2011 Speakers

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  George Church is Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Computational Genetics. He is the founder of the Personal Genome Project (PGP), Chairman of PersonalGenomes.org, and PGP#1. He is the recipient of the Franklin Institute’s 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science.

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  Dr. Radoje (Rade) Drmanac, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Complete Genomics since 2006, is one of the leading research scientists and inventors in the field of DNA sequencing-by-hybridization (SBH) and genomic microarrays. In 1994, he co-founded Hyseq (later Nuvelo) where, as chief scientific officer, he led the effort to discover and patent thousands of genes which formed the basis of Nuvelo’s drug development pipeline. Prior to Hyseq, Rade was a group leader at Argonne National Labs from 1991 to 1994 as part of the Department of Energy’s Human Genome Project. He completed his postdoctoral studies in 1990 in Hans Lehrach’s group at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology for the conception and pioneering development of SBH technology from Belgrade University, where he also received B.S. and M.S. degrees in molecular biology.

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  David Goldstein is Director of the Center for Human Genome Variation, The Richard and Pat Johnson Distinguished University Professor, and Professor of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology and Biology at Duke University School of Medicine. In April 2007, he was appointed Honorary Professor, Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK. Dr. Goldstein is the author of over 170 scholarly publications in the areas of population and medical genetics. His principal interests include human genetic diversity, the genetics of disease, and pharmacogenetics. He is the recipient of one of the first seven nationally awarded Royal Society / Wolfson research merit awards in the UK for his work in human population genetics. Most recently, he was appointed co-chair and chair of the Gordon Research Conference meeting on human genetics and genomics for 2011 and 2013.

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  Dana Pe’er is assistant professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia and is one of the leading researchers in computational systems biology. In her Ph.D. (Computer Science) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (with Nir Friedman), Dana pioneered the use of machine learning to uncover the structure and function of molecular networks from genomics data, based on Bayesian networks. She subsequently did a postdoc with George Church at Harvard Medical School and there she began to work towards understanding of how genetic variation alters the regulatory network between individuals and subsequently manifests in phenotypic diversity. This is now the focus of Dana’s lab at Columbia University, where she and her team are developing methods to infer how variation in sequence modulates signal processing and is manifested in cellular phenotypes, with applications towards personalized cancer treatment. Dana is recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, NIH Directors New Innovator Award and a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering.

GET Conference 2011 Steering Committee

• Jason Bobe, PersonalGenomes.org


• Maja Bucan, University of Pennsylvania


• George Church, Harvard