Professor
Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science

Dr. David Wishart is a Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He also holds adjunct appointments with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

Dr. Wishart has been studying protein folding and misfolding for more than 30 years using a combination of computational and experimental approaches. These experimental approaches include NMR spectroscopy, circular dichroism, fluorescence spectroscopy, electron microscopy, protein engineering and molecular biology. The computational methods include molecular dynamics, agent- based modeling, bioinformatics and machine learning. Over the course of his career, Dr. Wishart has published more than 430 scientific papers covering many areas of protein science including structural biology, protein metabolism and computational biochemistry.

Dr. Wishart received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and currently co-directs The Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC), Canada's national metabolomics laboratory. Dr. Wishart has been identified as one of the world’s most highly cited scientists for each of the past 7 years.

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Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
Executive Director in the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center

Dr. Cheryl Willman, executive director of Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs (nationally and globally) and Director of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, is an internationally renowned physician scientist and a pioneer in the field of cancer individualized medicine with a track record of innovation and successful translation of discoveries to clinical trials.

Dr. Willman has co-led several key NCI initiatives that are improving the lives of patients with cancer and addressing disparities in cancer care as well as cancer incidence and mortality among diverse and underserved populations. Dr. Willman has served in many leadership roles including NCI's Board of Scientific Advisors and the Scientific Advisory Board of the NCI Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. Dr. Willman also has held and currently holds national leadership positions in AACR, ASH, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She was a founder of the field of Molecular Diagnostic Pathology, President of the Association of Molecular Pathologists, and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Prior to joining Mayo Clinic, Dr. Willman served as the Director and CEO of the University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Willman received her M.D. from Mayo Medical School and completed her residency and postdoctoral training in pathology and cancer research at Mayo Clinic, University of New Mexico, and University of Washington.

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Assistant Professor
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Institute of Risk Assessment sciences at Utrech University

Dr. Douglas Walker is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a member of the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomics Research, and an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Institute of Risk Assessment Sciences at Utrecht University. He leads the High Resolution Exposomics Laboratory, which uses multi-faceted analytical approaches based on untargeted high-resolution mass spectrometry for deep characterization of the human exposome. These methods are high-throughput and low cost, and routinely detect >100,000 chemical signals in human samples, spanning endogenous metabolites, diet, microbiome-derived metabolites, environmental chemicals, commercial products, and pharmaceuticals, as well as many unidentified compounds.

Dr. Walker's research is focused on applying these methods to understand exposomic risk factors of multiple disease outcomes, including cancer, metabolic, and immunological diseases, and developing new methods for measuring exposure to contaminants of emerging concern. His research on health effects of micro- and nano-plastics is now developing one of the first biomonitoring strategies for measuring early life exposure to plastic particles and related chemicals.

Dr. Walker received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Tufts University and BS from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Prior to starting his research program at Mount Sinai, he was a member of the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory in the Department of Medicine and a postdoctoral fellow in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory University.

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Dr. Martine Vrijheid is a professor of Environmental Epidemiology and head of the Childhood and Environment Programme at the Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) in Barcelona. Her research focuses on improving the understanding of environmental risk factors for child health and development and the origins of disease, to underpin preventive action. Her research approach is strongly nested in longitudinal cohort studies as a powerful platform for etiological research. She leads and has led numerous national and international projects and has published extensively in this field.

Dr. Vrijheid led the European collaborative HELIX (Human Early Life Exposome) project, funded by the European Commission (EC) Framework Programme, in which she spearheaded the push for a more holistic exposome approach to study multiple, co-existing exposures and their effects on child health (neurodevelopment, cardiometabolic health, respiratory health). HELIX finalized the construction of a "deep" exposome database with completely comparable chemical pollutant data, geospatial urban environment data, child health outcome data, and multi-omics signatures, in mothers and children from 6 European cohorts.

She is continuing early life exposome research as coordinator of the EC Horizon 2020 project ATHLETE (Advancing Tools for Human Early Life-course Exposome Research and Translation), which aims to advance important challenges in exposome research through improved tools, data, and translation.

Dr. Vrijheid is PI of the INMA birth cohort study in Spain, and as leader and collaborator in several European grants, she has been instrumental in the building of a network of birth cohorts in Europe, resulting in a FAIR data infrastructure for data sharing and harmonization across more than 30 European birth cohorts. She has authored over 300 publications, cited over 25000 times, with an H-factor of 72.

