PREVIOUS VARIANT EFFECTS SEMINARS (VESS)

Yiyun Rao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences program at Penn State. She is co-advised by the Pritchard and O’Brien labs and focuses on exploring the functional impact of synonymous mutations in cancer and fitness contexts. Her research spans computational biology and functional genomic screens: in the former, she applies statistical models to identify cancer genes enriched with synonymous mutations; in the latter, she employs CRISPR base-editing screens to characterize their functional effects in human populations. The latter will be the focus of her talk. Additionally, as part of her Ph.D., she has studied complex combinatorial genotype-phenotype maps to investigate the genetic architecture underlying the evolution and function of the kinase phosphate-binding loop.

Joyce Kang is an MD/PhD Candidate at Harvard-MIT. She recently completed a PhD in Biomedical Informatics, where she developed computational methods to analyze large-scale single-cell genomics and human genetics data in the context of immune-mediated diseases, advised by Soumya Raychaudhuri. Previously, she graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Computer Science, where she received the Henry Ford II Scholar Award and Firestone Medal. She has co-authored over 20 publications and received numerous grants including an NIH F30 Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellowship.

Zach is a 5th-year MD/PhD candidate at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is currently completing his PhD in Benjamin Izar's lab, where he works at the intersection of T cell engineering and human genetics. His current work involves the scalable generation and discovery of variants that enhance T-cell based cancer therapies using CRISPR base editing screens.

Shawn is a genetic counselor and PhD candidate at the University of Washington coadvised by Doug Fowler and Lea Starita. His work focuses on the clinical integration of multiplexed functional assay data and generation of multiplexible assays in pluripotent stem cells.

Before beginning Malvika’s graduate studies at UW Genome Sciences, where she is co-advised by Dr. Lea Starita and Dr. Douglas Fowler, she earned a degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from UC Berkeley. After undergrad, she worked at Ultima Genomics and Maze Therapeutics, two biotech companies that deepened her interest in genomics and ultimately inspired her to pursue graduate research. Her work focuses on developing innovative algorithms to reinterpret variant effects. In the lab, she writes code to analyze variant effect data, quantify the likelihood of pathogenicity across diverse variants, and advance the democratization of MAVE data interpretation. Beyond research, she is passionate about science communication and fostering curiosity in others. Through her work, she strives to bridge the gap between data-driven insights and real-world clinical impact.

I'm a Postdoc at Lehner lab at CRG Barcelona interested in understanding the language of proteins - how their sequence determines their biochemical properties and functions. In my postdoc I have focused on multiplexed deep mutational scans of human protein domains, and on combining DMS with multiple molecular readouts to understand allosteric communication in kinases. Before joining the variant bio world I worked on quantifying the dynamics and stability of heritable epigenetic states by sequencing many generations of isogenic worms as a PhD student at the MRC-LMS (Imperial College London). I enjoy the combination of large-scale experimentation and computational analysis to understand fundamental biological questions.

I grew up in the Black Forest in Germany and got my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Genetics and Developmental Biology from the University of Freiburg in Germany.

For my PhD, I joined Guillaume Diss’ lab at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, where I got into the topic of Network Biology and Deep Mutational Scanning.

I graduated in December 2023 and soon after joined the lab of Professor Nicolas Thomae at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, as a Postdoc. Here, I am now trying to apply my skills in high-throughput screening of protein interactions to study molecular glues, small molecules that can induce novel interactions between proteins, specifically proteins and E3 ubiquitin ligases which can then result in the degradation of said proteins in a disease context.

Dr. Ujjwal Rathore is a Staff Research Scientist at the Gladstone Institutes, University of California, San Francisco. He completed his Ph.D. at the Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he focused on designing vaccines against human pathogenic viruses. During his postdoctoral training at UCSF, Dr. Rathore developed innovative methods for high-throughput CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in primary human T cells and myeloid cells. At the Gladstone Institutes, Dr. Rathore uses advanced functional genomics and proteomics to study virus-host interactions in human immune cells. His research focuses on identifying therapeutic targets for viral diseases and immune disorders, as well as developing next-generation tools and therapies.

