Variant Effects Seminar Series (VESS)

Shelby Hemker is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan and is funded by the American Cancer Society. Shelby's work in the Dr. Jacob Kitzman Laboratory has included development of a new functional assay to measure DNA damage repair by the adenine glycosylase MUTYH, of which the pre-print is available on bioRxiv. Other projects include assaying other DNA repair factors linked to inherited cancers. Shelby's previous research experiences include her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied the effects of hypoxia and microRNAs on kidney development under the mentorship of Dr. Jacqueline Ho and her BS from Michigan State University, where she studied inherited genetic disease in dogs and cats in Dr. John Fyfe's Laboratory of Comparative Medical Genetics. She is finishing up her tenure as a postdoc and will soon enter the academic job market, looking for opportunities to build upon past experience to develop new assays to resolve unknowns about inherited disease.

Karl Romanowicz is a Principal Scientist at SynPlexity and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Plesa Lab in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Oregon. His talk will highlight work recently published in Science Advances, where he and colleagues developed large-scale synthetic gene libraries and applied broad mutational scanning to decode variant effects in dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), revealing how sequence variation drives antibiotic resistance across the protein family. He holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan, with broad expertise across microbial ecology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics.

Nikhil is a graduate student in the Pritchard lab at Stanford University. He is interested in statistical and population genetics, and is exploring the relationship between gene expression and complex traits during his PhD.