She received her doctorate degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and previously held positions as lecturer at LSHTM and as staff scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, Lyon).

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Chief, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, UH Harrington Heart and Vascular Institute, University Hospitals
Division Chief, Cardiovascular Medicine, UH Cleveland Medical Center
Director, Center for Advanced Heart and Vascular Care, UH Cleveland Medical Center
Professor, CWRU School of Medicine

Dr. Sanjay Rajagopalan is among an elite group of physician scientists whose work has helped transform global perceptions of the impact of the environment on cardiovascular health. He is passionate about technology innovation in cardiovascular medicine for the development of personalized approaches to heart disease prevention.

Dr. Rajagopalan is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), American Association of Physicians (AAP), Association of University Cardiologists (AUC) and the Association of Professors of Cardiology (APC).

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Dr. Gary Miller is vice dean for Research Strategy and Innovation, and professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

He is an international leader on the exposome - the environmental equivalent of the genome. He founded the first NIH-funded exposome center in the U.S. (the HERCULES Exposome Research Center at Emory University) and wrote the first book on the topic, The Exposome: A Primer in 2014. Dr. Miller has also helped develop high-resolution mass spectrometry-based methods to provide an omic-scale analysis in human and animal samples. His laboratory studies environmental contributors to neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, using C. elegans, transgenic mice, and patient samples. In addition, he is leading the Columbia Exposome Initiative, an effort to incorporate the exposome into clinical and translational research. His new book, The Exposome: A New Paradigm for the Environment and Health, was published by Elsevier Academic Press in July, 2020.

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Teresa Kruisselbrink is a genetic counselor in the Center for Individualized Medicine and an instructor in laboratory medicine and pathology in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.

Kruisselbrink manages a team of genetic counselors, where she develops and implements genetic counseling services in the advancement and translation of personalized genomic medicine throughout multiple programs and clinical departments. Kruisselbrink leads her team in the development and delivery of clinical and research tools, educational strategies, and operational plans to promote the integration of personalized medicine across a broad range of clinical disciplines. She provides direct patient genetic counseling services to patients with cardiomyopathies, channelopathies, aortopathies, and amyloidosis.

Kruisselbrink received her Master of Science in genetic counselling at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

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Dr. Dean Jones is a professor of medicine (Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine) and biochemistry (Adjunct) at Emory and director of the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory. His studies include redox biology and medicine and he has research programs in the areas of redox systems biology, clinical metabolomics and environmental health. In recent years, Dr. Jones has also developed an exposome research program, building upon the metabolomics and mass spectrometry programs for affordable, high-throughput environmental chemical biomonitoring.

Dr. Jones is recognized for his research in oxidative stress, environmental health and toxicology, mitochondrial mechanisms of cell death and thiol antioxidants glutathione and thioredoxin. He received the Albert E. Levy Research Award, the Science and Humanity Award of the Oxygen Club of California, is a member of the Emory Millipub Club, and received the R. Wayne Alexander Research Career Achievement Award, the Society of Toxicology Mechanisms Lifetime Achievement Award and the Jarrow Science Achievement Award.

Dr. Jones received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1971 and a Ph.D in Biochemistry from Oregon Health Sciences Univ., Portland, in 1976. He was a National Sciences Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, Ithaca, and a Visiting Scientist in Molecular Toxicology at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm prior to joining Emory in 1979. In 1997-98, he was a Nobel Fellow at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm.

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Dr. Matthew Ferber is a consultant in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, an associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathology in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, and serves as the director of the Clinical Genome Sequencing Laboratory in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Mayo Clinic.

As the director of the Clinical Genome Sequencing Laboratory, Dr. Ferber leads a team of co-directors and laboratory staff focused on developing genomic applications to improve patient care. The overall goal of Dr. Ferber's research is to create access to DNA sequencing technology that provides patients and their health care providers with a wealth of data to efficiently make well-informed, personalized decisions about treatments and other clinical options.

Dr. Ferber completed his Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biochemistry and molecular biology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and a fellowship in clinical molecular genetics in the Mayo Clinic School of Health Sciences.

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Dr. Barbara A. Cohn is director of the Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) at the Public Health Institute. CHDS is home to a groundbreaking study, which originated in 1959 and was designed to shed light on the various factors impacting health during pregnancy and early childhood. Between 1959 and 1967, nearly 15,000 pregnant women and their families were enrolled. Researchers continue to study these rich data and conduct important follow-up studies to further examine how events during pregnancy impact the subsequent health of fathers, mothers and their children and grandchildren. Cohn consults with researchers around the world on the use of the CHDS data for health research.