Matthew is a PhD student working with Willow Coyote-Maestas and Aashish Manglik at the University of California, San Francisco. In the lab, Matt develops high-throughput assays to enable mutational scanning of many G protein-coupled receptor phenotypes. These approaches are applied to diverse receptor systems to better understand receptor biogenesis, ligand recognition, and signal transduction.

Gonzalo Benegas is a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley working with Yun S. Song. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires and his graduate studies at UC Berkeley. Gonzalo is interested in genomic language models as a new machine learning tool for interpreting non-coding variants.

Moez is a MD/PhD student from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston,TX, USA and is mentored by Dr. Richard Gibbs and Dr. Jim Lupski. Moez uses saturation genome editing to study rare disease and mRNA surveillance.

Priyanka is a postdoctoral fellow, co-mentored by Prof. James Fraser and Dr. Willow Coyote-Maestas at UCSF. She is interested in integrating deep sequencing with machine learning techniques to determine the structural basis of fusion protein-driven oncogenesis. She did her Ph.D. at Indian Institute of Science under the supervision of Prof. Raghavan Vardarajan. She developed high-throughput screens using deep mutational scanning to study the effects of mutations on protein activity, stability, and co-translational folding.

Saori is a physician scientist currently working as an Instructor with Dr. Soumya Raychaudhuri’s lab at Harvard Medical School and Broad Institute. She is interested in developing integrative analytical methods with population-scale genetics and multi-modal single-cell genomics data to define causal mechanisms of autoimmune diseases. She will be joining the department of Genome Sciences at University of Washington as an Assistant Professor in 2025.

Annique Claringbould studied life sciences in Utrecht in the Netherlands, continued her studies at Imperial College London and did her PhD at the University Medical Centre Groningen, where she studied the effect of genetic variants on gene expression. In her postdoc at EMBL in Heidelberg, Annique constructed gene regulatory networks, and she has recently started at the university medical centre in Rotterdam. Her research focus is understanding disease through gene regulation and genetics.

Craig Markin is a Fellow in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Function at the University of Manchester. His group's research is focused on understanding the molecular and physical basis of protein and enzyme function with the goal of addressing the two challenges of making enzyme design and engineering more rational and understanding the biological consequences of disease variants. In his postdoctoral work with Profs. Dan Herschlag and Polly Fordyce at Stanford University, Craig led the development of HT-MEK (High-Throughput Microfluidic Enzyme Kinetics), a novel microfluidics-based assay to express, purify, and quantitatively measure a variety of kinetic and thermodynamic constants for >1000 enzyme variants in parallel. In his graduate work with Prof. Leo Spyracopoulos at the University of Alberta, Craig studied the molecular mechanisms of polyubiquitin chain synthesis and their subsequent recognition by partner proteins in the DNA damage response with the aim of understanding how the kinetics and thermodynamics of these processes dictate biological outcomes.

Jingyou is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she conducts research under the guidance of Dr. Harold Pimentel. Her work focuses on developing rigorous statistical inference frameworks tailored to diverse types of deep mutational scanning data. Additionally, she is informally co-mentored by Dr. Willow Coyote-Maestas at the University of California, San Francisco, where she enjoys bridging computational analysis with experimental biochemistry and biophysics.

Ayesha Muhammad (she/her) is a resident physician in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan. In 2023, she graduated from Vanderbilt University with an MD and a PhD in Human Genetics completed in the lab of Dr. Dan Roden. Her dissertation ("Addressing Challenges to Genomic Medicine: Effects of Rare and Common Variation on Arrhythmia and Pharmacogenetic Phenotypes"), which was partially funded by an American Heart Association predoctoral grant, featured multiplexed assays of KCNE1 variant trafficking and function. She has presented her research at many national and international conferences and was the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Founder's Medalist in 2023. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician-scientist upon completion of her clinical training.

