As a splicing specialist, Angela Brooks’s goal is to identify weaknesses in the cancer genome. A Pew Scholar, Brooks is an expert in the analysis of RNA sequencing data and is especially interested in the role of RNA splicing in gene expression. Brooks co-led a research group in the Pan-cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (Pan-cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project, which contributed to the analysis of more than 2,600 genomes of 38 different tumor types, creating a huge resource of primary cancer genomes. Brooks’s Pan-Cancer research focused on changes in gene expression revealed by sequencing the RNA molecules in cancer cells in addition to the DNA sequences that are the focus of most cancer genomics studies. Toward improved detection of RNA molecules in cancer, Brooks’s lab developed the tool FLAIR for transcript detection and quantification from long-read RNA sequencing data. She also co-led the international Long-read RNA-seq Genome Annotation Assessment Project (LRGASP) Consortium to perform a systematic evaluation of long-read RNA sequencing methods.

When The Scientist magazine named her “A Scientist to Watch” in 2017, Brooks emphasized that beyond her lab work, she is also passionate about promoting diversity in research. “I think that’s another big goal I have: To increase the diversity of the data we have, but also to help include scientists from diverse populations to study these genomes.”

Brooks has enhanced diversity and inclusion in STEM at UC Santa Cruz by creating new training opportunities for students from underrepresented groups and leading and mentoring a highly diverse team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers. She is currently PI for the UCSC Genomics Institute’s Research Mentoring Internship Program (RMI), which supports research experiences for undergraduates from groups that are underrepresented in STEM. She has received multiple awards in recognition of her diversity and inclusion efforts including the Chancellor’s Achievement Awards for Diversity and the Outstanding Research and Professional Mentor Award from the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).

Anshul Kundaje is Associate Professor of Genetics and Computer Science at Stanford University. The Kundaje lab develops statistical and machine learning methods for large-scale integrative analysis of functional genomic data to decode regulatory DNA and networks across diverse cell types and tissues and understand their role in cellular function and disease. Anshul completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2008 from Columbia University. As a postdoc at Stanford University from 2008-2012 and a research scientist at MIT and the Broad Institute from 2012-2014, he led the integrative analysis efforts for two of the largest functional genomics consortia – The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) and The Roadmap Epigenomics Project. Dr. Kundaje is a recipient of the 2019 Chen Award of Excellence from the Human Genome Organization, 2016 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and The 2014 Alfred Sloan Foundation Fellowship. Anshul has also served as a member of the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee for Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Research and the NHGRI Genomic Data Science Working Group.

Bridgett vonHoldt is an associate professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. Her research focuses on evolutionary genomics of admixed species, hybrid zones, and consequence of natural selection on the regulatory genome. She has carried out extensive studies on wild and domesticated canines. Her research has significant conservation applications for endangered species like the red wolf and gray wolf of North America. She also has discovered genetic factors that shape the evolution of social behavior of dogs as a result of their domestication from wolves. One of her research goals is to unravel genotype-phenotype evolution in in wild and domestic canines. She is specifically interested in the interaction of demography, genetic, and gene expression changes that shape fitness-related phenotypes. She earned her BS in Psychology from Eckerd College (St. Petersburg, Florida) but spent a lot of her time in the pathology lab performing necropsies on manatees. She then completed her Master’s at NYU in Biology followed by a PhD at UCLA under the mentorship of Bob Wayne, focused on the population and evolutionary genetics of North American canids. She then wanted to expand her research scope through two post-doc experiences. First, she shifted to explore the evolutionary dynamics of transposable elements and DNA methylation in the genome of cultivated rice under the mentorship of Brandon Gaut at UC Irvine. Next, she returned to UCLA as a bioinformatics fellow to examine the methylome between domestic dogs and gray wolves. She continues these integrated efforts when she established her research group at Princeton University’s EEB Department in 2013, where she is now an Associate Professor. She is the founder and director of the North American Canine Ancestry Project. She is also a co-founder and lead geneticist for the Gulf Coast Canine Project.

