Genetics & Genomics 2019

Since June 2011, Dr. Harris has served as the Senior Vice President of Translational Medicine at Biogen Idec. Dr. Harris has served as the Director of the Advanced Technology Program at SAIC Frederick since 2007 and Chief Technology Officer for SAIC Frederick since 2008. Prior to ... holding these positions, he served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Novasite Pharmaceuticals Inc. from January 2005 to September 2006. Prior to that, he served as Chief Executive Officer for Structural GenomiX, Inc., a drug discovery and development company focused on innovative cancer therapeutics from 2003 to 2004 and as its President and Chief Executive Officer from 1999 to 2003. Dr. Harris started his career in biotechnology in 1981 as a group leader in Molecular Biology at Celltech Group and from 1989 to 1993 was Director of Biotechnology at Glaxo Group Research in the U.K. From 1993 until 1999, Dr. Harris was Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of Research and Development at Sequana Therapeutics Inc. in San Diego, which became Axys Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 1998 and was subsequently acquired by Celera Genomics. During the past five years, Dr. Harris has served on the board of directors of Dendreon Corporationration and he currently serves on the boards of directors of Origen Therapeutics, Inc. and Gyrasol Technologies and is Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of Bionomics Inc. in Australia.

Amina Abubakar, PharmD, AAHIVP, is the owner of Rx Clinic Pharmacy in Charlotte, NC. She graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy University of the Sciences in 2005. She is also both the founder and President of the Avant Institute of Clinical Pharmacy, where her ... passion for furthering the impact and success of clinical pharmacy services is realized through online learning, webinars and consultations with pharmacies across the United States. She is a clinical pharmacist, Certified HIV Specialty Pharmacist, and a preceptor to UNC Chapel Hill residents and students from several schools of pharmacy. She has fostered an environment that showcases the significance and impact of patient care of community pharmacists by collaborating with medical providers and expanding pharmacist led clinical services in her community. She serves as a board member for Pharmacogenetics Center of Excellence, a non-profit dedicated to advocacy for the profession of pharmacy in pharmacogenetics. She also serves as a Luminary for CPESN USA, where she helps other community pharmacists to facilitate the advancement of CPESN networks. Currently, she shares her experience and passion for pharmacy advancements through the Avant Institute. The institute offers online trainings as well as Advanced Learning Immersion Experience (ALIE) a simulation lab for those seeking to experience first hand pharmacist led clinical services. Amina also advocates for pharmacists by engaging with policy makers all over the country on Pharmacogenomics. She was invited to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and to the FDA to discuss the role of pharmacists in pharmacogenomics.

Dr. Shawn C. Baker is the Chief Science Officer and co-founder of AllSeq. Having received his Ph.D. at the University of California - Davis, he started his career as a Research Scientist at Illumina when it was a 15-person startup. After spending several years at the bench ... developing gene expression array products, he transitioned to Product Marketing where he led a team in charge of Illuminas Expression and Regulation sequencing portfolio. In 2013 Dr. Baker co-founded AllSeq, establishing the only true sequencing marketplace, matching researchers with service providers based on their needs.

Dr. Chen is Director of Clinical Genome Informatics (http://rongchenlab.org) at Icahn Institute of Genetics and Multiscale Biology. His research focuses on developing databases, genome repositories, and clinical applications to interpret personal genomes for clinical diagnosis ... precision medicine, predictive disease risk, and novel therapeutics. Prior to Mount Sinai, he led the collaborative efforts at Stanford University to drive personalized medicine and clinical diagnosis on Mendelian and complex diseases using genome and exome sequencing. Dr. Chen also helped launch a startup company Personalis, which won the VA's contract for the Million Veteran Genome project. Dr. Chen has a broad interest in translational bioinformatics and genome interpretation, and has published over 80 papers in Lancet, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Science Translational Medicine, PNAS, AJHG, JCI, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, Genome Research, Genome Biology, Genome Medicine, and AJT. He holds numerous patents for software and databases on personalized medicine, diagnosis, and structure modeling.

Emily Farrow joined the Center as a research scientist in February 2012. She is an assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and has a secondary appointment at the Indiana University School of Medicine in the Department of Medical and ... Molecular Genetics. She obtained her M.S. in Genetic Counseling from the Indiana University School of Medicine in 2006 followed by her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics in 2009. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship supported by a National Kidney Foundation research grant in phosphate regulation at Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Farrow is also a board certified genetic counselor. Her research interests include metabolic bone disorders and the role of genetic counseling in genomic medicine.