Matt Durrant received his PhD from Stanford University in 2020, working in the labs of Ami Bhatt and Stephen Montgomery on computationally characterizing mobile genetic elements. He continued on to a short postdoc in the lab of Patrick Hsu at UC Berkeley, where he discovered and characterized new large serine recombinases (LSRs) that could efficiently integrate DNA cargos into the genomes of human cells. He then transitioned to a senior scientist position in the Hsu Lab at the Arc Institute, where he continues his work with a focus on programmable recombinases and genome design.

Nicholas Perry is a current PhD student in the UC Berkeley - UCSF Joint Bioengineering program. He is conducting his research in Patrick Hsu's Lab at the Arc Institute, focusing on discovery and characterization of programmable recombinases.

Arjun received his PhD in Bioengineering from Stanford University working in Polly Fordyce's Lab, where he developed high-throughput platforms for measuring Transcription Factor-DNA binding affinities. He then transitioned to a postdoctoral position at Jesse Bloom's Lab. Outside of Lab, Arjun enjoys educational outreach, running, plane spotting, and listening to podcasts.

Max’s lab experience began with Sean Connolly and Jorge Benach at Stony Brook University. Max graduated from Princeton University with a major in Molecular Biology and a minor in Quantitative and Computational Biology, completing a senior thesis with David Botstein. Max completed graduate studies in the Systems Biology program at Harvard University, where he worked with Angela DePace. Max pursued his postdoctoral work at Washington University in St. Louis working with Barak Cohen and Rohit Pappu. Outside of lab, Max enjoys hiking, skiing and cooking.

Raquel Cuella Martin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Genetics at McGill University. Her lab applies cutting-edge large-scale precision genome editing to address outstanding mechanistic questions in the DNA damage response and their association with human disorders. Raquel undertook her Ph.D. studies at Dr. JR. Chapman’s lab at the Wellcome Center for Human Genetics (University of Oxford). During this time, Raquel described the mechanistic role of the DNA repair protein 53BP1 in optimal p53 tumor suppressor responses. In her postdoctoral work as an EMBO long-term fellow at the Ciccia lab (Columbia University), she used CRISPR-dependent base editing to perform genetic screens at nucleotide resolution and functionalize DNA variants at scale. Such an approach allowed her to identify loss-, gain- and separation-of-function mutations, and new functional domains in DNA damage response proteins, and to functionalize variants of uncertain significance in cancer predisposition syndromes.

Gonzalo Parra is an Argentine scientist who got a Bioinformatics degree from Universidad Nacional de Entre Rios followed by a Ph.D. from Buenos Aires University in Argentina. He was an EMBO postdoctoral researcher in the group of Dr. Johannes Soeding at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. Then moved to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Oliver Stegle at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the German Cancer Research Center in Germany. Since 2021, Gonzalo works at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center where he tries to understand the molecular mechanisms behind protein evolution, stability, function and dynamics both in healthy conditions as in disease. In addition, Gonzalo participates in multiple international forums to make science a more equal, diverse and inclusive environment. Gonzalo is currently a member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Board of Directors, he is one of the co-chairs of the ISCB 3DSig COSI, a member of the ISCB EDI committee, a steering committee member of the 3DBioinfo Elixir community, a member of the advisory board of the Bioinfo4Women programme and a Working Group lead within the Machine Learning for Non Globular Proteins COST action.

Anna Axakova is a Molecular Genetics PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.

Gabriella is a recent alum of the Fraser Lab at UCSF, where she studied the phenotypic and resistance landscape of the MET receptor tyrosine kinase. Her research focused on deciphering kinase domain regulatory motifs and resistance mechanisms to tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Additionally, she studied the relationship between the MET kinase domain and juxtamembrane.

Ian Hoskins was raised in Colorado and received his Bachelor’s of Science in Integrative Biology with a minor in Chemistry from The University of Colorado at Denver. He entered the biotechnology sector and worked at Enzymatics, Inc. and ArcherDX, Inc. between 2013 and 2018 developing genomic assays and software for clinical cancer research. Ian was admitted in The University of Texas at Austin Microbiology graduate program in 2018 and joined the lab of Dr. Can Cenik as his supervisor’s first graduate student.