In addition, Dr. Cohn directs research that examines how pregnancy protects against breast cancer and influences other health problems in mothers and their children, in order to identify natural protective mechanisms that can be used for prevention. She also investigates whether early life exposure to environmental chemicals during pregnancy affects obesity, immune function, reproductive health, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodevelopment, cancer, and health disparities in mothers and their children across the life span.

Dr. Cohn holds a doctorate in epidemiology, a master's degree in city and regional planning, a master's degree in public health planning and a bachelor's degree in zoology - all from the University of California, Berkeley.

Public Health Institute Profile

Director of National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Director of National Toxicology Program
National Institute of Health (NIH)

Dr. Roy Woychik is the Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and also as Director of the National Toxicology Program, both part of the National Institute of Health (NIH). In these roles, he oversees federal funding for biomedical research to discover how the environment influences human health and disease.

As a mammalian geneticist, Dr. Woychik has had several noteworthy accomplishments. His laboratory was the first to clone and characterize the gene called agouti, which provided molecular insights into obesity and the satiety response in the brain. Additionally, his laboratory was the first to identify a gene mutation associated with polycystic kidney disease. Recently, his research program has been focused on investigating the molecular mechanisms associated with how environmental agents influence the epigenetic control of gene expression. Dr. Woychik previously served as president and CEO of Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and functioned as the director of the laboratory's NCI designated Cancer Center. Prior to leading the Jackson Laboratory, Dr. Woychik held positions in both academia and industry: chief scientific officer for Lynx Therapeutics; head of the Parke-Davis Laboratory of Molecular Genetics; professor within the Departments of Pediatrics, Genetics and Pharmacology at the Case Western Reserve University; and senior research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Dr. Woychik received his B.S. and M.S. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

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Cathy Wurzer is the host of Morning Edition for MPR News. She is also the co-host of Almanac, a weekly public affairs program for which she has won four Emmy Awards. Wurzer has also started a new radio show last year titled "Minnesota Now."

Prior to MPR News, she was an anchor and reporter for WCCO-TV and a talk show host for WCCO-AM radio, a producer for KMSP-TV, and political reporter for KSTP-AM radio. Wurzer is the author of "Tales of the Road: Highway 61".

She received degrees in broadcast journalism and urban studies from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

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Professor
Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
Center for Individualized Medicine

Dr. Akhilesh Pandey is a senior associate consultant at Mayo Clinic and a professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.

A few of his research interests include developing novel assays for clinical diagnostics and using systems biology approaches to study a variety of human diseases ranging from cancer and infectious diseases to inherited genetic disorders.

Dr. Pandey obtained his medical degree from Armed Forces Medical College, Pune and completed his residency in pathology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in molecular biology.

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Akhilesh Pandey

Carlson and Nelson Endowed Executive Director, Center for Individualized Medicine Consultant in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Department of Internal Medicine

Dr. Konstantinos Lazaridis is the Carlson and Nelson Endowed Executive Director for the Center for Individualized Medicine, a consultant in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Department of Internal Medicine, with a joint appointment in the Department of Clinical Genomics at Mayo Clinic. He is a professor of medicine in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.

Dr. Lazaridis's research interests include genetic susceptibility to the environmental contributors to chronic cholestatic liver diseases and the biology of biliary epithelia. Through his research, Dr. Lazaridis and his team hope to explain the development and outcome of chronic cholestatic liver diseases, namely primary biliary cirrhosis and primary sclerosing cholangitis.

Dr. Lazaridis received his Doctor of Medicine at the University of Ioannina in Greece. He completed his internal medicine and gastroenterology fellowship at Mayo Clinic.

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Assistant Professor
Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics

Dr. Arjun Athreya is a principal data scientist, associate consultant in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and assistant professor of pharmacology in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.

Dr. Athreya is a leader and expert in developing technologies in artificial intelligence and machine learning. His research and technologies dramatically minimize guessing in the try and try again practice of treating patients by using artificial intelligence and high volumes of patient data to optimize treatment selection and treatment management specific to the patient. This augments physicians' decision-making abilities, decreasing the risk of treatment failures that bring added disease burden to patients.

Dr. Athreya received his Doctor of Philosophy in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Later, he became a research fellow at Mayo Clinic, where he collaborated to build learning methods and models for analyzing clinical data.

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