Dr. Korf is the Chief Genomics Officer, UAB Medicine, Wayne H. and Sara Crews Finley Endowed Chair in Medical Genetics, Professor of Genetics, Co-Director of the UAB-HudsonAlpha Center for Genomic Medicine, Associate Director for Rare Diseases, Hugh Kaul Personalized Medicine ... Institute and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Human Genetics. He is a medical geneticist, pediatrician, and child neurologist, certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (clinical genetics, clinical cytogenetics, and clinical molecular genetics), American Board of Pediatrics, and American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (child neurology). Dr. Korf is past president of the Association of Professors of Human and Medical Genetics, past president of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, and current president of the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH. His major research interests are molecular diagnosis of genetic disorders and the natural history, genetics, and treatment of neurofibromatosis. He serves as principal investigator of the Department of Defense funded Neurofibromatosis Clinical Trials Consortium, the Alabama Genomic Health Initiative, and the Southern All of Us Network. He is co-author of Human Genetics and Genomics (medical student textbook, now in fourth edition), Medical Genetics at a Glance (medical student textbook (now in third edition), Emery and Rimoin's Principles and Practice of Medical Genetics (now in 6th edition), and Current Protocols in Human Genetics.

Jonas Korlach was appointed Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences in July 2012. He was previously a Scientific Fellow, supporting commercial development of the PacBio RS II system and performing research aimed at developing new applications for SMRT technologies. He ... co-invented the SMRT technology with Stephen Turner, Ph.D., Pacific Biosciences Founder and Chief Technology Officer, when the two were graduate students at Cornell University. Dr. Korlach joined Pacific Biosciences as the company's eighth employee in 2004. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell University. Dr. Korlach is the recipient of multiple grants, an inventor on 70 issued U.S. patents and 61 international patents, and an author of over 70 scientific studies on the principles and applications of SMRT technology, including publications in Nature, Science, and PNAS. In 2013, Dr. Korlach was honored by the Obama White House as an Immigrant Innovator "Champion of Change." He received both his Ph.D. and his M.S. degrees in Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology from Cornell, and received M.S. and B.A. degrees in Biological Sciences from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

Agnieszka is currently a Staff Scientist and Laboratory Manager at TessArae, LLC in Sterling, VA, USA. She obtained her PhD at the University of Queensland in Australia in a field of biochemistry, and subsequently worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Queen's University of Belfast ... University of Queensland and Institute for Molecular Biosciences. Since 2005 until 2008 she held a continuing appointment as a lecturer in a School of Dentistry at the University of Queensland and established her own laboratory in area of functional genomics and metabonomics. She has over 10 years of experience in molecular biology, genetics, genomics, biochemistry, microbiology and metabonomics. In addition she has experience as a science writer. Recently Agnieszka served on the Council of the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and is still active in the society. Currently she is working on novel diagnostic assays for infectious diseases using microarray re-sequencing technology.

Jimmy Lin, MD, PhD, MHS, is a 2012 TED Fellow and Founder & President of Rare Genomics Institute, the world's first platform to enable any community to leverage cutting-edge biotechnology to advance understanding of any rare disease. Partnering with 18 of the top medical ... institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford, RGI helps custom design personalized research projects for diseases so rare that no organization exists to help. Dr. Lin is also a medical school faculty member at the Washington University in St. Louis and led the computational analysis of the first ever exome sequenching studies for any human disease at Johns Hopkins. He has numerous publications in Science, Nature, Cell, Nature Genetics, and Nature Biotechnology, and has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.

Molly McGinniss, MS, LCGC is a Senior Market Development Manager for Illumina's "Healthy Genome Initiatives" team. Her current role focuses on advancing the use of whole genome sequencing in clinical care by providing access and education to healthy individuals through the ... Understand Your Genome programs, MyGenome visualization software, and other research initiatives. Molly began her career at UC Davis Medical Center as a pediatric genetic counselor, developing a specialty in metabolic genetics and neurodevelopmental disorders. Later, she worked at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento where she provided prenatal, pediatric, and adult genetic counseling services. Molly received her B.S in Biology from Loyola Marymount University in 2005 and her M.S. in Genetic Counseling from Boston University in 2009. Molly is an Adjunct Professor in the Genetic Counseling Department at Augustana University and holds leadership roles in the National Society of Genetic Counselors' Industry and Personalized Medicine Special Interest Group.