Dr. Kristin Laidre is a Principal Scientist at the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington working on problems of applied animal ecology in the Arctic. She is a Professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and is partially supported by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, Greenland. She was named a Pew Marine Conservation fellow in 2017. Kristin’s research is focused on broad questions about Arctic marine mammals. Her research is field-based, largely empirical, and focuses on using quantitative data on individual movements, foraging behavior, and life history to unite behavioral, population, and evolutionary ecology. She is particularly interested in linking individual performance to an animal’s selection for habitat resources and predicting how these relationships will be impacted by climate change. Her interests include wildlife conservation and management, scaling questions in ecology, and the application of Geographic Information Systems to spatial data. She is a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Cetacean Specialist Group and the co-chair of the the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (2021-2024 quadrennium). She has participated in over 40 field expeditions in Greenland and authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles and 3 books on high-latitude marine mammals. Kristin is broadly involved in science communication outside of the university, including local high schools, elementary schools, museums, and community centers. She also takes creative approaches to science communication and outreach, often partnering with artists. Her research has been featured multiple times in National Geographic, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Washington Post, BBC, New Scientist, Smithsonian Magazine, National Wildlife Magazine, the Sunday Telegraph, Reuters, Good Morning America, CBS, NBC, and many other international media outlets.

Dr. Stephanie Hicks is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins BSPH where she is also a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab, and has affiliations with the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, Center for Computational Biology, the Department of Genetic Medicine, and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She is an expert in developing scalable computational methods and open-source software for biomedical data analysis, in particular single-cell and spatial transcriptomics genomics data, leading to an improved understanding of human health and disease. She serves on a variety of boards including the Bioconductor Technical Advisory Board, and the Editorial Board at Genome Biology. Locally, she co-founded and co-organizes the R-Ladies Baltimore chapter to promote gender diversity in the R programming language community. She is a recipient of several professional awards including a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, a High-Impact Project Award from the Bloomberg American Health Initiative, Teaching in the Health Sciences Young Investigator Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA), and the COPSS Emerging Leader Award from the ASA, arguably the statistical profession’s most prestigious award for early career leaders in Statistics and Data Science.

Dr. Federica Di Palma is the Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of Research and Innovation at Genome BC in Vancouver, Canada, and a Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She holds a PhD in Immunogenetics from the University of Reading and has over two decades of expertise in genomics and data science. Dr. Di Palma has led numerous international collaborations, including key projects with the NIH, Harvard, and MIT, and has made significant contributions to the scientific landscape in both the UK and British Columbia.

Formerly Director of Science at the Earlham Institute in the UK, she played a pivotal role in advancing food security research through cross-disciplinary initiatives in computational and molecular biology. Passionate about biodiversity, she has spearheaded global research programs that bridge science, policy, and industry for long-term sustainability, with a focus on developing nations.

Kathleen Rubins was selected by NASA in 2009.  Rubins completed her first spaceflight on Expedition 48/49, where she became the first person to sequence DNA in space. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California and a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University Medical School Biochemistry Department and Microbiology and Immunology Department.  Dr. Rubins conducted her undergraduate research on HIV-1 integration in the Infectious Diseases Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.  She worked as a Fellow/Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and headed 14 researchers studying viral diseases that primarily affect Central and West Africa. Rubins most recently served aboard the International Space Station as flight engineer for Expedition 63/64. Across her two flights, she has spent a total of 300 days in space, the fourth most days in space by a U.S. female astronaut.

Kirsten Bos is a specialist in ancient DNA research, with a focus on bacterial pathogens. Most of her work has centered on evolutionary questions related to medieval plague, tuberculosis, salmonella and treponema, with revelations coming from a variety of archaeological contexts and time periods. She is currently research group leader for Molecular Paleopathology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Her research is funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (until 2024), as well as the Max Planck Society. In addition to her scientific work, Kirsten has accumulated almost 20 years of orchestral experience with her oboe, and she’s raising two small kids.

