GOLD LAB - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Edgewise Therapeutics
Alan Russell is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Edgewise Therapeutics, based in Boulder CO, dedicated to the discovery and development of novel medicines to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other severe, inherited muscle diseases. Previously, Dr. Russell served at GlaxoSmithKline as VP and Head of the Muscle Metabolism Discovery Performance Unit, leading a broad discovery and development effort focused on patients for whom muscle function is compromised. Prior to this, he worked at Cytokinetics Inc. and is the co-inventor of Tirasemtiv and Reldesemtiv, direct muscle sensitizers in clinical trials for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
Dr. Russell received a B.Pharm. in Pharmacy and Pharmacology and Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Gene Therapy from the University of Bath in the UK and Postdoctoral training at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has been active in the discovery and development of medicines to improve skeletal muscle health for the last 20 years.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder and Chairman of the Board of Eliza Corporation
Alexandra Drane is the co-founder and chairman of the board of Eliza Corporation, and co-founder of Engage with Grace. She is obsessed with using technology to help people of all walks of life be happier, healthier, and more productive. She believes the definition of health should be broadened to include life factors (because when life goes wrong, health goes wrong), that people have enormous capacity and the best intentions, and that the single biggest missing, and most important, ingredient in health care is empathy.
Drane has founded four companies (all boot-strapped), is in the process of starting her fifth, and takes an active role with the nonprofits she feels are doing their best to change the world, including two she co-founded. She sits on the board of advisors of TEDMED, the Harvard Executive Sleep Council, and is vice chair of the board of trustees for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Teaching Hospital, in Boston, MA. She is a governor-appointed member of the board of directors for the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the board of directors of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), and the Health Executive Leadership Network. Drane was named one of Disruptive Women in Health Care's Women to Watch in 2014, and one of Boston Globe's 2013 Top 100 Women Leaders. She appears on Boston Business Journal's "40 Under 40" and Healthspottr Future Health 100 lists, as well as an inventor on multiple patents. She has few hobbies outside of her passion for revolutionizing health care, and her love of family and adventure.
Allen Lim received his doctorate from the Applied Exercise Science Laboratory in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder under the direction of Dr. William Byrnes. His doctoral work focused on the use of portable power meters to better understand the demands associated with professional cycling as a model for Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome. After graduating from the University of Colorado in 2004, Allen worked on the Pro Cycling Tour as a sport scientist and coach for the Phonak, Garmin, and Radio Shack professional cycling teams. While with Garmin, Allen was part of a team that developed a testing program that assessed biological markers associated with performance enhancing drug use. Now known as the Biological Passport, that program was adopted by the United States and World Anti-Doping Agency as the first line of defense in the anti-doping movement.
More recently, Allen founded Skratch Labs, a boot-strapped sports nutrition company, that was ranked as the 3rd fastest growing food and beverage company in the USA by Inc. 5000 in 2014. Allen has also co-written three cookbooks with Chef Biju Thomas-the Feed Zone Cookbook, Feed Zone Portables, and Feed Zone Table-all of which promote fresh food from scratch in the context of physical activity and community. Beyond his work in cycling and as an entrepreneur, Allen has served as a consultant for the Chinese Olympic Team at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, for the US Olympic Cycling Team at the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games in London and Rio, and for organizations ranging from Joe Gibbs Racing (NASCAR) to the Kansas City Royals. In his free time, Allen enjoys napping, cycling, and eating.
Job Titles:
- Professor for Systems Biology at the Cologne Excellence Cluster
Andreas Beyer is Professor for Systems Biology at the Cologne Excellence Cluster on Cellular Stress Responses in Age-Associated Diseases (CECAD). Further, he is affiliated with the Institute of Genetics of the University of Cologne and with the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC). After receiving his PhD from the University of Osnabrück, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the teams of Thomas Wilhelm (FLI Jena, Germany) and Trey Ideker (UC San Diego, CA). In 2007, Andreas Beyer became junior group leader at the TU Dresden (Germany), and since 2013, he is a full professor at the University of Cologne.