Dr. Clare Bycroft is a research scientist at Google DeepMind with a background in human genetics. She has a particular focus on ensuring the utility of deep learning models in real-world settings. Previously, Clare worked at Genomics PLC, an Oxford-based biotech using human genetics data to propose new therapeutic targets; and during her PhD (University of Oxford), she curated the first tranche of the UK Biobank genotyping data set.

Dr. Benjamin Livesey is a postdoctoral researcher currently working at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer at The University of Edinburgh. Over the course of his PhD and postdoc, Ben has worked towards finding an unbiased method to assess the performance of computational variant effect predictors.

Sriram majored in Chemistry and Physics in Boston and is now an MSTP student in Doug Fowler’s lab at Seattle’s UW Genome Sciences developing technology to study protein variation using microscopy. He also works on screening cytokine treatments in T-cells to develop better cell therapies. His hobbies include biking, hiking, and skiing.

Phil is a postdoctoral fellow in the Raman lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studies bacteriophage host interactions. He investigates how genetic perturbations influence the sequence-function landscape of phages and their bacterial hosts. His current research extends his doctoral work using large unbiased libraries of phage variants with the goal of engineering programmable synthetic phages for diverse biotechnology applications.

Dr. Nadav Brandes obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is currently a Cancer Research Institute (CRI) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) postdoctoral fellow at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His research focuses on the development of machine and deep learning approaches to study the effect of genetic variation on human traits and diseases.

King Hung is a PhD candidate at Stanford University. His research focuses on the regulation of gene expression and organization of the genome in disease and development. His recent work with Howard Chang at Stanford aims to uncover mechanisms of oncogene upregulation on extrachromosomal DNA in human cancer.

Dr. Juannan Zhou completed his PhD training in the area of evolutionary biology. He worked in the McCandlish lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 2017 to 2021, with a focus on development of theoretical and computational methods for modeling sequence-function relationships. He joined the Department of Biology at the University of Florida in Fall 2021. His current research directions include developing machine learning methods for modeling genotype phenotype maps, the genetic architecture of complex traits, and experimental evolution.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the McCandlish lab. My research focuses on the study of complex combinatorial genotype-phenotype maps to study the genetic architecture of different molecular phenotypes, e.g. rna, protein interactions; and their consequences for long-term molecular evolution. With this aim, I also develop computational tools to facilitate the inference and visualization of complex genotype-phenotype maps from different types of data, which may be of interest to the community (https://gpmap-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

Raehoon Jeong is a Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics PhD student in the Bulyk Lab at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Bachelor’s degree at Swarthmore College in Mathematics and Computer Science, and he will soon defend his dissertation at Harvard in August. Raehoon is interested in applying statistical genetics and machine learning approaches to better understand how genetic variants affect gene expression and cause diseases.

Willow Coyote-Maestas is an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. His lab focused on building biophysical, molecular, and cellular understanding of the secret life of membrane proteins. They build and apply scalable technologies to learn how membrane proteins underlie our physiology, what goes awry in disease, and how to better treat these diseases with therapeutics.

Adrine is a PhD student at The University of Toronto in the Department of Molecular Genetics. Supervised by Dr. Fritz Roth, she is leading to large-scale variant effect testing of the VHL and AGXT genes. Using VAMP-seq and yeast complementation assays she is providing evidence for variant interpretation of renal cell carcinoma, VHL disease and Primary Hyperoxaluria Type I patients. Adrine completed undergraduate studies in Biotechnology in Brazil and participated in an exchange program in Boston. She is interested in scientific communication, implementation of evidence-based care and teaching.

Megan graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford, where in her final year she joined Doug Higgs’s lab researching gene regulation at the alpha-globin locus. After completing her studies in 2020, Megan joined Greg Findlay at the Francis Crick Institute in London, researching in functional genomics. Megan worked at the Crick for 2 years before beginning her PhD at Cambridge in October 2022, now working in chromatin and epigenetics.

Xiaoyi is a postdoctoral fellow in the Jay Shendure Lab in the department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. She earned her Bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University and received a PhD at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Xiaoyi is interested in developing new molecular tools to dissect the roles of the epigenome in genome engineering and gene regulation.

