Biography

Roy Parker is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Executive Director, BioFrontiers Institute; Cech-Leinwand Endowed Chair of Biochemistry and Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has a joint appointment with the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. His research focuses on the translation, localization and degradation of eukaryotic RNA, how cells regulate different steps in this process to modulate gene expression, and how alterations in RNA regulation lead to human disease. He has served on, and chaired, the NIH CDF-1 study section, and co-organized the Nucleic Acids Gordon Conference (1997), the RNA Processing Meeting at CSHL (2001), and the 2004 FASEB Conference on Post-Transcriptional Control (2004). He is, or has been, on the editorial boards of MCB, Science, Cell, RNA, Nucleic Acids Research, and was an editor of the Journal of Cell Biology and eLife. He was the President of the RNA Society (2010). He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2010) and Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2012). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and completed his Postdoctoral work at the University of Massachusetts, Worcester.

Biography

David Eisenberg has been on the faculty of UCLA since 1969, now as the Paul D. Boyer Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and as Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Beginning in 1999, Eisenberg concentrated on studies of prions and proteins in the amyloid state.   

As a Harvard undergraduate, Eisenberg studied with Professor John T. Edsall, one of the pioneers of protein chemistry, who oriented his life’s work. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Eisenberg earned a DPhil in theoretical chemistry for study with Professor Charles Coulson on hydrogen bonding in ice. Returning to the United States, Eisenberg worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton with Professor Walter Kauzmann, the discoverer of the hydrophobic interaction. Together they wrote a monograph, The Structure and Properties of Water, still in print after 51 years. In a second postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, Eisenberg learned X-ray crystallography from Professor Richard Dickerson (who later joined the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry faculty in 1981).  

Eisenberg is a member of several scholarly societies, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society. He has received the Harvard Westheimer Medal, the UCLA Seaborg Medal, the Harvey International Prize in Human Health, the Bert and Natalie Vallee Award in Biomedical Science, the 2020 Passano Award and is an honorary fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.

Biography

Melissa Haendel is the Chief Research Informatics Officer at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School, and Director of the Center for Data to Health (CD2H). Her background is molecular genetics, developmental biology, and toxicology as well as translational informatics, with a focus over the past decade on open science and semantic engineering. Dr. Haendel’s vision is to weave together healthcare systems, basic science research, and patient generated data through development of data integration technologies and innovative data capture strategies. Dr. Haendel’s research has focused on integration of genotype-phenotype data to improve rare disease diagnosis and mechanism discovery.

Biography

Krzysztof Fidelis is Co-Founder (with John Moult, 1994) of the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction initiative (CASP) to evaluate modeling methods in structural biology. He also heads the Protein Structure Prediction Center, first at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1994-2005), and then at UC Davis (2005-present). CASP is designed to advance the modeling of protein structure by conducting community-wide assessments that determine the strengths and weaknesses of current methods and so foster progress. The Prediction Center provides the infrastructure for these evaluations. Currently, the fifteenth biennial assessment is underway. Approximately one hundred research groups world-wide participate, with over 67,000 submissions on approximately one hundred protein modeling targets submitted in the last round. 

To help navigate through structure similarities in proteins, Krzysztof’s group introduced the local structure descriptors, defined as amino acid-attached structure context. Their mid-level range of granularity allows for characterizing structure in “modules” that are small and common enough to be found in many proteins. The formalism was applied in several areas, including identification of structure similarity, fold recognition, enzyme-ligand interactions, and structure-function relationships.

Although the primary thrust of his research is in development of methods for structure modeling assessment, he has participated in several collaborations in applied modeling, for example producing the structural models for the Rad1 cell cycle checkpoint proteins, later confirmed by experiment. 

Krzysztof’s group has also used genome-wide yeast binding-site and microarray expression data to show the combinatorial nature of gene regulation. These results provided specific data on how binding sites may be combined to allow a large number of expression outcomes using relatively few transcription factors. 

Biography

Rob Reich is a philosopher, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and associate director of its new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He is a leading thinker at the intersection of ethics and technology, the author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. A former sixth grade teacher, he has won multiple teaching awards at Stanford. He helped to create the global movement #GivingTuesday and serves as chair of its board.

Biography

Dr. C. Estelle Smith (estellesmithphd.com) is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Information Science. With an emphasis in Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing, Estelle completed her PhD in Computer Science in the GroupLens Research Lab (grouplens.org) at the University of Minnesota in 2020. Through industry and interdisciplinary partnerships with organizations like CaringBridge, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Reddit, Estelle’s research explores online systems, communities, and Data Science or Artificial Intelligence and Machine-Learning (AI/ML)-based mechanisms for improving mental and spiritual wellbeing during health crises. Her work has received three awards at prestigious computing venues, including the CHI and CSCW conferences. Estelle employs a Human Centered Design approach that uses qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods to evaluate stakeholders’ values, needs, and behaviors, and to design future sociotechnical innovations that can support spiritual healing and flourishing, even in the face of life-critical illness. Apart from work, Estelle is an avid outdoor enthusiast who loves venturing out into the mountains to rock climb, ski, bike, yoga, and hike with her wonderful Siberian husky, Zosima. Contact her on Twitter at @EstelleSmithPhD or send an email to c.estelle.smith@colorado.edu.

Biography

David Fajgenbaum is a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL), Associate Director of the Penn Orphan Disease Center, and Co-Founder & President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network (CDCN). He is also the national bestselling author of ‘Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action‘ and a patient battling idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD). He is in his longest remission ever thanks to a precision treatment that he identified, which had never been used before for iMCD. An authority on cytokine storms and their treatment, Fajgenbaum leads over 20 translational research studies including the CORONA Project, which is the world’s largest effort to identify, track, and advance COVID-19 treatments. 

Fajgenbaum has published scientific papers in high-impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Lancet. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, Co-Chair of the Advisory Board for the CURE Drug Repurposing Collaboratory, and Co-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the CDCN. Dr. Fajgenbaum earned a B.S. from Georgetown University, M.Sc from the University of Oxford, M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and MBA from The Wharton School.