Variant Effects Seminar Series (VESS)

Frederik is a postdoc in the Section for Computational Biology at University of Copenhagen. A few months ago, he was awarded his PhD with the title ‘Medical genetics in the Greenlandic population’, which will also be the focus of the talk. The main part of the work was recently featured in Nature and focuses on the impact of including data from the Greenlandic population in genetic research. Frederik's background is in biomedicine and bioinformatics.

Daniel is a postdoc in Dr. Fritz Roth’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

Nurdan Kuru is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Siepel Lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher from 2021 to 2024 at Adebali Lab at Sabancı University, Turkey. Her talk will discuss her work at Adebali Lab, where she developed phylogeny-aware algorithms for variant effect prediction and coevolution. She holds BSc and MSc degrees in Mathematics and a PhD in Industrial Engineering. Her current research focuses on computational evolution and population genomics, specifically developing a multi-ancestry polygenic risk score prediction approach.

Ferdy is a resident in internal medicine with an interest in endocrinology. He has studied medicine in Rotterdam and has finished his PhD in the Erasmus Medical Center, focusing on understanding pathophysiology and clinical presentation of patients with rare thyroid hormone signalling diseases, particularly MCT8 deficiency, and on developing and evaluating novel therapies for these rare diseases. He is getting enthusiastic about enhancing understanding of complex pathophysiology and applying this to help patients in a bench to bedside translational manner.

Jonuelle (Jon) Acosta is a postdoctoral fellow at MIT co-mentored by Francisco Sánchez-Rivera and Michael Hemann. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in David Feldser's laboratory, where he utilized tractable mouse models of cancer to model the impact of p53 restorative therapies in small cell carcinoma.  As an F31 predoctoral fellow,  he identified novel context-dependent mechanisms of p53-mediated tumor suppression that may be utilized to develop novel strategies to treat this aggressive cancer subtype, and others. During his postdoctoral work, he is integrating next-generation genome editing technology with complex ex vivo and in vivo platforms to understand how cellular context influences genetic interactions, and its impact on cancer progression and evolution.