Florian is an expert in cardiovascular disease and functional genomics, currently working as a Postdoc in the group of Denis Schapiro at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine in Heidelberg. He acquired his PhD from the University of Muenster working together with the group of Dr. Gregor Aldenfinger at the CHU Ste Justine research center in Montreal, working on congenital heart disease. Following his PhD, Florian joined the lab of Guillaume Lettre at the Montreal Heart Institute, where he focused on the genetic architecture of complex cardiovascular diseases using functional genomics tools, such as pooled CRISPR screens. In his talk, Florian will share insights on how to utilize different CRISPR perturbations to investigate genetic loci associated with complex cardiovascular phenotypes.

William Bakhache is a postdoctoral fellow at the Quantitative Virology and Evolution Unit (QVEU) at the Laboratory of Viral Diseases (NIH-NIAID, Bethesda MD, main campus) under the supervision of Patrick Dolan, Ph.D. At the QVEU, William is developing approaches to explore the mutational landscape of viral proteins. In his talk, William will share his unpublished work related to investigating the tolerance of a variety of insertion sequences in viral proteomes.

Haider is a PhD student Biomedical Engineering in the Pritchard Lab at Penn State University. His work focuses on quantifying drug resistance to targeted anticancer therapeutics at scale. Variants of uncertain drug resistance in cancer are an analogous problem to VUS, but face unique technical barriers in DMS screens. To overcome these barriers, Haider built a scalable duplex sequencing workflow that enables deep error-corrected sequencing of variant libraries. He then applied this workflow to study resistance to targeted therapies in the BCR-ABL fusion protein. This workflow is able to successfully detect and quantify known resistant variants, as well as rare variants of unknown drug resistance in BCR-ABL. In this way, DMS screens can identify drug resistance variants long before they are seen in the clinic. This prospective detection of drug resistant variants can help guide clinical treatment decision-making as well as prioritize

Dr. John Morris is a human geneticist and genome engineer. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Biology at the University of Western Ontario, then went on to complete a Ph.D. in Human Genetics at McGill University, in the lab of Brent Richards. His PhD focused on identifying the genetic determinants of osteoporosis through genome-wide association studies of bone traits in large-scale biobanks. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Genome Center and New York University, in the labs of Neville Sanjana and Tuuli Lappalainen, where has developed single-cell pooled CRISPR screens to study noncoding GWAS loci. John's postdoctoral work linking GWAS variants to genes and functions, STING-seq, expands our ability to understand mechanisms underlying GWAS loci. John's achievements have been recognized by multiple agencies, as he was awarded both a CIHR Banting Fellowship and NHGRI K99 Fellowship, and was a 2021 winner of the ASHG Charles J. Epstein Excellence Award.

Florence is a PhD student in the Shendure and Starita labs in the department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. After receiving her B.S. in chemistry at UC Berkeley, Florence spent three years at Genentech working in monoclonal antibody therapeutic development before starting graduate school. The focus of her PhD is developing novel multiplex single-cell and bulk functional genomics sequencing-based technologies to study and better understand gene regulatory architecture and the consequences of genetic variation in numerous different in vitro cell culture models. The main application of this work relates to understanding and identifying both proximal and distal regulatory regions that regulate neurodevelopment and autism disorder risk genes with a goal of helping develop gene therapies for these disorders.

Ohanna is a CANSSI STAGE postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She applies statistical methods in DNA methylation and whole genome sequencing data to understand the epidemiological, genetic, and epigenetic determinants of complex diseases. A molecular biologist by training, Ohanna received a master’s and PhD degree in Genetic Epidemiology from the Oswaldo Cruz Institution in Brazil, where she studied genetic susceptibility of infectious diseases in admixed population. For her bachelor’s degree, Ohanna received a master's and PhD degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ/Brazil). Her dissertation focused on the Genetic Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases. Currently, she is a Postdoc of the CANSSI Ontario STAGE HostSeq Project in Dalla Lana School of Public Health at University of Toronto, studying genetics and epigenetics of complex traits.

