Ami Bhatt, Assistant Professor, Departments of Medicine and Genetics, Divisions of Hematology and Blood and Marrow Transplantation, Stanford University

Ami is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She earned an M.D. and Ph.D. (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) at the University of California, San Francisco and did her post-graduate training at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute.

Mark Smith, Co-Founder and Research Director, OpenBiome

Mark has led much of the seminal work on fecal transplantation and the human microbiome, publishing in leading journals such as Nature and NEJM. He translated fecal transplantation from a topic of research into clinical practice by founding OpenBiome, where he pioneered the universal donor model as a safe, effective and cost-efficient solution to the C. difficile epidemic. Under Mark's leadership, OpenBiome has treated more than 20,000 patients through a network of over 800 hospitals. He co-founded Finch Therapeutics to develop defined microbial therapies that treat diseases beyond C. difficile.

Mark graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BA in Biology and received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from MIT.

Devaki Bhaya, Principal Investigator, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC

Research in Bhaya lab is driven by an interest in understanding how photosynthetic microorganisms perceive and evolve in response to environmental stressors, such as light, nutrients and viral attack.

Katie Pollard, Director and Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Institute for Human Genetics, and Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco

Previously, Dr. Pollard was an assistant professor in the University of California, Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. Dr. Pollard earned her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley and was a comparative genomics postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1995 and the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008. She is a member of the California Academy of Sciences and a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.

Lawrence David, Assistant Professor, Duke University. Beckman Young Investigator, a Searle Scholar, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow

Lawrence David’s lab at Duke University develops computational and engineering tools for manipulating human-associated bacterial communities. He is a Beckman Young Investigator, a Searle Scholar, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He obtained his PhD in Computational & Systems Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his BS in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University.

Ed Green, Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and co-Director of the Paleogenomics lab at UCSC

Richard (Ed) Green is Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and co-Director of the Paleogenomics lab at UCSC. Ed did his PhD at UC Berkeley and a postdoc with Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig where he pioneered the application of high-throughput sequencing for ancient DNA. His research interests involve technology development for genomics, especially applying high-throughput DNA sequencing for genome assembly, ancient DNA, forensics, and population genetics. Green is co-founder of Dovetail Genomics.

Ramesh Nair, PhD, Acting Director, Bioinformatics, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, Stanford University

As Acting Director, Bioinformatics at Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine (SCGPM), Ramesh is the bioinformatician in residence for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) initiated Stem Cell Center of Excellence (CESCG). He is responsible for diverse bioinformatics needs for the Center Initiated Projects and its extensive collaboration network.

Kristen Beck, Research Staff Member, Sequencing the Food Supply Chain, IBM Research-Almaden, San Jose

Dr. Beck is in the Industrial and Applied Genomics team in the Accelerated Discovery Lab of IBM Research. Since 2008, she has been performing food-related research including mechanistic studies of omega-3 fatty acids in tumorigenesis as well as composition of primate breast milks. As a Research Staff Member and Technical Lead in the Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply, Dr. Beck develops novel bioinformatics methods to analyze terabytes of raw microbial metatranscriptomic data. Her current research focuses on analyzing next generation sequencing data to gain insights about microbial ecology in food ingredients as well as confidently determine the presence of various hazards such as pathogenic organisms, antimicrobial resistance genes, or food fraud.  

Prior to joining IBM Research. Dr. Beck developed biochemical and bioinformatics techniques for the study of a multi-species milk proteomics and transcriptomics. She received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology with a Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology from the University of California, Davis and a B.S. with honors in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Pieter Dorrestein, Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Pediatrics, Director of Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center, Co-Director of Institute for Metabolomics Medicine, Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC San Diego

Dorrestein is trained as a chemist with a focus on understanding how microbes made amino acids, vitamins and other small molecules such as virulence factors, quorum sensors and therapeutically valuable natural products.  Currently, Dorrestein is the Director of the Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center and a Co-Director, Institute for Metabolomics Medicine in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Department of Pharmacology and Pediatrics.

