Program

Dr. Lynda Chin has joined University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center where she will be the chair of the first ever Department of Genomic Medicine and Scientific Director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science. For the past 14 years, she has been a member of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School community where she was Professor of Dermatology at the Harvard Medical School, member of Department of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Chin also served as the Scientific Director of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and co-led the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center's Melanoma Program and the Harvard Skin SPORE. At the Broad Institute, Dr. Chin is PI of the TCGA Genome Data Analysis Center. She is also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.

Dr. Chin has made multiple scientific discoveries spanning the fields of transcription, telomere biology, mouse models of human cancer, oncogenomics, and personalized cancer medicine. She co-founded AVEO Pharmaceuticals in 2002, a cancer biotechnology company that emphasizes cancer biology and genetics to identify new cancer targets with tumor maintenance roles. Most recently, Dr. Chin also founded Metamark Genetic, a cancer diagnostic company that will develop function-based prognostic determinants that can guide customized management of early-staged cancer patients including melanoma and prostate cancer.

Dr. Chin received her M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1993. She is a board-certified dermatologist and conducted her clinical and scientific training at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she served as Chief Resident of Dermatology. Dr. Chin has three young children, ages 10, 9 and 7.

Lawrence Hunter is the Director of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and is a Professor in the departments of Pharmacology and Computer Science (Boulder). He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1989, and then spent more than 10 years at the National Institutes of Health, ending as the Chief of the Molecular Statistics and Bioinformatics Section at the National Cancer Institute.

He inaugurated two of the most important academic bioinformatics conferences, ISMB and PSB, and was the founding President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He was named a Fellow of the ISCB in 2009.

Larry's research interests span a wide range of areas, from cognitive science to rational drug design. His primary focus recently has been the integration of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning techniques and their application to interpreting data generated by high throughput molecular biology.

Kun Huang received two B.S. degrees in biology and computer science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1996. In addition, he received the M.S. degree in physiology in 1998, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2000, the M.S. degree in mathematics in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2004, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus, Ohio, USA and the Co-Director of the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center Biomedical Informatics Shared Resources. His research interests include computational biology, bioinformatics, biomedical imaging analysis, computer vision, and machine learning.

Cydney Nielsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the BC Cancer Agency's Genome Sciences Centre. She completed her PhD in Computational Biology at MIT where her work in Chris Burge's lab focused on understanding mammalian post-transcriptional gene regulation. Motivated by the analysis challenges posed by high-throughput sequencing technologies, her current research exploits synergies between human visual reasoning and machine computation in order to address pressing questions in genomics. Her work on a genome assembly visualization tool, ABySS-Explorer, won a Best Paper award at the 2009 IEEE Information Visualization Conference.

Arthur Olson is the Anderson Research Chair Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute and founder and director of its Molecular Graphics Laboratory. He received his B.S. (Honors) in Chemistry from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, working on the first atomic resolution structure of an intact viral capsid.

He is a pioneer in the analysis and visualization of biological assemblies spanning length scales from microns to angstroms. His laboratory has developed, applied and distributed a broad range of molecular modeling and visualization software tools over the past 25 years, including AutoDock, which is the worlds most highly cited ligand protein docking code. He started the first Internet distributed biomedical computing project, FightAIDS@Home, which is now running on over a million computers worldwide, and which was honored by resolution in the California State Legislature. His latest work in molecular graphics focuses on the development of novel and intuitive human interfaces for research and education in structural molecular biology utilizing solid printing and augmented reality technologies. Olson's visualizations and animations have reached a broad audience through public venues such as the Disney EPCOT center, PBS television, and a number of art and science museum exhibits around the world.

Willy Supatto is a tenured CNRS researcher at the Laboratory for Optics and Biosciences at Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France) since 2011. He received a M.Sc. degree in Physics and Chemistry from ESPCI ParisTech (Paris, France) and a M.Sc. degree in Biophysics from Paris University. He completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at Institut Curie in Paris where his work in Emmanuel Farge's lab focused on developing new imaging and optical manipulation strategies to investigate biomechanics during embryonic morphogenesis. In 2006, he joined the Biological Imaging Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, Pasadena, USA) to pursue postdoctoral studies with Pr. Scott E. Fraser within the Center of Excellence in Genomics Science. He developed microscopy, optical manipulation and image analysis tools to study symmetry breaking, fluid flow dynamics and collective cell migration in living embryos. He joined the Ecole Polytechnique in 2011 as a CNRS researcher to pursue pioneering investigaion of embryonic development using quantitative imaging.