Warren is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto in the laboratory of Dr. Frederick Roth. His research focuses on using multiplexed assays to measure the functional impact of missense variants across human disease genes associated with neurodegenerative, immune and metabolic disorders. Warren completed his PhD at the University of Guelph under the supervision of Dr. Ross N. Nazar. His PhD research focused on the structure, synthesis and regulation of eukaryotic ribosomes in normal and oncogenic tissues.

Antje completed her PhD in Medical Sciences at the University of Oxford and is currently working as a Postdoctoral fellow at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. In her PhD, supervised by Prof Anna Gloyn, she focused on identifying genes mediating Type 2 Diabetes risk and as part of her work, Antje developed the first genome-editing pipeline in an authentic human beta-cell model and performed a genome-wide CRISPR screen for human pancreatic beta-cell dysfunction. Since her MSc in Cell and Gene Therapy at the University College London, she has been fascinated by the insights gained from genetic studies to develop targeted or personalised therapies. Her postdoctoral work at AstraZeneca now builds on her interest in using genome editing to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying disease causing mutations

Dr. Samuele Cancellieri is postdoctoral fellow at University of Trento. His work spans from software and algorithm development for CRISPR targets prediction using SNVs and INDELs, to genomic and transcriptomic analysis and data processing for identification of gene’s isoforms related to neuropsychiatric diseases.

Dan Weiner is an MD/PhD candidate at Harvard Medical School. He recently defended his PhD in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics, focused on statistical and functional integration of common and rare genetic variation across complex traits and common diseases.

Ajay is an MD/PhD student at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is broadly interested in statistical and functional genomics, with particular emphasis on psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. He is advised by Drs. Elise Robinson and Luke O'Connor at the Broad Institute.

Guillaume is an infectious diseases clinician-scientist and currently a Canadian Institutes for Health Research fellow at the University of Oxford. He is a graduate of Brent Richards' genetic epidemiology lab at the Lady Davis Institute (McGill University), where he was actively involved in the genetic community's COVID-19 research response.

Nicholas Lue is a graduate student in the Chemical Biology Ph.D. program at Harvard University working in the laboratory of Prof. Brian Liau. His work focuses on applying interdisciplinary approaches, including genome editing and protein biochemistry, to study DNA Methyltransferase 3A, a key cancer target.

Sofia Battaglia is a postdoctoral researcher in Brad Bernstein's group at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and the Broad Institute. Her work focuses on developing and applying novel technologies for understanding long range interactions of regulatory elements of human complex loci, by leveraging ultralong-read epigenomic profiling on single DNA molecules. Prior to joining the Bernstein lab, Sofia did her PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and Munich University, studying the role of nascent mRNA in the recruitment of elongation factors to the transcription machinery.

Tyler Starr is a NIH Pathway to Independence (K99) Fellow and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah. Dr. Starr received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Chicago, where he studied protein evolution in the lab of Dr. Joe Thornton. He then moved to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to conduct postdoctoral research on viral evolution in the lab of Dr. Jesse Bloom. Dr. Starr’s research explores the evolutionary arms races between viruses and host factors involved in infection and immunity. Dr. Starr uses high-throughput “deep mutational scanning” assays to characterize the protein-protein interactions between viral glycoproteins, host receptors, and antiviral antibodies. These experiments reveal the biophysical details of protein sequence-structure-function relationships and provide maps for understanding viral evolution. Since 2020, Dr. Starr has applied these approaches to study SARS-CoV-2, informing ongoing efforts in viral forecasting and aiding in the development of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to combat COVID-19. His lab will continue to extend these approaches to understand the deeper molecular evolutionary features that drive the emergence of animal viruses that spill over into humans and to inform the development of vaccines and antibodies that can treat or prevent future viral spillovers.

Dr. Daniel Schraivogel works as a research staff scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Lars Steinmetz at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He develops and applies novel technologies in the functional genomics space, by combining high-throughput CRISPR/Cas9 genetic screens with complex readouts from single cells. These technologies aim to provide a better understanding of genotype-phenotype correlations in health and disease by scaling with the complexity of the human genome. Prior to joining EMBL, Daniel did his PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Gunter Meister at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) of Biochemistry in Munich and Regensburg University, studying the function of short non-coding RNAs and their associated proteins.

