President and Co-founder
Institute for Systems Biology (ISB)
Seattle, Washington - 6:15 PM Sunday

"Systems Medicine, Emerging Technologies and Proactive P4 Medicine"

Dr. Hood is a pioneer in the systems approach to biology and medicine. His research has focused on the study of molecular immunology, biotechnology and genomics. Dr. Hood’s professional career began at Caltech, where he and his colleagues developed the DNA gene sequencer and synthesizer and the protein synthesizer and sequencer––four instruments that paved the way for the successful mapping of the human genome and lead to him receiving the 2011 Fritz J. and Delores H. Russ Prize awarded by the Academy of Engineering for automating DNA sequencing that revolutionized biomedicine and forensic science. A pillar in the biotechnology field, Dr. Hood has played a role in founding more than fourteen biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Darwin, The Accelerator and Integrated Diagnostics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Of the 6,000+ scientists world-wide who belong to one or more of these academies, Dr. Hood is one of only fifteen people accepted to all three. He is

Read more...

Stanford University - 8:30 AM Monday

“Population Genetic Inference in the Personal Genome Era”

Carlos D. Bustamante is a population biologist who mines DNA sequence data for insights into the dynamics and migration of populations and the mechanisms of evolution and natural selection. In studies of humans, Bustamante analyzes SNPs (sites of common variation in a DNA sequence) from many individuals to infer changes in human populations and their relationship to specific gene mutations. He compared SNPs in regions of DNA that are translated into proteins with those in non-coding regions of the genome; from this analysis, he inferred that between a third and a half of mutations that change protein composition are lethal or produce weak negative selection, generating further understanding of a long-standing question of population genetics.

Read more...

University Of Tennessee - 9:15 AM Monday

“Systems Genetics: Tools and Techniques to Connect Genomes
with Phenomes” 

Robert (Rob) W. Williams received a BA in neuroscience from UC Santa Cruz (1975) and a Ph.D. in physiology at UC Davis with Leo M Chalupa (1983). He did postdoctoral work in developmental neurobiology at Yale with Pasko Rakic and moved to the University of Tennessee in 1989. He is a professor in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Director of the Center for Translational Genomics, and holds the Dunavant professorship in developmental genetics in the Department of Pediatrics. Williams is a past president of the Society for Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society and founding director of the Complex Trait Consortium.

Read more...

Stanford University - 8:00 AM Tuesday

“Single Cell, Single Molecule Genomics”

Stephen Quake is a brilliant scientist, a prolific inventor of biological automation tools, and a successful entrepreneur. His pioneering inventions and discoveries are revolutionizing biological automation, genome analysis, and personalized medicine. He invented Microfluidic Large Scale Integration, demonstrating the first microfluidic devices with thousands of integrated mechanical valves, and founded Fluidigm to commercialize this technology. Quake also performed the first successful single molecule DNA sequencing experiments, founded Helicos Biosciences to commercialize this technology, and sequenced his own genome with their instrument. He was one of the first half dozen people in the world to see their own genome, and the only one to have invented the sequencer used to do it. Quake is also a leader in applying genomic technologies to personalized clinical diagnostics.

Read more...

University of British Columbia - 8:45 AM Tuesday

“Genomics of Plant Speciation”

Loren Rieseberg was born in Alberta, Canada, in 1961. After completing his secondary education in 1979, he moved to the USA, where he earned a Ph.D. in Biology in 1987 from Washington State University.   Loren returned to Canada in 2006, when he accepted a Canada Research Chair in Plant Evolutionary Genomics at the University of British Columbia.  He retains an appointment as Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, USA.

Read more...

Cornell University - 8:00 AM Wednesday

“Natural Variation In Rice: Mixing, Matching, Keeping, Sharing” 

 Susan McCouch is a Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Cornell in 1990 and spent 5 years with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines before joining the Cornell faculty in 1995. She is well known for her pioneering studies on molecular mapping in rice and the development of genomics-based platforms to explore the extent and distribution of natural variation in rice germplasm. She is best known for her work demonstrating that low-yielding wild and exotic Oryza species harbor genes that can enhance the performance of modern, high-yielding cultivars.

Read more...

University of Adelaide - 8:45 AM Wednesday

“Plant Cell Walls: From the Plant to Human Health and
Renewable Biofuels”

Geoff Fincher is the Professor of Plant Science at the University of Adelaide and the Director of the newly established Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls. The ARC Centre of Excellence will receive $31 million in cash funding from 2011-2017. The CoE has additional nodes at the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland, together with several overseas partner organizations. Geoff is also the leader of a new CSIRO Food Futures Flagship Cluster on ‘High Fibre Grain’, which will receive more than $3.5 million from 2010-2013 for work on the role of wall polysaccharides in human health and nutrition.

Read more...