Elaine Mardis, Ph.D. serves as the co-Director of The Genome Center at the Washington University School of Medicine. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Molecular Microbiology.
In her role as the Director of Technology Development at The Genome Center Dr. Mardis has played a critical part in the evaluation, optimization and application of novel sequencing instrumentation, chemistry and molecular biology toward improved genome sequencing cost, throughput, and quality. She currently orchestrates the Center's efforts to explore next generation sequencing technologies, develop applications and processes, and to transition these into the Genome Center's production sequencing capabilities. Dr. Mardis has research interests in the application of DNA sequencing to characterize cancer genomes and in providing genomic resources that facilitate the use of non-human primates in human health research.
Dr. Mardis received her B.S. degree from the University of Oklahoma (Zoology with Highest Honors, 1984), and her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma (Chemistry and Biochemistry, 1989). She moved to Bio-Rad Laboratories in 1989 to pursue postdoctoral studies in industry. She has been on the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine since 1993.
Dr. Ken Dewar
Dr. Ken Dewar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Genetics at McGill University and the Acting Scientific Director of the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre. In 1997 he joined the Whitehead Institute Centre for Genome Research (now the Broad Institute) to work on the mapping, sequencing, and closure of the human genome. Recruited to the Department of Human Genetics at McGill University in 2002, Dr. Dewar leads several collaborative large-scale multi-institution genomics projects involving biomedically important non-human primates (vervet monkey) and bacterial pathogens (Clostridium difficile). In 2005, Dr. Dewar led the team that sequenced the deadly C. difficile strain residing in Quebec hospitals. Dr. Dewar's research interests straddle the intersection of genomic applications of new sequencing technologies and bioinformatics.
Dr. Dewar obtained his PhD in 1995 from U. Laval (Quebec City, Quebec, Canada) and from 1995 to 1997 he performed post-doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Ecker on the sequencing of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. With over 15 years experience in genomics research, Dr. Dewar maintains a deep interest in the uses of genomics for non-model organisms.
Dr. Sam Levy
Dr. Samuel Levy, Director in Human Genomics at the J. Craig Venter Institute, has an ongoing interest in characterizing and refining the structure and function of the genome and epigenome in human populations. Dr. Levy was the leading scientist on the first published diploid genome sequence of a human, J. Craig Venter (PLoS Biology 5, e254), and he leads ongoing studies of functional characterization of DNA variants in protein coding and cis-egulatory regions.
Prior to joining JCVI in 2002, Dr Levy worked at Celera Genomics for a three year period and was involved in developing computational tools for gene discovery and functional annotation in the Drosophila and human genome sequences. Prior to his work at Celera Genomics, from 1989-1999, Dr. Levy was a postdoctoral worker and then independent investigator in the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the MCDB department he worked on a variety of projects ranging from extracellular Golgi-based trafficking in plants, plant cell wall development and structure-function relationship in complex carbohydrates using a range of approaches involving biochemistry, cell biology and computational chemistry.
Dr. Levy received a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics at the University of Leeds, UK in 1982 and his Ph.D. in cell and computational biology at the University of Bristol, UK in 1986. He was in receipt of a NATO/SERC postdoctoral fellowship for a two-year period studying structural and biochemical changes in plant cell walls at the Ecole Normale Superieure, France.
Dr. Elliott Margulies
Elliott Margulies, Ph.D. is Head of the Genome Informatics Section in the Genome Technology Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Elliott’s lab utilizes both high-performance computational analyses and laboratory-based high-throughput genomic methods to decipher the genetic information that confers biological function. His lab is also implementing next-generation sequencing technologies for sequencing and analyzing genomes.
Elliott received his undergraduate degree in Biotechnology at Rutgers University in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Human Genetics at the University of Michigan in 2001. During his postdoctoral fellowship he developed bioinformatics approaches for identifying and characterizing regions of the human genome that are evolutionarily conserved across multiple species. Conservation of these sequences across millions of years of evolution is strong evidence they play important roles in biology, such as coding for genes or functioning as regulatory elements. He continues this line of research today, in an effort to decode the “language” of our human genome.
Dr. Gabor Marth
Gabor Marth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Biology at Boston College with a research focus on software development for next-generation sequencing and genomic data discovery.
Dr. Marth's lab is developing software for base calling, reference sequence guided sequence alignment, and sequence visualization. Dr. Marth is also updating previously published SNP discovery software to enable the analysis of data from new sequencing platforms. A special focus of his group is developing software for the detection of structural polymorphisms (chromosomal rearrangements, deletions, inversions, etc.). The group also builds tools for variation detection in cancer tissues, as well as for transcriptome sequencing applications, both for expression analysis and novel transcript discovery.
Dr. Marth and his team are key participants in the data analysis effort of the International 1000 Genomes Project, performing read mapping, SNP and structural variation analysis in whole-genome sequences, as well as leading the informatics analysis of the exon sequencing pilot of the project.
Dr. Marth received his D. Sc. degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Steven Salzberg
Dr. Steven Salzberg is the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. From 1997 to 2005 he was at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, where he was the Senior Director of Bioinformatics. During that time he was also a Research Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Johns Hopkins University.
As part of his gene finding research beginning in the 1990s, Salzberg and his colleagues built the Glimmer system for bacterial gene-finding, which has become one of the world's most successful and widely-used gene finders. Glimmer has been used in hundreds of bacterial, archaeal, and viral genome projects, including Bacillus anthracis, Borrelia burgdorferi, Treponema pallidum, Vibrio cholerae, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Salzberg's lab has also developed algorithms for large-scale genome sequence alignment and genome assembly, including the AMOS genome assembler and the MUMmer alignment system.
Dr. Salzberg has authored or co-authored over 150 scientific journal publications and two books. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a past member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH. Dr. Salzberg received his B.A., M.S., and M.Phil. degrees from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. He joined the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor in 1989.
Dr. Michael Zody
Dr. Michael Zody is a computational biologist at the Broad Institute, specializing is DNA sequence analysis. He has participated in sequencing of the human, mouse, chimpanzee, dog, opossum, and horse genomes. During the human genome project, he was responsible for development of automated laboratory tracking systems, sequence processing and assembly software, and submission of data to public databases. His research interests include mechanics of evolution, particularly the history of DNA duplications and structural rearrangements, and the search for signatures of selection in humans and model organisms.
Dr. Zody received a B.S. in Materials Science and an M.S. in Metallurgy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. in Medical Science from Uppsala University.