Since his arrival to UCSD in 2006, Dr. Dorrestein has been pioneering the development of mass spectrometry methods to study the chemical ecological crosstalk between populations of microorganisms, including host interactions, for agricultural, diagnostic, clinical and therapeutic applications. For a more detailed biography see http://www.nature.com/news/the-man-who-can-map-the-chemicals-all-over-your-body-1.20035.

Ramesh Nair, PhD, Acting Director, Bioinformatics, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, Stanford University

As Acting Director, Bioinformatics at Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine (SCGPM), Ramesh is the bioinformatician in residence for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) initiated Stem Cell Center of Excellence (CESCG). He is responsible for diverse bioinformatics needs for the Center Initiated Projects and its extensive collaboration network.

Pavel Pevzner,  Ronald R. Taylor Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Director of the NIH Technology Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at University of California, San Diego

Dr. Pevzner  holds Ph.D. (1988) from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia. He was named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2006. He was elected the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow in 2010 for "contribution to algorithms for genome rearrangements, DNA sequencing, and proteomics,” the International Society for Computational Biology Fellow in 2012, and European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europaea) in 2016. He was awarded a Honoris Causa (2011) from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. 

In 2015, he founded the Center for Algorithmic Biotechnology at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. Dr. Pevzner has authored textbooks  "Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach" in 2000,   "Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms" in 2004 (with Neal Jones), and “Bioinformatics Algorithms: An Active Learning Approach in 2014 (with Phillip Compeau). His latest textbook has become the basis of Bioinformatics Specialization at Coursera, a series of Massive Online Open Courses with over 250,000 students enrolled in the last 2 years.

Julie Parsonnet, Professor of Infectious Diseases, and Health Research & Policy, Stanford University

Dr. Parsonnet laboratory's primary research interest is investigating the role of infectious agents in chronic diseases. Much of this work has revolved around Helicobacter pylori infection as a cause of adenocarcinomas and lymphomas of the stomach. Other chronic disease-infection links that the lab has been investigating include the roles of infectious agents in atherosclerosis, and in cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. Additionally the lab is working with other groups inside and outside Stanford to develop teaching tools for clinical investigation and for use in public health in developing countries.  

Tom Slezak, Program Leader, Informatics, LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Tom Slezak is a computer scientist who has been supporting biological research at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) since 1978. He was part of the Human Genome Program for 14 years, and was a developer of the nation-wide BioWatch system. Since 2000 Tom’s pathogen bioinformatics team has developed PCR assays, pan-microbial microarrays (recently commercialized by Affymetrix), and DNA sequence analysis software to support a broad range of pathogen detection and forensic programs in biodefense and human/animal health. Tom was the first computer scientist at LLNL to be named a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff.

In 2011 Tom co-chaired a Blue Ribbon Panel on bioinformatics for the CDC that led to new funding for the Advanced Molecular Detection program. Tom has chaired two major NIAID sequencing center and infectious disease center proposal reviews. He has served on four National Academy panels on biodefense topics and for 3 years on the NAS DoD Standing Committee on Biodefense programs.

Catherine Lozupone, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Division of Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver

Cathy's research focuses on the complex community of microorganisms that inhabit the human body (the microbiota) – particularly in the gastrointestinal tract. She has been heavily involved in the development of very popular computational tools for microbial community analysis; She is the primary developer of the UniFrac algorithm for comparing microbial diversity among many samples using phylogenetic information. Her work in human microbiota research includes studies of the relationship between gut microbiota composition and age, culture, diet, obesity, inflammatory bowel diseases.

Rita Colwell, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland College Park and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health; Global Science Officer and Chairman, CosmosID, Inc.; Senior Advisor and Chairman Emeritus, Canon U. S. Life Sciences

Dr. Rita Colwell’s interests are focused on global infectious diseases, water, and health and Dr. Colwell developed an international network to address emerging infectious diseases and water issues, including safe drinking water for both the developed and developing world, in collaboration with Safe Water Network, headquartered in New York City.