Mark Blaxter leads the Sanger’s Tree of Life programme, which is generating and analyzing reference genome sequences from many thousands of species across the tree of life. The initial focus has been on the eukaryotic biota of Britain and Ireland (Darwin Tree of Life Project), the genomes of symbiotic organisms (Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics project) and international initiatives under the umbrella of the Earth BioGenome Project. His research portfolio focuses on the genomics of neglected, non-model organisms and the interpretation of those genomes in ecological and evolutionary contexts (including, inter alia, parasitic and free living nematodes, tardigrades, gastropod and bivalve molluscs, butterflies, bees, flies, birds, algae, fungi and bacteria). Before joining Sanger, he was Professor of Evolutionary Genomics in the University of Edinburgh, where his research portfolio focussed on the genomics of neglected, non-model organisms, and the interpretation of those genomes in ecological and evolutionary contexts. He is a highly cited author with over 250 refereed papers. He is a fellow of the Linnaean Society of London, of the Helminthological Society of Washington, of the Royal Society for Biology and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2014.

Melina Claussnitzer is an institute member at the Broad Institute, and an assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School (HMS). She also co-directs the Type 2 Diabetes Systems Genomics Initiative at the Broad, and serves as the associate director of scientific strategy for the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Broad. Her lab focuses on the conversion of disease-associated genetic variants to function (V2F) and, more specifically, on the dissection of the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes and its comorbidities into actionable therapeutics. This focus requires a concerted, systematic effort to interpret non-coding genetic variation and to understand how it contributes to phenotypic variation in the context of the complete cellular machinery. Claussnitzer’s research program therefore spans a diversity of areas in the field of disease genomics, and involves a hierarchical experimental and computational framework to discover pathophysiological targets underlying the genetic risk of metabolic disease phenotypes.

Claussnitzer’s thesis work focused on the computational and experimental foundations of genome-wide association study (GWAS) locus dissection and its application to the conversion of type 2 diabetes risk loci into disease mechanisms. She pioneered new computational and experimental methods for converting genomic regions associated with complex diseases and traits in humans into functions using multiple species comparisons and large-scale epigenomic and transcriptomic data sets, as well as CRISPR-Cas9 mediated variant editing. Her lab applies those methods to mechanistically dissect metabolic risk loci across diverse phenotypic scales.

Claussnitzer earned her “Vordiplom” (equivalent of B.Sc.) in mathematics and nutritional sciences and her “Diplom” (equivalent of M.Sc.) in molecular biology and nutritional sciences from the University of Hohenheim, Germany, where she now holds a faculty position. She earned her Ph.D. in genetics of complex diseases from the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Johns Hopkins University

Michael Schatz, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Johns Hopkins University, is among the world’s foremost experts in solving computational problems in genomics research. His innovative biotechnologies and computational tools to study the sequence and function of genomes are advancing the understanding of the structure, evolution, and function of genomes for medicine – particularly autism spectrum disorders, cancer, and other human diseases – and agriculture.

Schatz, who founded and directs the Schatz Lab, has created many of the most widely used methods and software to assemble the full genetic material for a single person or a species, including:

• NGMLR and Sniffles are long-read sequencing analysis methods to study the longer fragments of DNA, a breakthrough that may yield critical information about how cancer genomes evolve. Genomes in malignant tumors often house sections of chromosomes that are deleted, duplicated or fused together. By examining an unstable genome, Schatz identified almost 20,000 structural alterations – changes previously missed by other researchers when examining shorter DNA fragments.
• Scalpel, the leading genetic variants discovery tool, to identify and analyze mutations in autism spectrum disorders and somatic mutations (or post-conception DNA alterations) in cancer genomes, including pancreatic cancers.
• GECCO (Genomic Enrichment Computational Clustering Operation), a novel algorithm to study complex non-coding and structural variations in genomes, through which his lab identified recurrent non-coding somatic mutations (DNA alterations that occur post-conception) in pancreatic cancer, including some that substantially changed survival outcomes.
• Ginkgo, a computational tool for single cell copy number profiling in heterogeneous tumors to study the progression of primary and metastatic breast tumors and adult acute myeloid leukemia.
• New computational methods including FALCON and Assemblytics for assembling and analyzing the genomes of different species using single molecule sequencing, especially plant and animal species, to study their evolution and adaption.
• CloudBurst and Crossbow, the first published algorithms to use cloud computing technologies in genomics for mapping and variant discovery.

