Cancer Genomics

The Foundation for Genetic Research in Houston was founded in 1992 by Dr. Krishna Dronamraju, who is the President and Director of the Foundation. Previous advisors to the Foundation include Sir Arthur C. Clarke, well known author of many books in science and science fiction; Dr. Victor McKusick, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Current advisors include Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Advisor to the Prime Minister, and Chairman of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, India; and Prof. N.A. Mitchison, at the University of London, U.K.. Dr. Dronamraju has been nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was a member of the U.S. Presidential delegation led by President Bill Clinton to India in 2000. Dr. Dronamraju received his Ph.D. in Genetics for research under the direction of the famous scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who is well known as a polymath, a founder of population genetics, and as a prolific author of numerous popular scientific essays. Dr. Dronamraju is the author of 20 books and 200 papers in genetics, biotechnology, and the History of Science. Many of his books were concerned with the life and scientific work of J.B.S. Haldane. Dr. Dronamraju was an Advisor to the U.S. Government as a member of the two National Advisory Committees in Health and Agriculture in Washington D.C. He is an Invited Professor of the University of Paris, France, Honorary Professor of the Albert Schweitzer International University, Geneva, and an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of London. He is also an Honorary Visiting Professor of Andhra University in India. He was awarded the Nayudamma Prize in Science and Technology in 1997. The Foundation for Genetic Research has been engaged in promoting Science Cooperation between USA and India. Over the last several years, the Foundation has served many functions, preparing and publishing books in genetics and scientific biography, advising US Government and Indian Government, and most of all arranging international conferences in science, technology, and intellectual property rights. Special attention is paid to recognize the intellectual property rights (IPR) of the tribal groups of India and the contributions of tribal men and women to the conservation of food crops and medicinal plants of India.

Dronamraju's research focused on the history of genetics and human/medical genetics, resulting in the publication of several books, especially with reference to the contributions of his mentor J.B.S. Haldane. Dronamraju’s contribution to the mechanisms of Speciation in plants and plant-pollinator interaction, and also the pollinating behavior of butterflies is considered quite significant. His research papers on the visits of several species of Lepidoptera to different colored flowers of Lantana camara reported the discovery of a species-specific pattern of color preference behavior by pollinating insects. This indicated the possibility that reproductive isolating mechanisms in plants could result from the behavior of pollinators, leading to sympatric speciation which was considered unlikely by some leading experts such as Ernst Mayr until then. These papers created a sensation among biologists.

Perry received his bachelor's of arts degree in Zoology from University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduation, he headed to Scripps Institution of Oceanography and also studied at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University and the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole and obtained his PhD in Marine Biology under David Epel in 1979. He then received a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Cell Biology in the laboratories of Drs. Bill Brinkley, Joseph Bryan and Anthony R. Means at Baylor College of Medicine where he laid the foundation for his observations of cytoskeletal abnormalities.

His current studies focus on two issues: (i) the metabolic basis for the mitochondrial damage restricted to vulnerable neurons; and (ii) the consequences of RNA oxidation on protein synthesis rate and fidelity.

Zhou is presently a Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Medicine, Associate Vice President of Global Medical Development, Associate Dean of International Research, and Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. Professor Zhou completed his clinical medical training in China in 1989 and obtained his PhD in 2001 from the School of Medicine, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since 2002, After 2 years’ postdoctoral training in the University of Auckland, Dr Zhou has served as an Assistant Professor, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor for the National University of Singapore, Queensland University of Technology (Australia), and RMIT University (Australia). Dr Zhou’s major research interests are systems pharmacology, drug metabolism & drug transport, pharmacokinetics & pharmacometrics, pharmacogenomics, nanomedicine and Chinese medicines. He is currently affiliated with the WHO Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine. Professor Zhou has published more than 320 peer-reviewed papers in various pharmacology and medical journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Research, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and Clinical Cancer Research. He has also published 16 books and book chapters and more than 250 conference abstracts. Dr Zhou serves as an editor-in-chief or editor for Drug, Healthcare and Patient Safety, Clinical Pharmacology & Biopharmaceutics, Journal of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmacoproteomics, Drug Metabolism Letters, WMC (WebmedCentral) plus Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Current Drug Metabolism and is the editorial board member of 25 medical and pharmacological journals.