Roshni is a PhD candidate in Jonathan Pritchard's group at Stanford University. Her work focuses on developing statistical methods for understanding the genetic architecture of human complex traits, often by leveraging data from multiple populations.

Dr. Franco Izzo is an Instructor of Molecular Biology in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center. His research focuses on clonal hematopoiesis and myeloproliferative neoplasms, where he aims to link genotypes to phenotypes within human samples by applying single cell multi-omics. Dr. Izzo is supported by the American Society of Hematology Fellow-to-Faculty Scholar awards.

Sarah is a PhD student in Rasmus Hartmann-Petersen’s group at the University of Copenhagen. Her work focuses on characterizing the effects and mechanisms of variants in the human enzyme glucokinase using deep mutational scanning in yeast.

Jeff received a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Michigan in 2013 under the mentorship of Dr. Lori Isom. For his postdoctoral training, he studied the genetics of epilepsy in mice and humans in the laboratories of Dr. Jennifer Kearney and Dr. Gemma Carvill. His research interests focus on improving the genetic diagnosis of epilepsy through genome sequencing, machine learning, and functional characterization of variants of uncertain significance.

Matt is a postdoctoral researcher in the Garnett laboratory at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK. His research is focused on functional genomics strategies to understand molecular pathways involved in sensitivity to cancer immunotherapies. Matt has gained prior expertise in cancer immunotherapy in the laboratory of Julian Downward at the Francis Crick Institute, and CRISPR and base editing technologies at AstraZeneca.

Antonio is a PhD candidate in Ronald Cohn’s laboratory at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He is interested in the challenges of gene discovery for rare genetic diseases. His work focuses on defining a novel role for variants causing complex brain development disorders.

Shawn is a genetic counselor and PhD candidate at the University of Washington coadvised by Doug Fowler and Lea Starita. His work focuses on the clinical integration of multiplexed functional assay data and generation of multiplexible assays in pluripotent stem cells.

Marty is a Ph.D. student in Michael Greenberg’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. His work focuses on using genetic variation to understand how transcription factors control cis-regulatory function in the native chromatin context.

Haley is a PhD candidate in Luis Barreiro's group at the University of Chicago. She works at the interface of genomics and immunology to understand how transcriptional and genetic variation influence differences in the immune response to pathogens across individuals.

André is a senior postdoc in Ben Lehner's group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. His work focuses on developing software for the analysis and modelling of deep mutational scanning (DMS) data in order to better understand how biological sequences encode biophysical properties.

Oana is a postdoc working with Prof. Aviv Regev at Genentech. She studies the molecular basis of cellular decisions and resulting cell states using pooled high-content screening, applied to profile the impact of coding variation in cancer (collaboration with JT Neal, Jesse Boehm at the Broad Institute).

Mireia is a PhD student in Benedetta Bolognesi’s Lab at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalunya (IBEC) in Barcelona. We use deep mutational scanning to understand and predict how genetic variation impact amyloid formation in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Mafalda is a  senior postdocs in Debora Marks’ group at Harvard Medical School. He works at the intersection of computational biology and machine learning, developing probabilistic models of sequence data with an emphasis on predicting risk of disease from genetic variation.

Jonathan is a  senior postdocs in Debora Marks’ group at Harvard Medical School. He works at the intersection of computational biology and machine learning, developing probabilistic models of sequence data with an emphasis on predicting risk of disease from genetic variation.

Isaac Jia is postdoc fellow in Jacob Kitzman's lab at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States. He and colleagues in the Kitzman lab use high-throughput assays such as deep mutational scanning to produce functional evidence for Lynch Syndrome genetic variants. He will soon launch an independent lab in the Greater Bay Area Institute of Precision Medicine in Guangzhou, China.

Ferran Muiños is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Biomedical Research (IRB Barcelona) working in computational cancer genomics. His main research revolves around the characterization of mutational heterogeneity, the interplay between mutagenesis and selection in cancer, and the study of positional determinants of mutagenesis as well as DNA damage and repair