and started her successful career at Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Honeywell Corporation. For almost a decade she worked at KLS Professional Advisors Group where she created the marketing program that turned KLS into the most prestigious advising firm to the legal profession in both New York City and Washington, D.C.

Jeanne Langer became very interested in the field of learning disabilies and special education. She then went on to receive a dual masters in special and regular education from New York University in May 2006.

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Sisalee M. Hecht

Sisalee M. Hecht has personal insight and experience in navigating the educational, social, and medical issues that challenge a bipolar child. Ms. Hecht was the founder of a support group for parents of children with ADD and ADHD and is a founding member of the TriState Support Network for Families with Bipolar Children, a support group formed in 2002 for parents and caregivers from New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut who are raising children and teenagers with early onset bipolar disorder.

Ms. Hecht holds a Masters of Science degree from the Palmer School of Library and Information Science of Long Island University and is currently a reference librarian at a large public library in Bergen County, New Jersey. In addition to having served as Secretary on the executive board of the JBRF, she now serves as the Medical Research Librarian for its Scientific Advisory Council and Professional Listserv. Ms. Hecht and her husband are the parents of a teenage son and daughter.

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Keith Franz, Esq.
General Counsel

Keith S. Franz has been chief litigator in many celebrated civil cases in the state of Maryland and other states, particularly multi-district complex litigation arising from aviation disasters. His work has helped expand Maryland’s Wrongful Death Statute, and he is regarded as a legal authority on victim’s rights and lectures frequently on the subject.

For the past 15 years, Mr. Franz has provided substantial pro bono work for Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and serves as MADD’s representative on the Governor’s Task Force for Crime Victim’s Rights.

Keith Franz is a member of the Maryland State Bar Association and has been elected or appointed to positions on the Democratic State Central Committee, the U.S. Presidential Electoral College, and the National Crime Victims Bar Association, among others.

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Eugene M. Matalene, Jr.
Treasurer

Since graduating in the top ten of his class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, Eugene Matalene has had a wealth of business experience. He worked in corporate finance for eight years at Kidder, Peabody & Company, Incorporated becoming a vice president, and then a first vice president in the Investment Banking Division of Drexel Burnham Lambert.

In April 1987, Mr. Matalene joined Paine Webber’s Investment Banking Division, and from 1990-1996, was Managing Director and the Chief Operating Officer of that Division. He was also President and a director of Paine Webber Development Corporation, a three-hundred million dollar equity fund, and a director of Paine Weber Properties which managed or controlled commercial and residential properties with a value in excess of one billion dollars.

Mr. Matalene next became Group Head of Private Placements where he was responsible for all private securities marketing activities from bank debt to equity with an emphasis on high yield and equity securities.

Today, Eugene Matalene is a director and consultant for a variety of companies, including serving as Vice Chairman of a large foodservice business where he is also a member of both the Audit and Compensation committees.

He is the father of two children, one of whom has bipolar disorder.

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Demitri F. Papolos, M.D.

Dr. Demitri Papolos is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Co-Director of the Program in Behavioral Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Papolos received his M.D. from New York Medical College, and took his psychiatric residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of the Columbia University College of Physicians an Surgeons.

After completing his residency, Dr. Papolos joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as an attending psychiatrist at Jaccobi Hospital. He later moved to the Montefiore Medical Center to become Director of Inpatient Psychiatry and Director of the Treatment Refractory Depression Research Unit. In 1990, with the support of the Ruane Family Foundation, a NARSAD Investigator Award, and an NIMH Physician/Scientist Career Development Award, Dr. Papolos teamed with Dr. Herbert Lachman to establish the Program in Behavioral Genetics at Einstein. The focus of their work was on the novel action of lithium salts on gene expression and the investigation of stress-related animal models of depression.

More recently, Dr. Papolos and his collaborators at Einstein and SUNY-Syracuse have been pursuing a line of inquiry that originated from their study of children and adolescents with an unusual genetic condition known as velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS). They found that a high rate of VCFS patients have bipolar spectrum disorders, and that the behavioral symptoms that arise appear to have a developmental sequence that parallels the pattern of symptom development they have since discovered in patients with childhood-onset bipolar disorder, who were ascertained from the general population.

Because the emergence of the medical and psychiatric symptoms in VCFS is associated with a micro deletion on chromosome 22, their finding may be the first direct link of a psychiatric illness to a discrete molecular target. In an extension of this diagnostic study of VCFS children, a positive allelic association was found between a variant of the COMT gene and ultra-ultra rapid cycling – a pattern of cycling most commonly expressed in childhood-onset bipolar disorder. Prompted by these findings, Dr. Papolos and colleagues examined adult patients with de novo rapid-cycling bipolar disorder from the general population, and again found an association between the low-activity COMT allele and this form of the disorder, a finding that has been confirmed by an independent research team. Following the publication of this work in the American Journal of Psychiatry , the American Journal of Human Genetics, and in Molecular Psychiatry, the COMT gene has become one of the most actively studied genetic variants in psychiatric genetics.

Dr. Papolos edited the monograph Genetic Studies in Affective Disorders, (John Wiley & Sons, 1994), and is the co-author with his wife, Janice, of Overcoming Depression, Third Edition (HarperCollins,1997), the most comprehensive book written for the lay person on depression and manic-depression. The book is now in its 35th printing. Demitri Papolos is also the co-author of the highly acclaimed book, The Bipolar Child, which has been featured on ABC News's 20/20, the Oprah Winfrey Show and Public Radios’s The Infinite Mind. Dr. Papolos also has a private practice in New York City and in Westport, CT.

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Janice Papolos

Janice Papolos is co-author of the book, The Bipolar Child, which won the NAMI Ken Award as an “outstanding book which has substantially contributed to the public’s awareness and better understanding of mental illness as a neurobiological brain disease.” It has had 17 printings in hardcover to date, and a revised hardcover edition was published in September 2002. It is currently being translated into Japanese.

Miss Papolos is the author of three other books, all considered definitive in their fields. Her second book, Overcoming Depression, 3rd Edition (also co-authored with her husband, Demitri Papolos, M.D.) was ranked as “One of the Top Ten Books of the Decade” by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and has returned to press over 35 times. It has been translated into Polish as well as Italian.

Janice Papolos was a co-founder of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation. In addition to her serving on the board of the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation, she publishes The Bipolar Child Newsletter which is subscribed to by over 20,000 parents and professionals throughout this country and abroad. She is a powerful advocate for families of children with bipolar disorder and has appeared on Oprah, 20/20, The Infinite Mind and on television and radio shows throughout the country in order to bring attention to this disorder of childhood.

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J. Mark Rubenstein

Throughout his career, Mark Rubenstein has been involved in the planning, development and implementation of various business and marketing models. His career has encompassed three distinct areas in the past two decades: financial services, product manufacture and distribution, and the design and marketing of telecommunications products and services.

In 1995, Mr. Rubenstein founded Centerpiece Communications, Inc., a telecommunications product design and distribution organization. Through targeted marketing and the development of retail distribution channels throughout the United States and Europe, Centerpiece reached a monthly sales volume of over $1.3 million by the end of 1997. In February 1998, Centerpiece was acquired by GTS, a facilities-based prepaid phone card provider. Mr. Rubenstein served as Executive Vice President of GTS until November 1998.

Currently Mark Rubenstein is a managing partner in and director of business development for several telecommunications companies, CTW Prepaid, LLC, Firstusebilling.com, and Telcon holdings. In his role as Director of Business Development, he is instrumental in initiating and developing relationships with key partners throughout the telecommunications industry.

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