Andreas Beyer's research employs computational biology approaches to investigate transcriptional and post-transcriptional processes, including their changes with age and in diseases. His work has contributed numerous approaches for the computational analysis of high-throughput molecular data and has led to discoveries regarding the regulation of protein levels and age-associated changes of the transcriptional process.
Anna Marie Pyle is the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, professor of chemistry at Yale University, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Pyle studies RNA structure and RNA recognition by protein enzymes. Her lab uses a combination of experimental biochemistry and crystallography to study the architectural features of large RNA molecules, such as self-splicing introns and other noncoding RNAs. This is accompanied by complementary work on RNA-dependent ATPase enzymes that bind and remodel RNA structures, with an emphasis on proteins that are involved in viral replication and host innate immune response. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Thomas R. Cech at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received a Ph.D. in chemistry under the direction of Jacqueline K. Barton at Columbia University.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Translational Epigenetics at the University Medical Center Goettingen
Argyris Papantonis is the Chair of Translational Epigenetics at the University Medical Center Goettingen, Germany. He was born in 1978 in Athens, Greece, and completed his Biology degree and PhD at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. After a postdoctoral placement at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, UK, he established his own lab at the Center for Molecular Medicine, University of Cologne, Germany in 2013. In 2019, he was appointed as a Professor of Translational Epigenetics at the Medical Faculty of the University of Goettingen, Germany. His research group focuses on understanding the 3D organization of chromosomes over time and how it is impacted by aging and late-life diseases such as cancer. In addition to his scientific work, Papantonis writes and translates fiction, and his debut novella, Karyotype (Kichli Eds., 2014), received the prestigious "Anagnostis" First Book Award.
Barry Levy completed an internal medicine residency at University Hospital and the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and a preventive medicine residency at the Centers for Disease Control. He is board certified in internal medicine and occupational medicine. He is a consultant in occupational and environmental health and an adjunct professor of public health at Tufts University School of Medicine. He previously worked as a medical epidemiologist with the CDC, a professor and director of the occupational health program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and as a director of international health programs. He served as president of the American Public Health Association. Levy has written many published papers on occupational health and public health, and has co-edited books on occupational and environmental health, mastering public health, climate change and public health, and the impact of war, terrorism, and social injustice on public health. Levy's Passover Seder Symbols Song has been viewed over 900,000 times on YouTube.
Ben Coles is a broadly trained economic and political geographer who researches the intersections between commodities and markets, with a particular focus on food. Of particular interest to Ben are the ways in which markets and economies in the abstract sense are grounded in everyday practices and processes of the marketplace, and other places of production and consumption. His research is informed through a place-centred methodology that he calls ‘topo/graphy' (place-writing), which he uses to interrogate the material, social, discursive and sensual assemblies that constitute place. Ben has deployed topo/graphy in a variety of contexts relating the economic and political spaces of the UK, EU, Latin America and beyond to examine a diverse array of geographical questions surrounding the ‘geographies' of commodities and foods (coffee, wine & chickens), of production/consumption/in-between (markets, farms and factories), of social anxiety and of food-bio-security. He is currently working in Sao Paulo on a project that examines the ‘nexus' of food, water and energy, and in the UK a project that examines the ‘Anthropocene Chicken'.
Since 2011, Ben has lectured on economic and political geography at the University of Leicester, UK, and is a Co-director of the Supermarkets Research Network (SuRN). Prior to his appointment at Leicester, Ben was a research fellow in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Sciences (ICOSS), at the University of Sheffield. He has a Ph.D. in Geography from Royal Holloway, University of London, and degrees from the University of Kansas.