Nanomedicine, drug discovery, drug metabolism, drug transport, pharmacogenomics, Chinese medicine/herbal medicines, and stem cells.

Vasant G. Honavar is an Indian born American computer scientist, researcher, and professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked with Leonard Uhr. He is known for his research contributions in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, knowledge representation, neural networks, semantic web, big data analytics, and bioinformatics and computational biology. He has published over 200 research articles as well as edited several books on these topics. His recent work has focused on scalable algorithms for constructing predictive models from large, semantically disparate distributed data, learning predictive models from linked open data, big data analytics, analysis and prediction of protein-protein, protein-RNA, and protein-DNA interfaces and interactions, social network analytics, secrecy-preserving query answering, representing and reasoning about preferences, and causal inference and meta-analysis. During 1990-2013, Honavar was professor of computer science and headed the Iowa State University Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory. In 2006 he became director of the Iowa State University Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery. He was also on the faculty of the interdepartmental graduate programs in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (serving as Chair during 2003-2005), and Human-Computer Interaction. During 2010-2013, Honavar served as a Program Director in the Information Integration and Informatics program in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the US National Science Foundation where he led the Big Data Program and contributed to several core and cross-cutting programs.

Transformative research in computing and information sciences and its applications in science, humanities, and engineering; Introducing algorithmic thinking across sciences and humanities;

Lajos Pusztai is presently a Professor of Medicine ( Medical Oncology), Co-Director, Cancer Genetics Research Program; Professor of Medicine, Director of Breast Medical Oncology Section, Yale School of medicine. Professor Lajos completed his M.D., Semmelweis University School of Medicine, Budapest, Hungary, 1987 and obtained his D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1993.

Breast cancer; Translational cancer research; Developing pharmacogenomic markers of response to breast cancer therapy and identifying methods to select the optimal treatment for each patient.

Kazuo Ishii, Ph.D. is the Professor of Genome Science of the Graduate School of Agriculture of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan. After receiving the PhD degree from the Graduate School of Medicine of the University of Tokushima in 1995, he started professional career in genomic sciences. From 1997 to 2000, he participated in human genome sequencing project at the University of Tokyo and RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center. After that, he worked for SNPs discovery at Centre National de Genotypage, Evry, France. In 2003, he changed his specialty to bioinformatics, especially such as data analysis and data mining. He performed bioinformatics research at Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases (2003-2005), Tokyo University of Science (2005-2009), and Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine (2010). In 2011, he got the present job and he has dedicated to the Human Resource Development Program in Agricultural Genome Sciences in Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, funding supported from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT).

programming (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Java and C/C++), databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and NoSQL), Big Data processing (Hadoop, MapReduce, Impara and Mahout), cloud computing (Amazon Web Services), statistical computing (multivariate statistics, bayesian statistics, machine learning and Mathematical modeling), on the Linux/UNIX platform; that is data science.

In 2013, Amelia joined Gentris Corporation as CEO and President and a Director on the Gentris Board of Directors. Gentris is a pioneer in genomic biomarker strategy, testing, operations, ethics, consulting, and global regulation and law. The company is also a global leader in biobanking operations, procedures, policy, consulting, and storage. Amelia also serves as the CAP Biorepository Director for Gentris. Amelia is the Founder and CEO of Global Specimen Solutions, Inc.- an innovative company offering pharmacogenomics operation services and consultancy to the pharmaceutical industry. Global Specimen Solutions, Inc provides expert ability to write pharmacogenomic and biomarker protocols, informed consent, negotiate consents, annotate specimen permissions, manage and clean key files, create blinded data sets, manage biorepository activities, design and plan of pharmacogenomic and biomarker corporate strategy and development design. Amelia has over 15 years experience building and incorporating clinical pharmacogenomic research into comprehensive, cohesive, integrated prospective strategy. Amelia conceptualized and built biorepository programs from the ground up at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Schering-Plough, and Merck. Customizing programmatic needs from academic programs to pharmaceutical company needs, Amelia has developed optimized approaches for pharmacogenomics, human specimen research, and biobanking that are compliant, maximize return-on-investment, and yield important understanding of human variation in response to drug therapy. She leads international teams focused on optimizing genetic sample collection, data generation, and data transfer globally and continues to work on international policy for both genetic specimens and human specimen research. She was a PhRMA representative to ICH E16 for Genomic Biomarker Data Submissions and is Past Chair of the Industry Pharmacogenomics Working Group.

