Plenary Speakers

Susannah Green Tringe, Ph.D.
Metagenome Program Lead, Joint Genome Institute (JGI)

Dr. Tringe received her Bachelor’s Degree in Physics from Harvard and PhD in Biophysics from Stanford. She first did a postdoc at the University of New Mexico studying yeast genetics before doing a second postdoc at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) where she worked in the then emerging field of metagenomics. Dr. Tringe is now the Metagenome Program Lead at the JGI. Her research focuses on using sequence-based approaches to understand microbial communities in a range of environments including animal gut, plant rhizosphere / endosphere and wetland sediments.

 

Lynn Bry, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator and Director of the Partners Biorepository for Medical Discovery (PBMD), Director of the Specimen Bank, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Bry is a Co-Investigator at the Partners Biobank, which is consenting patients at two Partners Healthcare institutions, BWH and MGH, to enable studies furthering biomarker development and validation for personalized medicine. She is an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Medical Director in the Department of Pathology at BWH. She also directs the Crimson Project that has developed IT tools and infrastructure to support high-throughput and sample collection that occurs in a cost-effective and IRB-compliant manner. Working with i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology with the Bedside), an NIH-funded National Center for Biomedical Computing, Crimson has enabled many large-scale genomic studies by supplying tens of thousands of phenotyped samples at a fraction of the costs commonly incurred to obtain adequate materials. Dr. Bry is also a Board-certified pathologist and specializes in clinical laboratory testing in molecular diagnostics, microbiology and immunology. She routinely works with research groups to develop novel markers into diagnostic assays that can be run on platforms used in clinical laboratories. She also maintains an NIH-funded research laboratory, studying host-pathogen-commensal interactions in the gut.

 

John Condeelis, PhD
The Judith and Burton P. Resnick Chair in Translational Research Professor & Co-Chair, Department of Anatomy & Structural Biology Co-Director, Integrated Imaging Program Co-Director, Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics Center Scientific Director, Analytical Imaging Facility Director, Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program, Albert Einstein Cancer Center

John Condeelis’ research interests are in optical physics, cell biology and biophysics, cancer biology and mouse models of cancer. He and his collaborators developed the multiphoton imaging technology and animal models used to identify invasion, intravasation and extravasation microenvironments in mammary tumor metastasis. This led to the discovery of the paracrine interaction between tumor cells and macrophages in vivo, and the role of macrophages in the migration of tumor cells and their dissemination from primary tumors via blood vessels to distant metastatic sites. Based on these results, cell collection techniques, including the in vivo invasion assay, and the NANIVID, were developed for the collection of migrating and disseminating macrophages and tumor cells. This led to the discovery of the mouse and human invasion signatures. John Condeelis has devised optical microscopes for uncaging, biosensor detection and multiphoton imaging for these studies and has used novel caged-enzymes and biosensors to test, in vivo, the predictions of the invasion signatures regarding the mechanisms of tumor cell dissemination and metastasis. This work has supplied markers for the prediction of breast tumor metastasis in humans. Three of these markers, TMEM, MenaCalc and cofilin x p-cofilin, have been used in retrospective studies of cohorts of breast cancer patients to predict metastatic risk and are now in clinical validation trials. He has authored more than 280 scientific papers on various aspects of cell and cancer biology, biophysics and optical imaging.

 

Daniel C. Liebler, PhD
Ingram Professor of Cancer Research and Professor of Biochemistry, Pharmacology and Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Daniel C. Liebler is the Ingram Professor of Cancer Research and Professor of Biochemistry, Pharmacology and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Dr. Liebler’s research program has focused on the interactions of chemicals with biological systems, the impact of protein damage by reactive chemicals and the integration of proteomic and genomic analyses to understand cancer phenotypes. Dr. Liebler is Director of the Jim Ayers Institute for Precancer Detection and Diagnosis, which is dedicated to the application of proteomic technologies to develop cancer diagnostics, and Director of the Vanderbilt programs in the National Cancer Institute-funded Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) and Early Detection Research Network (EDRN).