Dr. Murray is Director of Genomic Technologies at UC San Diego's Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine (CALM) and Professor in the Department of Pathology. At the CALM, Dr. Murray is involved with the development of advanced genomic technologies for the clinical lab, and ... oversees the bioinformatics and analysis of genomic data. Prior to coming to UCSD, she was a founding member of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, serving as the institute's Director of Genetics, as well as Associate Professor of Translational Genomics at The Scripps Research Institute. While at Scripps, Dr. Murray directed a high-throughput genotyping and sequencing laboratory aimed at discovering genetic components of various diseases and health, and determining risk profiles based on combinations of specific risk alleles in large prospective studies. From 2003-2007, Dr. Murray was the chief geneticist at Illumina, a San Diego genomics biotech company, where she played a large role in developing the content and design strategy for numerous whole genome genotyping arrays that enabled large-scale genome-wide genetic studies. Dr. Murray has a long history in both theoretical and applied genetics research. She has published over 90 articles in the human genetics literature that focus on the discovery and analysis of DNA sequence polymorphism. Dr. Murray received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Human Genetics, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve's Department of Genetics. Dr. Murray also has a M.S. degree in genetic counseling from the University of Pittsburgh.

John Quackenbush received his PhD in 1990 in theoretical physics from UCLA working on string theory models. Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in physics, Dr. Quackenbush applied for and received a Special Emphasis Research Career Award from the National Center for ... Human Genome Research to work on the Human Genome Project. He spent two years at the Salk Institute and two years at Stanford University working at the interface of genomics and computational biology. In 1997 he joined the faculty of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) where his focus began to shift to understanding what was encoded within the human genome. Since joining the faculties of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health in 2005, his work has focused on the use of genomic data to reconstruct the networks of genes that drive the development of diseases such as cancer and emphysema.

Dr. Fritz Sedlazeck completed his PhD in 2012 in the group of Dr. Arndt von Haeseler at the Max F. Perutz Laboratory in Vienna. After a two year postdoc, he transitioned to the lab of Dr. Michael Schatz at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and later to Johns Hopkins University. Since ... 2017 he leads his own group at the Human Genome Sequencing Centre at Baylor College of Medicine. His research focuses on developing computational methods to detect and analyse genomic variations with a focus on Structural Variations. Structural Variations are genomic events that manipulate multiple positions in a genome, which impact evolution, genomic disorders, regulation as well as play an important role in explaining multiple phenotypes.

Dr. Tong is Director of Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR/FDA). He has served a science advisory board member for several large projects involving multiple institutes in Europe and USA. He also holds several ... adjunct positions at universities in US and China. His division at FDA is to develop bioinformatic methodologies and standards to support FDA research and regulation and to advance regulatory science and personalized medicine. The most visible projects from his group are (1) leading the Microarray Quality Control (MAQC) consortium to develop standard analysis protocols and quality control metrics for emerging technologies to support regulatory science and precision medicine; (2) development of liver toxicity knowledge base (LTKB) for drug safety; (4) in silico drug repositioning for the enhanced treatment of rare diseases; and (4) development of the FDA bioinformatics system, ArrayTrackTM suite, to support FDA review and research on pharmacogenomics. In addition, his group also specializes in molecular modeling and QSARs with specific interest in estrogen, androgen, and endocrine disruptor. Dr. Tong has published more than 200 papers and book chapters.

Alexander (Sasha) Wait Zaranek, PhD is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Curoverse, a venture-backed company focused on building a free and open-source platform for storing, analyzing and sharing biomedical data. Sasha works on open technologies that are part of the revolution ... that reduced human DNA sequencing costs by a million-fold since the completion of the Human Genome Project. A current research focus is the development of clinical-quality applications for processing massive data sets spanning millions of individuals across collaborating organizations, eventually encompassing exabytes of data. His contributions have led to highly cited publications in Science, Nature, the Lancet and other leading scientific journals. Sasha is also a co-founder and Director of Informatics at the Harvard Personal Genome Project.

Yue Wan received her B.Sc in Cell Biology and Biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego. She obtained her Ph.D in Cancer Biology Stanford University, California, USA, under the mentorship of Howard Y. Chang. During her PhD, she developed the first ... high-throughput method for probing RNA structures genome-wide. Yue is a recipient of the NSS-PhD scholarship from Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. She is currently a GIS fellow in the Genome Institute of Singapore and a Society in Science- Branco Weiss Fellow. Yue is interested in studying functional RNA structures and understanding their roles in regulating cellular biology.