Dr. Colwell served as the 11th Director of the National Science Foundation, 1998-2004.  In her capacity as NSF Director, she served as Co-chair of the Committee on Science of the National Science and Technology Council.  One of her major interests includes K-12 science and mathematics education, graduate science and engineering education and increased participation of women and minorities in science and engineering.  

Gavin Sherlock, Associate Professor, Department of Genetics, School of Medicine, Stanford University

The Sherlock lab uses experimental approaches to understand the evolutionary process, specifically interested in i) what's the rate of beneficial mutation, ii) what is the distribution of fitness effects of beneficial mutations, iii) what are the identities of beneficial mutations, and iv) how do each of these change as a function of genotype, ploidy and environment. Dr. Sherlock is also interested in how mutations that are beneficial in one environment fare in others, to explore the trade-offs that inevitably occur when fitness increases in a specific environment, and to explore at what level experimental evolution can be deterministic, and at what level it is stochastic.

Michael Fischbach, Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF, member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3)

Fischbach is a recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer and New Innovator Awards, an HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholars Award, a Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, a Medical Research Award from the W.M. Keck Foundation, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease award, and a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging.

Jeff Xia, Assistant Professor, McGill University

Dr. Xia obtained his Bachelor’s degree (medicine, 5-yr program) from Peking University Health Science Center, China. He then moved to Canada and obtained his MSc degree (immunology & genetics), followed by his PhD (metabolomics) in 2011, both at the University of Alberta, Canada. He did his postdoctoral training (next-generation sequencing and systems biology) at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Dr. Xia joined McGill University as an Assistant Professor in 2015, and has been recently awarded the Canada Research Chair in bioinformatics and big data analytics. To date, Dr. Xia has published 46 peer-reviewed papers and 4 book chapters. His lab (www.xialab.ca) focuses on combining big data analytics, metabolomics and next-generation sequencing to study gene-environment-microbiome interactions.

Peter Karp, Director, Bioinformatics Research Group, AI Center, SRI

Peter D. Karp is the director of the Bioinformatics Research Group within the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. Dr. Karp has authored more than 160 publications in bioinformatics and computer science in areas including metabolic pathway bioinformatics, computational genomics, scientific visualization, and scientific databases. 

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Ami Bhatt, Assistant Professor, Departments of Medicine and Genetics, Divisions of Hematology and Blood and Marrow Transplantation, Stanford University

Ami is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She earned an M.D. and Ph.D. (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) at the University of California, San Francisco and did her post-graduate training at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute.

Elisabeth Bik, Science Editor, uBiome

After receiving her PhD at Utrecht University in The Netherlands with work on epidemic Vibrio cholerae strains, Elisabeth Bik worked at the Dutch National Institute for Health and the St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, where she set up a molecular microbiology unit for the detection and typing of clinical and nosocomial strains. In 2001, she joined the lab of David Relman in the School of Medicine at Stanford, where she worked on the characterization of the human microbiome in oral, gastric, and intestinal samples. In addition, she studied the microbiome of marine mammals.

In May 2014, she founded Microbiome Digest, an almost daily compilation of scientific papers in the rapidly growing microbiome field. In November 2016, she joined uBiome as a Science Editor. She can often be found discussing science papers on Twitter at @MicrobiomDigest. In her spare time, she searches the biomedical literature for inappropriately duplicated or manipulated photographic images and plagiarized text.

Sanjay Joshi, Chief of Technology, Healthcare and Life Sciences, H2O.ai

Based in Seattle, Sanjay's 25+ year career has spanned the entire gamut of life-sciences and healthcare from clinical and biotechnology research to healthcare informatics to medical devices. A "skunkworks" engineer, bioengineer and informaticist, he defines himself as a "non-reductionist" with a "systems view of the world.”

