Curtis Huttenhower, Phd, Harvard School of Public Health, USA

Dr. Curtis Huttenhower is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in the lab of Dr. Olga Troyanskaya, where he also performed his postdoctoral research at the Lewis-Sigler Institute. His lab focuses on computational metagenomics and the human microbiome, particularly in terms of scalable methods for characterizing microbial populations, their molecular and metabolic functionalities, and their impacts on human health. He chairs the Metabolic Reconstruction group in the Human Microbiome Project and co-chairs the Whole-Genome Shotgun metagenomic analysis group, and his lab has produced a microbiome-wide map of microbial functional activity as part of this effort. In past lives, he studied computational linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University and worked as a developer in the software industry.

Ivet Bahar, PhD, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Dr. Ivet Bahar is currently the Founding Chair of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology (CSB), the University of Pittsburgh at the School of Medicine. She received her PhD in Chemistry in 1986 from Istanbul Technical University. She then joined the Chemical Engineering Department at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey where she served as an Assistant (1986-87), Associate (1987-93) and Full (1993-2001) Professor, while also being a regular visiting Scientist at the Molecular Structure Division of the Laboratory of Experimental & Computational Biology, NIH, Bethesda, USA, and the Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie Structurale et Macromoleculaire, Paris. She moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, where she established a new Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2001-05) which led to her current department, and she served as the Director of the Carnegie Mellon-U Pitt Joint PhD program in Computational Biology (2005-09). Her research area is molecular biophysics and computational biology, with focus on the dynamics of proteins and their assemblies, and modeling and simulations of complex biomolecular interactions at multiple scales. She is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and a Principal Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.

Chad Myers, PhD, University of Minnesota, USA

Chad Myers received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University in 2007, working with Dr. Olga Troyanskaya in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. In 2008, he began his current position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Myers’s research emphasis includes computational methods for analysis and interpretation of large-scale genetic interaction networks and methods for integration of diverse genomic data to predict gene function or infer biological networks. His lab is developing approaches for analyzing and leveraging interaction networks to answer biological questions in a variety of systems including yeast, plants (Arabidopsis and maize), worm and human.