WOLVERINE FOUNDATION - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama
Precision Medicine Institute and Professor, UAB School of Medicine. Dr. Might has been the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) since 2017. At UAB, he is the Hugh Kaul Kaul Endowed Chair of Personalized Medicine, a Professor of Internal Medicine and a Professor of Computer Science. His research at UAB focuses on precision prevention, diagnosis, and therapeutics across rare disease, cancer and common/chronic conditions. A principal theme in his research is the use of computer and data science to enhance clinical and academic medicine.
From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Might was a Strategist in the Executive Office of the President in The White House. At The White House, he worked primarily on President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative with both the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2015, Dr. Might joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School as a visiting professor. At DBMI, his research focused on rare disease discovery and diagnosis, and on the development of personalized therapeutics for rare disease.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Yale
Dr Tim Yu, Attending Physician, Division of Genetics and Genomics, Boston Children's Hospital and Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, has started initial research to establish patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) based neuronal models to study the neurodevelopmental phenotype associated with MAPK8IP3 variants.
Dr Tim Yu - MD, PhD. Dr. Tim Yu is a neurologist and researcher in the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children's Hospital, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research group works at the intersection of genetics, neurobiology, and bioinformatics to explore the basis for neurologic disease and advance genomic medicine. Research interests range from large-scale computational analyses to uncover genes responsible for autism and rare pediatric neurogenetic disorders, to the application of whole genome sequencing for early detection of disease in newborns, to pioneering the development of individualized genomic medicines.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell
Dr. Bradley K. Yoder is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology in the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He holds the UAB Health Science Foundation Endowed Chair in Biomedical Research and was the 2019 recipient of the Lillian Jean Kaplan International Prize for Advancement in the Understanding of Polycystic Kidney Disease. He is the Director of the NIH funded Childhood Cystic Kidney Disease Center, Co-director, with Dr. Matt Might, of the NIH funded Center for Precision Animal Modeling (C-PAM), and the Director of the Graduate Training Program in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental, Biology. He joined the faculty at UAB in 1997 after completing his postdoctoral studies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the guidance of Dr. Rick Woychik, where Dr. Yoder was an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1993.
His research focus is on the cellular and molecular mechanisms regulating assembly, maintenance, and function of the primary cilium utilizing complementary approaches in rats, mice, C. elegans, and cell culture models. Utilizing genetic screens in C. elegans, his group identified multiple proteins required for ciliogenesis and cilia mediated sensory and signaling activities and have extended these studies into mammalian systems demonstrating critical roles for the cilium in embryogenesis and for maintaining normal tissue function in adults. His studies have uncovered a novel role of neuronal cilia in regulating feeding behavior and satiation response that when disrupted leads to obesity and diabetes. His group has contributed to the identification of several new loci involved in human cilia related diseases. In summary, the research conducted by his group is providing innovative insights into how cilia are constructed and how they are established as a unique signaling and sensory structure with a distinct protein composition from the rest of the cell membrane.
Job Titles:
- Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Dr. Roger J. Davis is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is the H. Arthur Smith Professor and Chair, Program in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He received his initial training as a student at Cambridge University. He also trained as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow with Michael P. Czech at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and was a founding member of the Program in Molecular Medicine.
Dr. Davis' studies of signal transduction mechanisms led to the molecular cloning of the first human stress-activated MAP kinase, the cJun NH 2-terminal kinase (JNK). Subsequent studies defined the molecular structure of the JNK pathway, including the identification of upstream and down-stream pathway components and scaffold proteins. This signaling pathway is activated in response to many pathological / physiological stimuli and is implicated in inflammatory diseases (e.g. arthritis), cancer, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. The overall goal of Dr. Davis' research is to understand the molecular basis for these diseases and to design novel therapeutic strategies.
Dr. Wendy Chung is an ABMG board certified clinical and molecular geneticist with 20 years of experience in human genetic research of monogenic and complex traits including diseases such as breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, congenital heart disease, pulmonary hypertension, inherited arrhythmias, cardiomyopathies, obesity, diabetes, congenital diaphragmatic hernias, and autism. She has extensive experience mapping and cloning genes in humans, and describing the clinical characteristics and natural history of novel genetic conditions and characterizing the spectrum of disease, and developing tailored care and treatments for rare genetic diseases.
Dr. Chung directs NIH funded research programs in human genetics of birth defects including congenital diaphragmatic hernia, congenital heart disease, and esophageal atresia, autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, pulmonary hypertension, cardiomyopathy, obesity, diabetes, and breast cancer. She leads Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She has authored over 450 peer reviewed papers and 75 reviews and chapters in medical texts.
Director, Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute and Professor, UAB School of Medicine. Dr. Might has been the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) since 2017. At UAB, he is the Hugh Kaul Kaul Endowed Chair of Personalized Medicine, a Professor of Internal Medicine and a Professor of Computer Science. His research at UAB focuses on precision prevention, diagnosis, and therapeutics across rare disease, cancer and common/chronic conditions. A principal theme in his research is the use of computer and data science to enhance clinical and academic medicine.
Megan is a research assistant in the Yu Lab and received her Bachelor Of Science in Pathobiology and Molecular Cell Biology from The University of Connecticut. She is very interested in studying the pathophysiology of individualized gene therapies and plans to apply to medical school while continuing to pursue her research.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Department of Anatomy and Cell
Swetha Gowrishankar, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is a Faculty Fellow of the Honors College and Faculty of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience, UIC. She has over fifteen years of experience investigating lysosome biology which includes her post-doctoral work studying axonal lysosome transport in the laboratories of Shawn Ferguson and HHMI Investigator Pietro De Camilli at Yale School of Medicine. She was a recipient of BrightFocus fellowship for research on Alzheimer's disease and Cayman Woman in Research Grant. At UIC, her lab studies mechanisms underlying lysosome formation and function in neurons as well as mechanisms underlying lysosome dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia. She addresses these questions using a multidisciplinary approach (imaging, biochemical techniques and proteomics) in mouse models of these diseases as well as iPSC-derived neurons.