Nadav Ahituv - Nadav Ahituv is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco.
He received his PhD in human genetics from Tel-Aviv University working on hereditary hearing loss. He then did his postdoc, specializing in human genomics, in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the DOE Joint Genome Institute. His current work is focused on discovering gene regulatory elements in the human genome and linking mutations within them to human disease.
Jeffrey Boore - Dr. Jeffrey Boore is Chief Executive Officer of Genome Project Solutions, Inc. and Associate Adjunct Professor at University of California, Berkeley. Jeffrey Boore began his comparative genomics work over two decades ago by sequencing, interpreting, and comparing the mitochondrial genomes of many animal groups, and has continued by working on both plastid and whole nuclear genomes.
He has had academic appointments at the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley, was Head of Evolutionary Genomics at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, and is CEO of Genome Project Solutions, Inc. He has led several whole genome sequencing projects, including those of the crustacean Daphnia pulex, the moss Physcomitrella patens, and the oomycete agent of Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, Phytophthora sojae.
His contributions have included the use of gene rearrangements for uncovering ancient evolutionary relationships, the demonstration that the vertebrate genome arose by two rounds of whole genome duplication, and the creation of software for doing whole genome evolutionary analysis.
Jonathan Eisen - Jonathan A. Eisen is an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at the University of California, Davis, as well as the lead of the Phylogenomics Program at JGI Doe Joint Genome Institute. His research focuses on the mechanisms underlying the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate).
Most of his work involves the sequencing of the genomes of microorganisms and the development and use of "phylogenomic" methods to analyze the genome data.
Katherine Pollard - Katherine received her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley Division of Biostatistics under the supervision of Mark van der Laan. Her research at Berkeley included developing computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology.
After graduating, she did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Sandrine Dudoit. She developed Bioconductor open source software packages for clustering and multiple hypothesis testing. In 2003, she began a comparative genomics NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the labs of David Haussler and Todd Lowe in the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
She was part of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium that published the sequence of the Chimp Genome, and she used this sequence to identify the fastest evolving regions in the human genome. In 2005, she joined the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She moved to UCSF in Fall 2008.
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