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.

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.

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.

Dr. Taylors background is in biophysics, bioinformatics, computational biology and structural biology with emphasis on human genetics and translational medicine. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and completed a postdoctoral ... fellowship at Pfizer in Ann Arbor. She had worked in the pharmaceutical industry at EMD-Serono, transitioning into clinical and basic research by moving to Harvard School of Public Health and then to clinical research at RWJ/Rutgers. She also served several years as the Program Director of the Graduate Program in Bioinformatics at Brandeis University, where she still occasionally teaches a course in Computational Systems Biology. Her main areas of research are in the development of mathematical and computational methods to better understand biological variation and the genetic contribution to disease, coupling clinical information with high-dimensional biomedical data from next-gen sequencing, microarray, PCR, and proteomics experiments. Some of her immediate research interests are in development of methods to better classify effects of genetic variation within interacting systems through effects in gene function and contributions to disease, developing mathematical genotype representations of variation in populations, and using machine-learning techniques to build classifiers in translational medicine research. Her scientific contributions were acknowledged with the rest of the Divisions research team at the 2010 ASRM meeting when the REI division received the ASRM Prize Paper Award, where her contribution was in building databases, systems and validated methods for high-throughput genotype analyses .

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.

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.

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.

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. Mauro is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He is also a co-founder and lead scientist of Promosome, a biotechnology company focused on bioproduction enablement and DNA vaccines. In addition, Dr ... Mauro is a Senior Fellow in Experimental Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. Prior to moving to The Scripps Research Institute, Dr. Mauro received his Ph.D. at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and continued his studies as a postdoctoral fellow at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Dr. Mauro studies both fundamental and applied aspects of translational control mechanisms. His basic research is focused on understanding how eukaryotic mRNAs recruit ribosomes, how ribosomes subsequently locate initiation codons, and how ribosomes regulate the translation of specific subsets of mRNAs. Dr. Mauro's applied studies build on his basic research. These applied studies have led to the identification of Translational Enhancer Elements (TEEs) and the generation of synthetic translational enhancers.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Bayrak-Toydemir is the medical director of the Molecular Genetics and Genomics Laboratories at ARUP and an associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Dr. Bayrak-Toydemir received her MD from the Ankara University School of Medicine in ... Ankara, Turkey, where she also received her PhD in human genetics. Subsequently, she completed her fellowship in clinical molecular genetics at the University of Utah. She is board certified in medical genetics. Dr. Bayrak-Toydemir has focused her research efforts on understanding the molecular genetic characteristics of the Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) disease, an autosomal dominant vascular dysplasia. Her research aims to identify additional gene(s) that can cause HHT disease, to determine the roles of regulatory region mutations of known HHT genes, and to describe the genotype-phenotype correlation. In addition to HHT, her research aims to identify gene(s) that cause various inherited vascular malformations. She is also interested in application of next generation sequencing to molecular diagnostics.