Joav Merrick, MD, MMedSci, DMSc, (Medical Director, Health Services, Division for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Services, Jerusalem, Israel; Division of Adolescent Medicine, KY Children’s Hospital, Department of Pediatrics, Lexington, Kentucky, US; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Jerusalem, Israel; Division of Pediatrics, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Centers, Mt Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel; School of Public Health, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, US)

Gerry Leisman, MD, PhD, BCFM is an Israeli neuroscientist educated in the United Kingdom and the United States in medicine, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at the University of Manchester, the City University of New York, and Union University. He holds the position of Director of the National Institute for Brain and Rehabilitation Sciences-Israel in Nazareth, Israel and Professor of Rehabilitation Sciences in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at O.R.T.-Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel, Israel. He is also Professor of Restorative Neurology at the Universidad de Ciencias Medicas de la Habana, Faculdad Manuel Fajardo, Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Havana Cuba. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Functional Neurology, Rehabilitation and Ergonomics. He has been active since the early 1970s in the promotion of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been particularly influential in arguing that consciousness can now be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology and understood by mechanisms of theoretical physics. He has also been influential in examining mechanisms of self-organizing systems in the brain and nervous system for cognitive function exemplified by his work in optimization, memory, kinesiology, consciousness, death, autism and dyslexia. It is in this context that he was one of the first to identify functional disconnectivities in the brain and nervous system.