After graduating with a degree in Cell Biology from the University of Connecticut in 1975, Bill lived in Colorado for two years before settling in Bennington, Vermont. There he assumed responsibility for the care of his mother, who suffered from early onset breast cancer, as well as the care and financial responsibility for three minor siblings. To support his family, Bill found work at a small cancer research institute at a rural hospital serving the Bennington community. After his mother's death and graduation of his youngest brother from high school, Bill worked at the UC San Diego Medical School for two years before entering graduate school at the Medical College of Vermont. After completing postdoc training at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in New Jersey in 1992, Bill joined the faculty at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, where he has worked as a senior cancer scientist since.
All five of Bill's mother's siblings died of cancer, his brother was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 41, a sister died of breast cancer at 65, and another sister has been treated for ovarian and breast cancer. This extensive family history of cancer led Bill to pursue a career as a cancer scientist in order to obtain a better understanding of the malignant forces killing his family, which also threatened to kill him. Much of the research in his laboratory has investigated DNA damage response pathways that are often defective in cancer cells. In the mid 1990s, his laboratory pioneered the use of the model organism S. cerevisiae to investigate the synthetic lethal interactions between drugs and mutations that eventually became the conceptual basis for personalized medicine.
Not surprisingly given his family history, Bill was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2013. Genetic testing revealed his cancer was caused by a pathogenic mutation in the breast cancer gene BRCA2, which plays an important role in the DNA damage response pathways that have been under investigation in the Burhans laboratory. In addition to continuing to pursue research, Burhans lectures on the importance of genetics and genetic testing to cancer patients and clinicians and serves on the Board of Directors and Advisory Board of the AnCan Foundation, a cancer patient advocacy organization.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors for Brown University 's Carney Institute for Brain Science
Bill Martin leads the Neuroscience therapeutic area of Janssen Research & Development, LLC in discovering and developing important new therapies for people living with brain disorders. His role is focused on addressing areas where the greatest unmet needs in neuroscience remain, and where the biggest impacts can be made for patients and society, including serious mental illness (such as treatment-resistant depression and schizophrenia) and neurodegenerative disorders (such as Alzheimer's disease).
Prior to joining Janssen R&D, Martin co-founded Blackthorn Therapeutics, where he first served as the company's Chief Scientific Officer and Head of R&D before becoming President and Chief Executive Officer. Blackthorn integrates computational and clinical neuroscience and applies a precision medicine approach to creating novel therapeutics for central nervous system (CNS) disorders. Before Blackthorn, Martin held leadership positions at Theravance Biopharma. He started his career at Merck, contributing to the company's Neuroscience franchise.
Martin is also a member of the Board of Directors for Brown University's Carney Institute for Brain Science and has held leadership positions in the Society for Neuroscience, the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, the American Physiological Society and the International Brain Research Organization. He has published extensively on neuroscience and brain disorders, with more than 75 publications in scientific journals.
Martin received a bachelor's in Psychology from Swarthmore College and a doctorate in Experimental Psychology from Brown University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.
Job Titles:
- SVP of Research and Development at Solid Biosciences
Carl Morris is the SVP of Research and Development at Solid Biosciences where he is responsible for overseeing the company's drug development activities. Prior to joining Solid, Carl was a Senior Director for Pfizer's Rare Disease Research Unit, leading their efforts in neurologic diseases and the muscle biology programs. While at Pfizer, Carl directed several small molecule and biotherapeutic development programs, including a program that led to a Phase 2 study in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. He also headed an internal research group responsible for advancing programs from target identification to the clinic for many of the rare neurologic and muscle-related diseases. Carl identified key external opportunities and worked closely with patient groups, academic laboratories, and other industry partners to advance drug development in the rare neuromuscular space. His scientific and drug development experience at Pfizer also included investigations into broader muscle wasting conditions, as well as tendon and bone repair biology.