CEO and President
Gentris Corporation
USA
Gentris Corporation, USA

Anton A. Komar is presently a Professor of Biology and the Director of the Center for Gene Regulation in Health in Disease (GRHD) at Cleveland State University (CSU), Cleveland, OH, USA. He also serves as the Director of the Cellular and Molecular Medicine Specialization (CMMS) Program, a doctoral program jointly operated by CSU and Cleveland Clinic Learner Research Institute. Dr. Komar also holds adjunct appointments at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine and Cleveland Clinic Learner Research Institute. He received his PhD degree in Molecular biology from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1991 and then (before coming to USA in 2001) worked in many different countries across the globe, including Germany, France and Switzerland. Dr. Komar is an accomplished investigator with extensive experience in the study of translational control of gene expression. He serves as an editorial board member of the journal “Translation” and was the editor of the 2d edition of the “Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms: Methods and Protocols”, published by Springer/Humana Press.

gene expression/protein synthesis, co-translational protein folding, the function of the genetic code, synonymous codon usage and the relationship between genotype and phenotype.

Igor B. Roninson Leads programs in cancer drug discovery, from the initial biological concept to early-stage clinical development. 39 issued US patents and more than 160 publications in cancer biology, pharmacology, genomics, molecular diagnostics and drug discovery

Cancer drug discovery, Genomics,Molecular oncology, Biomarkers

Deng is presently a Hong-Wen Deng, Professor and Edward G. Schlieder Endowed Chair Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, USA. Professor Deng obtained his PhD, quantitative genetics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 1995, Since 1997, After 2 years’ Postdoctoral research, molecular and statistical population/quantitative genetics, Human Genetics Center, University of Texas, Houston, TEXAS, Dr Deng has served as an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor for the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Dr Hong-Wen major research interests are epigenome-wide profiling of osteoporosis at micro-RNA, DNA phosphorylation and histone modification levels. He is currently Member of Genetics Society of American Member, American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG).

Genetic dissection of human complex diseases using the state-of-the-art multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches of genomic technologies, and statistical and bioinformatical methods. Interested in developing novel statistical methods and bioinformatics tools for analyzing and managing large, complex datasets in genomic and epigenomic research.

He serves in the faculty of Democritus University of Thrace Medical School in Alexandroupolis since 1998; currently He is full professor at the department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology. Dr. Vangelis obtained a PhD from the Medical School of Patras University in 1991. The next 4 years I spent as a postdoctoral scientist at the Milwaukee Clinical Campus of the University of Wisconsin in the USA. His next affiliation was with the department of Physiology of the Medical School of the Katholic University in Leuven, Belgium, as a research scientist for almost 3 years.

Transnational research in pharmacogenomics of drugs used for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, asthma, and psychiatric diseases

Catherine Tribouley earned a Ph.D. in 1994 from University of Liyon/Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology. She was Head of Biomarker and Pathway Analysis, Inflammation, at Roche Pharmaceutical before joining Novartis; currently she is working as Global Correlative Sciences Leader at Novartis. Extensive experience in translational science leading teams in both a line and matrix management role. Expertise in the use of genomics, proteomics and genetics technologies and data analysis methods in a pre-clinical and clinical environment for disease understanding, biomarker validation and personalized healthcare strategies. Knowledge of Respiratory, Auto-immune and Oncology disease areas.

Expertise in the use of genomics, proteomics and genetics technologies and data analysis methods in a pre-clinical and clinical environment for disease understanding, biomarker validation and personalized healthcare strategi

Istvan Ladunga completed his PhD at the Budapest University of Sciences. Dr. Ladunga served at the Institute of Computer Science and Automation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Natl. Committee for Technological Development, Hungary, the Dept. Mathematics, Stanford University, the Dept. Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals, and Celera Genomics. Dr. Ladunga has published 134 patents and copyrights, 35 papers, and a book.