His current focus is a systems-level understanding of Healthcare, Genomics, Proteomics, Microbiomics, Imaging and IoT processes. Recent experience has included data management and instruments for Electronic Medical Records; Proteomics and Flow Cytometry; FDA and HIPAA validations; Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS); Translational Genomics research and Imaging. Sanjay holds a patent in multi-dimensional flow cytometry analytics. He began his career developing and building X-Ray machines.

Duncan MacCannell,  Chief Science Officer for the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD)

Duncan MacCannell is the chief science officer for the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD), where he coordinates the implementation and support of pathogen genomics, bioinformatics, high-performance computing and other innovative laboratory technologies across the CDC’s four infectious disease centers.  With a broad focus on laboratory science and strategic innovation, he directs the agency’s high-performance computing center of excellence, and works to integrate standardized, sustainable capacity for advanced laboratory technologies and scientific computing into routine public health practice.

Previously, as a public health microbiologist and molecular epidemiologist, Duncan worked with the PulseNet program on the development and validation of next-generation subtyping and characterization methods for Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli (STEC), as a general subject matter expert on bacterial molecular epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance, and as the CDC laboratory surveillance team lead for healthcare-associated pathogens, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile.  

Mark Smith, Co-Founder and Research Director, OpenBiome

Mark has led much of the seminal work on fecal transplantation and the human microbiome, publishing in leading journals such as Nature and NEJM. He translated fecal transplantation from a topic of research into clinical practice by founding OpenBiome, where he pioneered the universal donor model as a safe, effective and cost-efficient solution to the C. difficile epidemic. Under Mark's leadership, OpenBiome has treated more than 20,000 patients through a network of over 800 hospitals. He co-founded Finch Therapeutics to develop defined microbial therapies that treat diseases beyond C. difficile.

Mark graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BA in Biology and received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from MIT.

Holly Ganz, CEO and Founder, AnimalBiome

Holly H. Ganz, PhD, is a microbiologist turned entrepreneur. In the fall of 2016, she left academia to found AnimalBiome, a company that provides assessments of the bacterial composition of the digestive tract of dogs and cats and therapies to help promote healthy guts. Her efforts to translate academic research into solutions for animal lovers began when she launched KittyBiome, a citizen science project that she started while working with Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis in 2015. From the KittyBiome project, she came to appreciate that digestive disorders are common in pets and that there is a pressing need for better diagnostics and therapeutics.

Holly received her PhD from UC Davis, where she studied co-evolution between microbes and animals. After receiving her doctorate, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to study how genetics affects the spread of fungal infections in animal populations. Subsequently she was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley studying how bacterial pathogens survive in soil to infect wildlife. An animal lover, Holly is dedicated to improving animal health and wellness through the application of the latest innovations in microbiology.

Vanessa Ridaura, Technical Lead, Microbiome Research, Verily Life Sciences

Vanessa Ridaura originally from Venezuela, completed her Ph.D. in Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon, where she contributed in developing the first models of 'humanized' mice (gnotobiotic animals colonized with the microbiome from humans) and used these models to study how the gut microbiota can be modified by diet and be a casual element of metabolic diseases such as obesity and type two diabetes.  Vanessa did her post-doctoral work with Dr. Yasmine Belkaid (NIH-NIAID), understanding the effect of specific skin-associated taxa in inflammatory skin diseases like psoriasis and melanoma.

Currently Vanessa is the Technical lead of microbiome research in Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet bet, where as part of Baseline, she studies how the microbiota from different body sites contributes to health.

Ramesh Nair, PhD, Acting Director, Bioinformatics, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, Stanford University

As Acting Director, Bioinformatics at Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine (SCGPM), Ramesh is the bioinformatician in residence for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) initiated Stem Cell Center of Excellence (CESCG). He is responsible for diverse bioinformatics needs for the Center Initiated Projects and its extensive collaboration network.