Prior to joining Pfizer in 2007, Carl was an Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Medicine and a founding faculty member of the Muscle and Aging Research Unit, established to investigate strategies for improving muscle function during aging or disease. He completed his Postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked on multiple projects ranging from molecular aspects of muscle protein interactions through to therapeutic approaches for modulating muscle size and function. As a trained muscle physiologist, his academic pursuits have ranged from biophysical aspects of muscle contraction and enzyme kinetics to therapeutic interventions in a variety of in vivo muscle atrophy and disease models.
Carl holds a bachelor's degree in Biology from Franklin Pierce College (Rindge, NH) and a Ph.D. in Physiology from UCLA.
Casey is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the founding Director of the Center for Health AI in the University of Colorado School of Medicine. His lab develops machine learning methods that integrate distinct large-scale datasets to extract the rich and intrinsic information embedded in such integrated data. This approach reveals underlying principles of an organism's genetics, its environment, and its response to that environment. Extracting this key contextual information reveals where the data's context doesn't fit existing models and raises the questions that a complete collection of publicly available data indicates researchers should be asking. In addition to developing deep learning methods for extracting context, a core mission of his lab is bringing these capabilities into every molecular biology lab through open, transparent science conducted by a diverse team of researchers. Before starting the Integrative Genomics Lab in 2012, Casey earned his Ph.D. for his study of gene-gene interactions in the field of computational genetics from Dartmouth College in 2009 and moved to the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow from 2009-2012. The overarching theme of his work has been the development and evaluation of methods that acknowledge the emergent complexity of biological systems.
Charles R. "Chuck" Middleton, after a long and distinguished career in higher education spanning six decades, retired as Roosevelt University's 5 th president in 2015. Subsequently he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the City Colleges of Chicago where he is overseeing the academic transformation of that institution's seven campuses. For over 50 years, he taught more than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students and authored more than 80 scholarly books, monographs and public policy papers.
In addition to his passion for and work in higher education, Chuck's dedication to community engagement, including advocacy for inclusiveness, social justice, and LGBT rights, is evidenced by his many professional and civic commitments. Among these he serves on the Board of Governors of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., the Board of Directors of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), the Point Foundation Board of Governors, and the Chicago History Museum Community Advisory Council. In 2011, he joined the Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) Board of Directors where he is currently Treasurer, and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) Board of Directors. He is past Co-Chair of the LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education and continues as Executive Director of that organization to work for its expanding influence and impact on college and university campuses nationwide.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Biological Chemistry
Christopher Walsh is the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology (BCMP) at Harvard Medical School. He has had extensive academic leadership experience, including Chairmanship of the MIT Chemistry Dept (1982-1987) and the HMS Biological Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology Dept (1987-1995) as well as serving as President and CEO of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (1992-1995).
His research has focused on enzymes and enzyme inhibitors, with recent specialization on antibiotics and biosynthesis of other biologically and medicinally active natural products. He and his group have authored 790 research papers, and three books: on Enzymatic Reaction Mechanisms (1979); Antibiotics: Origins, Actions, Resistance (2003); Posttranslational Modification of Proteins: Expanding Nature's Inventory (2005). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a co-recipient of the 2010 Welch Prize in Chemistry.
At Harvard he has taught biochemistry, chemical biology, and pharmacology to medical students and graduate students and organic chemistry to undergraduates. He has been involved in a variety of venture-based biotechnology companies since 1981, including Genzyme, Ironwood, and Epizyme.
Dr. Malone began her scientific career wearing hip-waders in a swamp behind her home in Illinois. She earned her B.S in Biology at Illinois State University and her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at UCLA. She continued her Post-doctoral work at UCLA in Molecular Genetics. Dr. Malone is currently a distinguished educator and an Associate Professor at California State University Northridge where she is the Director of the CSUN-UCLA Bridges to Stem Cell Research Program funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Malone's research is aimed at training Undergraduates and Masters degree candidates to understand how genes are regulated through genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that alter gene expression.