Sean Eddy is a computational biologist at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard in 2015, he was a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, and before that, a faculty member in the Genetics department at Washington University in St. Louis. He received a bachelor’s degree from Caltech, a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and did postdoctoral work at NeXagen in Boulder and at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.

Elinor Karlsson, PhD, is associate professor in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology at the UMass Chan Medical School, and director of Vertebrate Genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research combines new technology, community science and genomics to investigate diseases and discover the origins of exceptional mammalian traits.  Dr. Karlsson’s research includes the Zoonomia project, an international effort to compare the genomes of over 240 mammals (from the African Yellow-spotted Rock Hyrax to the Woodland Dormouse), to identify segments of DNA that are important for survival and health.  Dr. Karlsson has a special interest in dog genetics, and her international Darwin’s Ark project invites all dog owners to enroll their dogs in an open data research project exploring the genetic basis of behavior, as well as diseases such as cancer.

Elinor received her B.A. in biochemistry/cell biology and her B.F.A. (Bachelor of Fine Arts) from Rice University, and earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Boston University. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Pardis Sabeti at Harvard University before starting her research group at UMass Chan in 2014.

Elinor Karlsson, PhD, is associate professor in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology at the UMass Chan Medical School, and director of Vertebrate Genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research combines new technology, community science and genomics to investigate diseases and discover the origins of exceptional mammalian traits. Dr. Karlsson’s research includes the Zoonomia project, an international effort to compare the genomes of over 240 mammals (from the African Yellow-spotted Rock Hyrax to the Woodland Dormouse), to identify segments of DNA that are important for survival and health. Dr. Karlsson has a special interest in dog genetics, and her international Darwin’s Ark project invites all dog owners to enroll their dogs in an open data research project exploring the genetic basis of behavior, as well as diseases such as cancer.

Elinor received her B.A. in biochemistry/cell biology and her B.F.A. (Bachelor of Fine Arts) from Rice University, and earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Boston University. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Pardis Sabeti at Harvard University before starting her research group at UMass Chan in 2014.

As an Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Bonnen is applying her acumen in bioinformatics and human genetics to gene discovery studies for an array of phenotypes and diseases including disorders caused by mitochondrial dysfunction and cancer. The Bonnen lab develops and applies methods for analyzing next-generation sequence data and interpretation of human variation. We collaborate closely with clinicians to translate our findings to clinical and diagnostic settings.

Specialties: human genetics, genomics, functional genomics, bioinformatics, population genetics, mitochondrial disease, metabolic disease, cancer, NGS

Dr. Kimberly Doheny is an Associate Professor of Genetic Medicine and Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  She is Director of the Center for Inherited Disease Research, Co-Director of Johns Hopkins Genomics, Co-Director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute Intellectual Developmental Disabilities Research Center Genomics Core and Director of the Laboratory Genetics and Genomics Fellowship program.  She received her PhD in Human Genetics in 1993 from Johns Hopkins University and she is board certified in Clinical Molecular Genetics and Clinical Cytogenetics.  Dr. Doheny has co-authored over 120 peer-reviewed publications in the area of complex trait genetics, Mendelian gene discovery, and high-throughput genomics.   She is currently the lead Principal Investigator for the CIDR Program trans-NIH contract and Co-PI of the Baylor-Hopkins Clinical Genomics Center for All of Us.

Dr. Eric Green is the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is the third NHGRI Director, having been appointed by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins in 2009.

Dr. Green has been at the Institute for more than 25 years, during which he has had multiple key leadership roles. He served as the Institute’s Scientific Director for 7 years, Chief of the NHGRI Genome Technology Branch for 13 years, and Founding Director of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center for 12 years.

For just over two decades, Dr. Green directed an independent research program that included integral start-to-finish roles in the Human Genome Project and groundbreaking work on mapping, sequencing, and characterizing mammalian genomes.

Dr. Green earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1987 from Washington University in St. Louis; coincidentally, the word “genomics” was coined in that same year.

During his career, Dr. Green has authored and co-authored over 375 scientific publications.

Michael Schatz is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Johns Hopkins University. His research is at the intersection of computer science, biology, and biotechnology, and focuses on development of novel algorithms and computing systems for human genetics, comparative genomics, and personalized medicine. Schatz is also widely recognized as a passionate educator and relationship builder who leads several efforts to grow and diversify the genomics data science community.