Professor of Computational Biology
Department of Statistics
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
USA
Tel: 402-472-6074
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Brocchieri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and Genetics Institute, University of Florida. He has received his A.B. in Biology with a dissertation on the evolution of animal behavior, and his Ph.D. in Environmental Studies, with a dissertation in Theoretical Population Genetics on the evolution of altruistic behavior, at the University of Parma, Italy. He was Postdoctoral fellow, Research Associate, and Senior Research Associate at the Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, from 1991 to 2006, where he worked with Prof. Sam Karlin on bioinformatics and molecular evolution. Dr. Brocchieri is the author of more than 30 peer reviewed scientific articles, 3 book chapters, and software for protein multiple sequence alignment (ITERALIGN) and for gene identification (N-PACT).

Dr. Brocchieri’s main research interests are in the development of mathematical models for the characterization of patterns of protein evolution and phylogenetic methods, in studying the evolution of eukaryotic developmental genes, in adaptive processes in the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and in computational methods for gene identification.

Derek Butler did his masters in Biotechnology at Dublin City University in 1995, specialising in Genetics and Immunology. He continued his studies at University College Cork and in 2001 received his PhD degree for work on the genetic regulation of lactic acid bacteria. In the same year he took up a post-doctoral position at the University of Groningen where his work focused on the identification of novel enzymatic activities from thermophilic bacteria. In 2004 Derek joined Lactrys (now Falco Biotherapeutics) where he worked on vaccine development in probiotic bacteria before joining BaseClear in 2006.

Director
Genome analysis & Synthetic biology at BaseClear
USA
BaseClear, USA

Chiara Manzini has completed Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2006.She is working as an Assistant Professor at Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, GW SMHS.The goal of Dr. Manzini\'s lab is to study the determinants of neuronal differentiation and circuit formation in the normal and diseased brain. They start from the identification of genes, which cause neurodevelopmental disorders, and are essential for normal cognition. They then use animal models (mouse and zebrafish) to recapitulate the human disease, understand pathogenesis and study the molecular mechanisms of development.

Kyoung-Jae Won has completed his PhD from University of Southampton, UK in 2006 and Postdoctoral studies from University of Copenhagen, Denmark and University of California, San Diego. He is a Research Assistant Professor of Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published more than 20 papers in reputed journals. His research interest is in developing integrative and comparative methods using genomic and epigenomic data to study cell-type specific gene regulation. He performed a large-scale analysis using various types of datasets including ChIP-seq, DNase-seq, GRO-seq and RNA-seq. Using integrative approaches, he studied regulatory mechanisms in various tissue- or cell-types including adipocytes, liver, embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and cancer cells.

Assistant Professor of Genetics
Department of Genetics
University of Pennsylvania
USA
Tel: 215-746-8424
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Kameshwar Singh has done M.VSc in Veterinary Bacteriology from Ruhelkhand University and working as Research Assistant Professor in Department of Environmental Medicine (SMD) at University of Rochester Medical Center, New York.

Senior Faculty
University of Rochester
USA
University of Rochester, USA

Dr. Dongxiao Zhu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wayne State University after holding a similar position at the University of New Orleans. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research is in the areas of computational biology, bioinformatics, health informatics and the interface with data mining, machine learning and pattern recognition.

My research are in the areas of computational biology, bioinformatics, health informatics and the interface with data mining, machine learning and pattern recognition. Motivated by the recent technological advances in high throughput data (aka, Big Data) acquisition, represented by next-generation sequencing, I am developing statistical models, algorithms and computational tools for data analysis. In addition, I am also interested in collaborative research to investigate and solve real-world problems.

Founder and CEO
BioCentra LLC
USA
BioCentra LLC, USA

Antonei B. Csoka, Ph.D. is a biogerontologist at Howard University who works on the molecular biology of aging. He was a member of the consortium that identified the Lamin A gene as the cause of the accelerated aging disease Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. He also showed that atypical cases of Progeria can be caused by mutations in the same gene, and currently researches the molecular etiology of these disorders. He showed that lamin A is a marker for human embryonic stem cell differentiation, which may have application in regenerative medicine, rejuvenation and cloning. In earlier work, he cloned the human hyaluronidase gene family.

Dr. Khalid Siddiqui pursued his doctoral degree in the field of Molecular Genetics and biochemistry as a student of International Max Planck Research School, Germany, and gets his degree from JW Goethe University Frankfurt. Following his PhD he worked as Postdoctoral research associate in Faculty of Life Science at The University of Manchester, England. After that he moves to Manipal University Dubai Campus as an Assistant Professor of Biotechnology. He has more than 11 years of research experience in various fields of molecular biology and protein purification. He has received numerous scholarships for his work from scientific organizations from UK and Germany. He also received awards for Keystone symposia for his scientific presentations.