Dr. Malone has thought deeply about how one engages normal human beings in the practice of sensible biology in everyday life. Her alternative educational efforts have won her curriculum enhancement awards and teaching awards at CSUN. Many of her antics can be seen in a number of entertaining You Tube videos
Job Titles:
- Co - Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies
Daniel Dennett is Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy. He is the author of a number of books including Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves, and Breaking the Spell. His most recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds was published in 2017. He is also the author of over four hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
In 2012, Dan was awarded the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam, the highest award given in the Netherlands. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and five grandchildren. He received a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from Harvard. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed his D.Phil. in philosophy. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the London School of Economics, and the American University of Beirut.
Dan has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. After more than forty summers hobby farming in Maine, he sold his farm in Blue Hill and moved to a house on an island in Maine, where he hopes to continue his sailing and maybe resume his sculpting.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Microbiology at the Royal Institute of Technology
Dr Mathias Uhlen is Professor of Microbiology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. Dr Uhlen is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science (IVA), the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (KVA), the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and member of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) council. He was Vice-President of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), responsible for external relations, from 1999 to 2001. He was the chairman of the Swedish Biochemical and Molecular Biology Society (SFMB) from 1994 to 1999. Dr Uhlen has more than 350 publications in bioscience with the focus on the development and use of affinity reagents in biotechnology and biomedicine.
In the early eighties, Dr Uhlen cloned and characterized staphylococcal protein A, which is now used extensively for purification of antibodies both in diagnostics and therapy. In 1983, he showed, for the first time, the principle of affinity tag for purification fusion proteins. The use of affinity tags for purification of recombinant proteins are now widely used in bioscience. In 1988, Uhlen published the use of magnetic micro spheres with streptavidin for automated solid phase applications. Such laboratory systems based on streptavidin beads are at present frequently used both in research and diagnostics. In 1995, his group described a new principle for affinity reagents, called Affibodies, and showed their use as research tool and recently as potential cancer therapeutics. Uhlen and colleagues also developed a new strategy for DNA analysis called Pyrosequencing, a method that has recently been further developed by 454/Roche into a so called next generation sequencing instrument.
Dr Uhlen is currently working on the Human Protein Atlas project (HPA), with the aim to systematically map the human proteome. At present, the Human Protein Atlas portal (www.proteinatlas.org) contains more than 10 million high-resolution images representing more than 12,000 human protein-encoded genes. He is also Director of the new Science for Life Laboratory at the Karolinska Institute campus in Stockholm responsible for high-throughput molecular life science, with a focus on genomics, proteomics, bioimaging, biobank profiling, bioinformatics and systems biology.
He has founded several companies, including Pyrosequencing AB (now Biotage AB), Affibody AB, SweTree Technologies AB, Magnetic Biosolutions AB (now Nordiag AS), Atlas Antibodies AB and Creative Peptides AB. He has received numerous awards, including The Svedberg prize in 1992, the Göran Gustavsson prize in 1993, the gold medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2004, the Most Noble Order of the Seraphim - the Order of His Majesty the King in 2004, the Jerker Porath award in 2005, the Akzo Noble Award in 2005, the HUPO Distinguished Award and KTH Great Prize both in 2006. The Scheele prize in 2007 and the ABRF award in 2009.
Job Titles:
- Consulting Professor
- Managing Director and General Partner at Artiman Ventures
Dr. Ajit Singh is Managing Director and General Partner at Artiman Ventures, based in Palo Alto, CA and focuses on early-stage Technology and Life Science investments. On behalf of Artiman, he serves on the Board of Directors of Aditazz, CardioDx, Click Diagnostics, CORE Diagnostics, and OncoStem Diagnostics.
Dr. Singh is also a Consulting Professor in the School of Medicine at Stanford University.
He serves on the Board of Max India Ltd, and is the Lead Director on Board of Directors of Max Healthcare based in New Delhi, India. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Sophie Biosciences - an early stage company focused on molecular imaging, spun out from UCLA and CalTech.