For this work, he is the recipient of the 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an 2014 NSF CAREER award, and was named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world in 2022 (TIME100).

He has also been a regular attendee at AGBT since 2010, and has presented several times throughout the years on long read sequencing and advanced computational approaches for plant, animal, and human genomics at AGBT, ABGT-Ag, and AGBT-Precision Health.

Schatz received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2010 and 2008, his B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000.  More information is available on his lab website: http://schatz-lab.org

Dr. Christopher Mason is a Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. He is also co-Founder and global director at Biotia, co-Founder and scientific director at Onegevity, Director of Genomics at Tempus Labs, and recently published The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds.

Dr. Mason develops and deploys computational and experimental methodologies to identify the functional genetic elements of the human genome and metagenome. To do this, we perform research in three principal areas: (1) molecular profiling in patients with extreme phenotypes, including brain malformations, aggressive cancers, and astronauts, (2) creating new biochemical and computational techniques in DNA/RNA sequencing and DNA/RNA base modifications, and (3) the development of new cell and genome modifications. In the very long term, we believe these systems-based methods will enable an understanding of the functional elements of the human genome and embedded metagenome, such that we can begin to repair or re-engineer these genetic networks for ameliorating disease and lay the foundation to enable long-term human spaceflight.

Dr. Mason has won the NIH’s Transformative R01 Award, the NASA Group Achievement Award, the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance Young Investigator award, the Hirschl-Weill-Caulier Career Scientist Award, the Vallee Scholar Award, the International Space Station (ISS) Research and Development Award, the CDC Honor Award for Standardization of Clinical Testing, and the WorldQuant Foundation Scholar Award.  He was named as one of the “Brilliant Ten” Scientists by Popular Science, featured as a TEDMED speaker, and called “The Genius of Genetics” by 92Y. He has written 2 books and >300 peer-reviewed papers, featured on the covers of Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Microbiology, and Neuron, as well as legal briefs cited by the U.S. District Court and U.S. Supreme Court.  Coverage of his work has also appeared on the covers of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TIME, The LA Times, and across many media (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, PBS, NASA, NatGeo). He is an inventor on four patents, co-creator of five FDA-authorized diagnostic tests, founded five biotechnology companies, and he serves as an advisor to 21 others, as well as 3 non-profits. He lives with his daughter and wife in Brooklyn, NY.

Dr. Christopher Mason’s background and appointments:

• S. in Genetics, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001)
• S. in Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001)
• D. in Genetics, Yale University (2006)
• Post-doc, Clinical Genetics, Yale Medical School (2009)
• Fellowship of Genomics, Ethics, and Law, Yale Law School (2009).
• Assistant Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine (2009)
• Associate Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine (2015)
• Director, the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction (2017),

Appointments at the Tri-Institutional Program on Computational Biology and Medicine between Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University, the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center, and the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute.

Dr. McPherson is the Deputy Director of the UCD Comprehensive Cancer Center and Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine. He has deep expertise in DNA sequencing and cancer genomics through his involvement in the Human Genome Project and large-scale tumor sequencing as a founding member of the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Within the ICGC, Dr. McPherson led the whole genome sequencing of >200 pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas using laser capture microdissected material. His current interests lie in bringing advanced genomic technologies to clinical application in personalized diagnosis and targeted therapeutics; in maximizing the data yield from small biopsies and circulating cell free DNA; and in the role of DNA repair in carcinogenesis.

Stephen Montgomery’s laboratory at Stanford University studies genetic effects on gene regulation and gene expression to identify the molecular and cellular mechanisms which define human traits. They focus on understanding the effects of genome variation on cellular phenotypes and cellular modeling of disease through genomic approaches such as next generation RNA sequencing in combination with developing and utilizing state-of-the-art bioinformatics and statistical genetics approaches.

Dr. Federica Di Palma is the Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of Research and Innovation at Genome BC in Vancouver, Canada, and a Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She holds a PhD in Immunogenetics from the University of Reading and has over two decades of expertise in genomics and data science. Dr. Di Palma has led numerous international collaborations, including key projects with the NIH, Harvard, and MIT, and has made significant contributions to the scientific landscape in both the UK and British Columbia.