Head Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics Lab
Diabetes Strategic Research Center
King Saud University
Saudi Arabia
King Saud University, USA

Dr. Bolshoy is an Associated Professor in the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, and a member of the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa, Israel. He completed his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Computational Structural Biology in 1993. Dr. Bolshoy has been a major player in the field of DNA Linguistics and in the field of DNA curvature and bendability since the 1990-ies. He is the author of the books and many scientific articles.

 Bioinformatics Expertise: DNA structure, multiple sequence alignment algorithms, sequence repetitiveness, sequence complexity, pattern recognition, non-linear regression, heuristic methods of optimization. During the last years my work tries to shed light on one of the big questions in comparative genomics: what are the factors affecting gene length, and whether variations in gene length are dependent on organismal evolution. Currently we know that some genes become longer than their predecessors while other genes become shorter; however, whether the sizes of these factions vary randomly in each organism or follow certain tendency remains an open question.

George G Chen is a professor in the Department of Surgery, Director of Surgical Research Laboratories, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. He is also served as a principle investigator at the Hong Kong Cancer Institute. He has extensive experience in cancer research, particularly in the area of apoptosis in hepatocellular carcinoma, lung caner and thyroid cancer. He has authored or co-authored ~120 papers and has written a number of books or book chapters. He is currently a member of editorial boards or a guest editor of a number of scientific journals and a regular peer-reviewer for several grant agents. He was educated in China and United Kingdom and has MB and PhD degrees.

Surgical Research

Dr. Brocchieri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and Genetics Institute, University of Florida. He has received his A.B. in Biology with a dissertation on the evolution of animal behavior, and his Ph.D. in Environmental Studies, with a dissertation in Theoretical Population Genetics on the evolution of altruistic behavior, at the University of Parma, Italy. He was Postdoctoral fellow, Research Associate, and Senior Research Associate at the Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, from 1991 to 2006, where he worked with Prof. Sam Karlin on bioinformatics and molecular evolution. Dr. Brocchieri is the author of more than 30 peer reviewed scientific articles, 3 book chapters, and software for protein multiple sequence alignment (ITERALIGN) and for gene identification (N-PACT).

Dr. Brocchieri’s main research interests are in the development of mathematical models for the characterization of patterns of protein evolution and phylogenetic methods, in studying the evolution of eukaryotic developmental genes, in adaptive processes in the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and in computational methods for gene identification.

Momiao Xiong completed his Ph. D in 1993 and postdoctoral studies from University of Southern California. He is a Professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Human Genetics Center at the University of Texas School of Public Health. He has published more than 100 papers and served as editorial board member for a number of Journals.

Statistical Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology;
Integrated Analysis of Genetics and Epigenetics;
Population Genetics;
Computational Systems Biology;
Hign Dimensional Data Reduction and Functional Data Analysis

Dr. Verma is Chief of the Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program\'s (EGRP) Methods and Technologies Branch (MTB), and oversees its research portfolio and initiatives that focus on methods to address epidemiologic data collection, study design and analysis, and to modify technological approaches developed in the context of other research endeavors for use as biomarkers and methods to understand cancer susceptibility. He is responsible for stimulating EGRP-funded research on epigenetic approaches in cancer epidemiology and has been instrumental in developing epigenetics research for NIH as a whole. Dr. Verma helped to develop a Request for Applications (RFA) on Environmental Influences on Epigenetics with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and represents the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS), in NIH\'s Roadmap Initiative on Epigenetics. He helped develop an RFA on Comparative Systems Genetics of Cancer with NCI\'s Division of Cancer Biology (DCB), and is known within the extramural research community as an EGRP Program Director for Program Announcements (PAs) on Small Grants for Cancer Epidemiology and Pilot Studies in Pancreatic Cancer. He also organized a workshop to explore developing a concept for a research initiative on mitochondrial DNA and cancer epidemiology. Dr. Verma was, and continues to be, a co-Program Director for initiatives in gene-environment interactions in cancer etiology, including the Breast and Prostate Cancer and Hormone-Related Variants Cohort Consortium (BPC3), which is a collaborative project to pool data and biospecimens from a group of large prospective cancer epidemiology cohorts. Dr. Verma joined EGRP as a Program Director in 2004. In 2005, he was appointed Acting Chief of EGRP\'s former Analytic Epidemiology Research Branch (AERB). When EGRP reorganized in 2007, he was appointed Acting Chief of MTB and of the Host Susceptibility Factors Branch (HSFB), for which he served as Acting Chief through 2008. Before joining EGRP, he was a Program Director in NCI\'s Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP), where he worked in the areas of biomarkers, early detection, risk assessment, and prevention. He also was Coordinator of DCP\'s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs. He was on the faculty in the Biochemistry Department of Georgetown University before joining NIH.