Prior to joining Artiman, Ajit was the President and CEO of BioImagene, a Cancer Diagnostics company that was acquired by Roche in 2010. Before BioImagene, Ajit spent nearly twenty years at Siemens Healthcare in various CEO roles based in the US and Germany. Between 1988 and 1995, he concurrently served on the faculty at Princeton University.
Ajit has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, a Master's in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Banaras Hindu University, India. He has published two books and numerous refereed articles, and holds six patents.
Ajit is an avid reader, and publishes an annual Top-10 Book Review. He is the Chairman of the Board of Art Forum based in San Francisco, which, along with its parent organization, puts up Asia's biggest literary gathering, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Department of Microbiology
Dr. Allan Jacobson is Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems at the UMass Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He obtained a Ph.D. at Brandeis University, did postdoctoral research at MIT, and joined the founding UMass faculty in 1973. His research in the ensuing decades has been focused on the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression, at first exclusively in model systems, but subsequently in inherited disorders. To transform his research interests into products, Dr. Jacobson co-founded Applied bioTechnology, Inc. in 1982 and PTC Therapeutics Inc. in 1998. At PTC, he currently serves as a director and chair of its Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Jacobson's contributions have been acknowledged with the UMass Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Scholarship, a MERIT Award from the NIH, and election to the American Academy of Microbiology.
Dr. Ann Thor is the Todd Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Colorado School Of Medicine, and the former Rader Professor and Chair of Pathology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Prior to that she served as Director of Cytopathology at Evanston Northwestern and the University of Vermont Medical Center. In addition to her role as Chair, Ann is the Director of Cytopathology for the University Hospital and Director of the Cytology Fellowship Program. She has served on numerous not for profit boards related to clinical oncology and breast disease, national committees and study sections, including the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NCI, Chair of Women in Cancer Research for AACR, President of the Association of Pathology Chairs, founding Chair of Leadership and Diversity Committee, Chair of the Research Committee of the APC, President of the International Society of Breast Pathology. She is active in leadership with the physician practice organization known as CU Medicine. She is particularly interested in promoting roles for women and minorities in science and medicine.
Ann was trained in research at the Ludwig Institute in Sutton, England, the labs of Tumor Immunology and Biology and Pathology at the NIH and the Department of Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University through a Career Development Award from the American Cancer Society. Her research laboratory has published 195 peer reviewed scientific articles and trained nearly 40 pre- and post-doctoral students. She has published 195 peer reviewed publications in prestigious journals including Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, J. National Cancer Research, Cancer Research, Oncogene, to name a few. Her research has focused on breast cancer biology and molecular subtyping, hormonal and receptor tyrosine kinase associated carcinogenesis and the mechanisms of metformin action in breast cancer.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder, and Retired Chief Scientific Officer at SEQUENOM, Inc
Dr. Charles Cantor is co-founder, and retired Chief Scientific Officer at SEQUENOM, Inc., the leading provider of noninvasive prenatal testing. He consults for a number of biotech companies including Simcere/Bioscikin (China), Star-Array (Singapore), Edico Genomics (USA), Innovative Biosciences (China), Agena Biosciences (USA), Strand Life Sciences (India), Trovagene (USA), Ana Jema (China), ProdermIQ (USA), Armonica (USA), Anchor DX (China), My Genome Box, a subsidiary of EOne (Korea), Genetic Intelligence (USA) and In Silico Biology (Russia, USA), and he is co-founder and executive director of Retrotope (USA), a clinical stage pharmaceutical company.
In the past decade, Charles has focused his attention on developing rational and cost-effective approaches to preventive and personalized medicine. is includes (1) liquid biopsies (Agena Biosciences, Trovagene, Innovative Biociences, Anchor DX) that could detect age-related disease pathology earlier and thus allow for more effective intervention, (2) DNA testing in minutes suitable for use in emergency rooms and operating theaters (Star-Array) and (3) deuterated lipids (Retrotope) that show great promise at reducing the oxidative damage processes that play a central role in many age-related diseases.