Formerly Director of Science at the Earlham Institute in the UK, she played a pivotal role in advancing food security research through cross-disciplinary initiatives in computational and molecular biology. Passionate about biodiversity, she has spearheaded global research programs that bridge science, policy, and industry for long-term sustainability, with a focus on developing nations.

Dr. Len Pennacchio is a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), Deputy Director of the DOE Joint Genome Institute, and Adjunct Professor at the University of California Berkeley.  He received his PhD in Genetics from Stanford University in 1998 under Rick Myers and then served as a DOE Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Fellow at LBL under Eddy Rubin. He has authored over 150 publications and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House for his contributions to the Human Genome Project and understanding mammalian gene regulation in vivo. Dr. Pennacchio has an extensive background in mammalian genetics and genomics as well as with DNA sequencing technologies and their application to address outstanding issues in both the biomedical, energy, and environment sectors. He serves in numerous advisory roles such as NHGRI’s Genome Sequencing Program, the Centre for Genomic Research at the University of Liverpool, as a past permanent member of NIH’s GCAT Study Section. He also is an Organizer and Co-Chair of both annual Advances in Genome Biology & Technology (AGBT) meetings as well as a “Systems Biology of Gene Regulation and Genome Editing” meeting hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Asia. Currently his research is heavily focused on understanding the spectrum of DNA mutations that contribute to human disease through in vivo functional studies.

Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in the genetics of ice age animals and plants. As Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz and HHMI Investigator, Beth uses DNA recovered from bones and other remains to study how species evolved through time and how human activities have affected and continue to affect this dynamic process. Her work focuses on organisms ranging from influenza to mammoths, asking questions about domestication, admixture, speciation, and pathogen evolution. Her current work develops techniques to recover increasingly trace amounts of DNA such as from environmental and forensic samples. A 2009 MacArthur Fellow, Beth is also an award-winning popular science author and communicator who uses her research as a platform to explore the potential of genomic technologies for conservation and medicine.

Beth Shapiro, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz and an HHMI Investigator, uses DNA from the past to study how species evolve and how human activities affect this dynamic process. Beth develops tools to recover and analyze genomic data preserved in organismal remains and the environment, asking questions about domestication, admixture, and pathogen evolution.  As an author and communicator, Beth uses her research as a platform to explore the potential of genomic technologies for conservation and medicine.

Dr. Michael Zody is a computational biologist with over 15 years of experience writing bioinformatic software, analyzing genomic and transcriptomic sequence data, and managing engineers and researchers. He serves as the Scientific Director of Computational Biology at the New York Genome Center.

He started his career at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research (now part of the Broad Institute) during the pilot-sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project. As Manager of Sequencing Informatics at Whitehead, he led informatics efforts associated with production scaling of human genome sequencing. His group built the first fully-automated barcoding and database tracking system for managing high-throughput sequencing workflows. Dr. Zody also oversaw automated assembly, quality control, and public release of ¼ of the draft sequence of the human genome.

After the initial release of the human genome reference sequence, Dr. Zody co-led mouse genome sequencing efforts and was an analysis group leader for both the mouse and chimpanzee genome analysis consortia. He has worked with nearly every extant commercial sequencing platform and has been part of the early evaluation and adoption teams for several platforms ranging from ABI 3700 capillary sequencers to Solexa (now Illumina) Genome Analyzers. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and written 4 book chapters. Dr. Zody received his PhD in medical science from Uppsala University, Sweden, and earned a SB in materials science and engineering and a SM in metallurgy from MIT.

In addition to his research work, Dr. Zody has served on the organizing committee for the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting since 2007. He travels extensively to teach courses on sequencing technology, analysis, and experimental design. Since 2007, he has been an instructor at the Cold Spring Harbor Advanced Sequencing Technologies and Applications course. He has also taught in such diverse locations as the Smithsonian Institution (2010), Uppsala University (Sweden, 2008-2012), and K-RITH (Durban, South Africa, 2013). Dr. Zody teaches an annual Sequencing Informatics Workshop for the scientific community at the New York Genome Center.