Biomarkers, epigenetics, epidemiology technologies, proteomics, microRNA, methylation, mitochondria, nanotechnology, risk assessment, susceptibility factors, and systems genetics

Nadereh Jafari directs the Genomics Core Facility, which supports both Northwestern and external investigators by providing traditional and next generation sequencing, genotyping, and gene expression profiling services, as well as many others. She previously served as the director of the Microarray Core Facility, which merged with the Genotyping Core in 2006 to form the current facility. Jafari received her doctorate in laboratory medicine from Shiraz University in Iran, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship and received a master\\\'s degree in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University.

Biotechnology

Y. Kartavtsev has completed his Ph.D. in 1978 at the Institute of General Genetics, RAS (Moscow) and 2nd S.D. degree at the age of 45 years from S. Petersburg University. He served 7 years as the director of Vostok Marine Biological Station (Institute of Marine Biology, FEB RAS, Vladivostok, Russia). Currently he is the head of Lab of Molecular Systematics. He has published more than 60 papers in reputed journals, has several, reviews, monographs & textbooks and serving as an editorial board member of repute. Publically is active as the chairman of Vladivostok Public Foundation for Development of Genetics and RUS-BOL.

Population, Evolutionary & Ecological Genetics, Evolutionary Genomics, Conservation Genetics, Phylogenetics, Genetic Basis of Heterosis, Genetics of Quantitative Traits, Genetics of Reproduction and Animal Stock Rehabilitation.

Dr Zhou is presently a Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Medicine, Associate Vice President of Global Medical Development, Associate Dean of International Research, and Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. Professor Zhou completed his clinical medical training in China in 1989 and obtained his PhD in 2001 from the School of Medicine, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since 2002, After 2 years’ postdoctoral training in the University of Auckland, Dr Zhou has served as an Assistant Professor, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor for the National University of Singapore, Queensland University of Technology (Australia), and RMIT University (Australia). Dr Zhou’s major research interests are systems pharmacology, drug metabolism & drug transport, pharmacokinetics & pharmacometrics, pharmacogenomics, nanomedicine and Chinese medicines. He is currently affiliated with the WHO Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine. Professor Zhou has published more than 320 peer-reviewed papers in various pharmacology and medical journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Research, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and Clinical Cancer Research. He has also published 16 books and book chapters and more than 250 conference abstracts. Dr Zhou serves as an editor-in-chief or editor for Drug, Healthcare and Patient Safety, Clinical Pharmacology & Biopharmaceutics, Journal of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmacoproteomics, Drug Metabolism Letters, WMC (WebmedCentral) plus Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Current Drug Metabolism and is the editorial board member of 25 medical and pharmacological journals.

Nanomedicine, drug discovery, drug metabolism, drug transport, pharmacogenomics, Chinese medicine/herbal medicines, and stem cells.

William Reinhold is currently operating as facility head of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Group in the Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology. He has been a part of this section since April 1998, working with John N. Weinstein, and then Yves Pommier. He has been central in generating multiple datasets for the NCI-60 cancerous cell lines, available at the CellMiner web-application at http://discover.nci.nih.gov/cellminer/. His activities include running the web site, the dissemination and interpretation of this data, and encouraging and facilitating collaborations. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland in 1978, and currently has 67 peer-reviewed publications.

Currently our research includes the collection of data for the NCI-60 cancerous cell lines, and the development of software to facilitate the use of this data in systems pharmacology. We currently provide easy integration for 20, 602 compounds (including 102 FDA-approved drugs, and 53 in clinical trial), 26,065 genes, and 350 microRNAs.