Charles has held academic and leadership positions at Columbia and several other distinguished American universities, but for the past 20 years he has focused his efforts in biotechnology companies. Charles is currently professor emeritus of Biomedical Engineering and of Pharmacology at Boston University. He is adjunct professor of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Institute for Research, distinguished adjunct professor of Physiology and Biophysics at UC Irvine and adjunct professor at the Moscow institute of Physics and Technology.
Charles received his bachelor's of art in chemistry at Columbia College and his doctorate from UC Berkeley. He became a full professor of chemistry at Columbia University at the age of 29.
Larry Gold, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized scientist whose research at the University of Colorado Boulder has spawned numerous discoveries and commercially successful biotechnology patents. Gold, who has taught at CU-Boulder since 1970 and was chair of the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department from 1988 to 1992, helped to open the MCD Biology Building in 1995. The building, renamed the Gold Biosciences Building in 2013, has been home to groundbreaking discoveries, including innovations by Gold himself, which can lead to longer and better lives.
Gold, a bioscience industry pioneer and entrepreneur, has conducted DNA and RNA research resulting in new drug families. He currently is the chairman of the board of the biotech company SomaLogic in Boulder, Colorado. He founded NeXagen, Inc. in 1992, which later became NeXstar Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and merged with Gilead Sciences, Inc. The company is a developer of commercial products for infectious disease treatments. Gold also co-founded the biotech company Synergen, Inc. in 1981.
For his contributions to teaching and science, Gold has won numerous local and national awards including CU-Boulder's Distinguished Research Lectureship award, the highest honor bestowed by faculty on a faculty member. Gold also has won the Merit Award and the Career Development Award, both of the National Institutes of Health, and the Lifetime Award and the Chiron Prize for Biotechnology, both of the Colorado BioScience Association.
In addition, he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993 and was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1995. Valuable and commercially successful patents resulting from Gold's discoveries made at CU-Boulder in combination with several private donations generously made by Gold have brought significant recognition and revenues both to the MCDB department and to the university while advancing human health and wellness.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison
I began my research career by studying lipid and lipoprotein metabolism. In mid-career, I switched to work on genetics of obesity and diabetes. My lab is presently devoted to identification and characterization of new genes that confer susceptibility to obesity-induced diabetes and contribute to diabetes complications. We combine metabolic research with cutting edge approaches to genetics and genomics. The laboratory has a highly experienced staff with expertise in physiological studies of insulin secretion, insulin action, lipid and lipoprotein metabolism, and quantitative genetics and is experienced in in vivo studies in numerous animal models as well as in vitro studies in tissue culture models of adipose, muscle, liver, and B-cells. The current focus of our work is on genes that affect vesicle biogenesis and insulin secretion.
Mat Todd was born in Manchester, England. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Cambridge University in 1999, was a Wellcome Trust postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, a college fellow back at Cambridge University, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London and since 2005 has been at the School of Chemistry, the University of Sydney.
His research interests include the development of new ways to make molecules, particularly how to make chiral molecules with new catalysts. He is also interested in making metal complexes that do unusual things when they meet biological molecules or metal ions. His lab motto is "To make the right molecule in the right place at the right time," and his students are currently trying to work out what this means.
He has a significant interest in open science, and how it may be used to accelerate research, with particular emphasis on open source discovery of drugs and catalysts. He is Chair of The Synaptic Leap, a nonprofit dedicated to open biomedical research. In 2011 he was awarded a New South Wales Scientist of the Year award in the Emerging Research category for his work in open science. He is on the Editorial Boards of PLOS ONE, Chemistry Central Journal and ChemistryOpen.
Meredith Guerrero is the executive director of the GoldLab Foundation. After receiving her bachelor's degree in Psychology and English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Meredith took a job with Bain & Company's global headquarters in Boston. She spent four years at Bain, where she was part of a core team that created an investment fund subsidiary. She left Bain for graduate school. At New York University, she received a master's degree in Integrated Marketing, a program that focused on quantitative metrics, direct marketing fundamentals, social media, and ROI analysis by channel.
