Dr. Kolesar serves as Dean and Professor and the Jean M. Schmidt Chair in Drug Discovery at the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy. She received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, where she also completed a residency and fellowship in oncology. Her research focuses on precision medicine and oncology drug development. She has authored more than 400 abstracts, research articles, and book chapters, and as a principal investigator has received more than $15 million in research funding from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and other sources. In addition, she has 9 patents or patents pending and has founded two start-up companies, Helix Diagnostics and VesiCure Technologies, based on technologies developed in her laboratory.

 Dr. Jinpeng Liu is an assistant professor in the Division of Cancer Biostatistics in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Liu obtained his Ph.D from University of Kentucky.  His research focuses on computational method design and big data analytics for the interrogation of high-throughput sequencing data in cancer research. He has published several software packages for single cell RNA-seq quantification, large-scale alignment-free sequencing query and genome wide driver mutation discovery. He also led the bioinformatics components in genomics characterization of Lung Cancer Genomics in Appalachian Kentucky, Kentucky Colon Cancer Genome study and Kentucky Pediatric Brain Tumors study.

Dr. Jakubek is an assistant professor in the Division of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Kentucky and a member of the Markey Cancer Center. She has led and contributed to several genomic studies of tumors, pre-malignant lesions, and genetic mosaicism in normal tissues. Her work includes methods developments for the study of intra-tumor heterogeneity and copy number changes. Dr. Jakubek’s research program aims to advance our understanding of the earliest stages in disease development by studying somatic mutations and clonal dynamics across tissue types. Dr. Jakubek obtained her B.A. from Cornell University and her PhD from Emory University. She completed her postdoctoral training at MD Anderson Cancer Center .

Biography coming soon.

Biography coming soon.

Mariano Russo, PhD, is a bioinformatics scientist at Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine at Windber and Murtha Cancer Center Research Program. He received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University studying personalized medicine approaches for early detection biomarkers in cancer. Before joining the Windber Research Institute, he was a bioinformatician at a clinical genomics company, SOPHiA Genetics, where he worked on developing new bioinformatics pipelines for targeted panels in clinical diagnostics and analyzing NGS sequencing approaches to optimize signal-to-noise solutions. His research is currently focused on understanding the evolutionary genomics of metastatic progression.

Dr. Davis is the newly appointed Director of the Institute of Translational Genomic Medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine, and Distinguished Investigator with the Georgia Research Alliance. She also serves as Scientific Director of the International Center for the Study of Breast Cancer Subtypes (ICSBCS), (Interim) Director of Health Equity for the Englander Institute of Precision Medicine and Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Department of Surgery and at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, NY. She is also a Cancer Ethnicity Scholar, co leading the PolyEthnic-1000 project at New York Genome Center.

Dr. Han is David Brown Chair Professor in Genomic Medicine, Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, Brown Center for Immunotherapy, Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM). Before joining IU, he was an Associate Professor and CPRIT scholar at Texas A&M University, Institute of Biosciences & Technology, and Assistant Professor at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Dr. Han obtained his PhD from Chinese Academy of Sciences and did postdoc training at Stanford University and at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Han’s lab focused on harnessing big data for precision oncology.

Dr. Teer's research interests are focused on developing methods to analyze, interpret and visualize massively-parallel sequencing information in cancer genetics. This includes developing and applying computational methods and graphical tools to better detect genetic variations from sequencing data, understand the functional context of sequence changes, and visualize the results of large-scale genomics studies. Dr. Teer applies these approaches in collaborative projects related to cancer disparities, immuno-oncology, and cancer genomics.

Hong Zhu, Ph.D., is a tenured Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine. She currently serves as Director of Biostatistics Shared Resource of UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Zhu has over a decade of experience in conducting statistical methodology research and providing statistical leadership on federally- and foundation-funded projects. Her methodological research focuses on design and analysis of clinical trials, statistical methods for complex survival data, and causal inference. She has extensive experiences in design, conduct, and analysis of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), particularly, real-world pragmatic trials and comparative effectiveness research (CER) using complex observational healthcare data (registries, claims, and electronic health record) in areas including cancer, chronic and infectious diseases.

Biography coming soon.

Biography coming soon.