Meredith originally intended to work in the fashion industry and held internships at Prada and Ann Taylor. However, while in graduate school, Meredith lost both of her parents to preventable diseases. That life-changing experience convinced her to pursue a more meaningful, fulfilling path in work and life.
Consequently, after she received her master's degree she moved to Boulder, Colorado. In Boulder, she worked as a Marketing Strategy Consultant until she teamed up with Larry Gold to form The GoldLab Foundation. In her capacity as Executive Director, she worked closely with Dr. Gold to create the initial plan for the Colorado Longitudinal Study. Now, with many more fantastic advisors, Meredith combines her marketing and leadership skills with collaborative spirit and passion for doing meaningful work to create the partnerships that will support COLS.
Meredith Guerrero's professional and personal experiences have shaped and positioned her to take the lead position at the GoldLab Foundation.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Head of Music and Human Learning at the University of Texas
Robert Duke is the Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Professor and Head of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is University Distinguished Teaching Professor, Elizabeth Shatto Massey Distinguished Fellow in Teacher Education, and Director of the Center for Music Learning. The most recent recipient of MENC's Senior Researcher Award, Dr. Duke has directed national research efforts under the sponsorship of such organizations as the National Piano Foundation and the International Suzuki Institute. His research on human learning and behavior spans multiple disciplines, including motor skill learning, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. His most recent work explores procedural memory consolidation and the cognitive processes engaged during musical improvisation. A former studio musician and public school music teacher, he has worked closely with children at-risk, both in the public schools and through the juvenile justice system. He is the author of Scribe 4 behavior analysis software, and his most recent books are Intelligent Music Teaching: Essays on the Core Principles of Effective Instruction and The Habits of Musicianship, which he co-authored with Jim Byo of Louisiana State University. In the fall of 2011 he will join the faculty of the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, California.
Job Titles:
- Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
Robert A. Weinberg is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Bob and his colleagues isolated the first human cancer-causing gene, the ras oncogene, and the first known tumor suppressor gene, Rb, the retinoblastoma gene. Bob is the author or editor of five books and more than 420 articles. His three most recent books include Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer; Genes and the Biology of Cancer; co-authored with Dr. Harold E. Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health, and The Biology of Cancer; a textbook for advanced undergraduates and doctoral students. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the 1997 U.S. National Medal of Science.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1942, Bob received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biology from MIT. He did postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and then returned to MIT in 1972. In 1982, he was appointed Professor of Biology at MIT and also became one of the five original members of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ruth Crowe is an internist practicing Primary Care medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. As the Director of Integrated Clinical Skills at New York University School of Medicine, she focuses on implementing innovative medical education to educate entrustable physicians who will facilitate health care reform.
Job Titles:
- President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance
Sharon F. Terry is President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance. She is the founding CEO of PXE International, a research & advocacy organization for the genetic condition pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), a condition that affects her two children. Ms. Terry is also co-founder of Genetic Alliance Registry & Biobank, a centralized lay run biological and data repository catalyzing translational genomic research on genetic diseases.
She is at the forefront of consumer participation in genetics research, services and policy and serves as a member of many of the major governmental advisory committees on biomedical research, including liaison to the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders and Genetic Diseases in Newborns and Children and the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, NHGRI, NIH. She serves on the boards of the Institute of Medicine Science and Policy, GRAND Therapeutics Foundation, the Center for Information & Study on Clinical Research Participation, National Coalition of Health Professional Education in Genetics, and the Google Health and Rosalind Franklin Society.
She received an honorary doctorate from Iona College; the first Patient Service Award from the UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy; the Research!America Distinguished Organization Advocacy Award and the Clinical Research Forum and Foundation's Annual Award for Leadership in Public Advocacy. She is an Ashoka Fellow.