Materials for AKES 01 - DREAM Challenge

Chairs

Gustavo Stolovitzky, Distinguished Research Staff Member and Director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nano-Biotechnology Program IBM Research; Adjunct Professor, Columbia University and at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, United States

Dr. Stolovitzky joined IBM Research in 1998 after being a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at The Rockefeller University. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University (1994) and his M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires (1987). Dr. Stolovitzky has received Yale University's Henry Prentiss Becton Prize award (1994), the HENAAC's Pioneer Award for Great Minds in STEM (2013), the World Technology Awards (2013), and Master Inventor in IBM Research (2013). Dr. Stolovitzky is a Fellow of the NY Academy of Sciences, of the World Technology Network, of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.
Gustavo has led many industry projects at IBM Research including the development of single molecule DNA sequencing methods (DNA Transistor Project), and the use of crowd-sourcing to improve the quality of industrial research in systems biology (IMPROVER project). He is also heavily involved in academic research. He founded and leads the DREAM Challenges. He is a co-chair of the “RECOMB/ISCB Systems and Regulatory Genomics with DREAM Challenges” conference series. His research spans from the fields of high-throughput biological-data analysis, to reverse engineering biological circuits, the mathematical modeling of biological processes and nano-biotechnology.

Julio Saez-Rodriguez, Group Leader, European Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI)

Julio studied Chemical Engineering at the Universities of Oviedo and Stuttgart, and obtained his PhD at the University of Magdeburg and the Max-Planck-Institute with E. D. Gilles. After this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School with Peter Sorger and Doug Lauffenburger at M.I.T., and a Scientific Coordinator of the NIH-NIGMS Cell Decision Process Centre. Since 2010 he is a group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) , with a joint appointment in the EMBL Genome Biology Unit in Heidelberg, as well as a senior fellow at Wolfson College (Cambridge). He is an affiliated member of Sage-Bionetworks and a co-organizer of the DREAM initiative to catalyze the development of methods in systems biology. His main research interest is to develop and apply computational methods to acquire a functional understanding of signaling networks and their deregulation in disease, and to apply this knowledge to develop novel therapeutics.

Pablo Meyer, Team Leader, Research Staff Member, IBM Research

Pablo Meyer received a degree in Physics from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Univeriste Paris-VII and his PhD in Biology from Rockefeller University (2005) studying with live imaging the protein interactions in the Drosophila circadian clock. He studied at Columbia University the live-imaging of metabolism during sporulation in Bacillus Subtillis. In 2010 he joined the IBM Computational Biology center at IBM Research where he is a DREAM challenges director and finds himself in the intersection between modelling, data analysis and wet lab. His most recent interests are in enzyme distribution in the cell in and their link to Metabolism/Cancer via high-throughput biological-data analysis and development of new experimental techniques.

Thea Norman, Director, Strategic Development, Sage Bionetworks, United States

Dr. Norman works closely in partnership with Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky of IBM to oversee the running of the Sage-DREAM Challenges. DREAM Challenges foster a collaborative framework for researchers to rapidly evolve predictive disease models for tough problems in biology and medicine that would otherwise take years to produce. Dr. Norman also oversees the design and development of Sage Bionetworks BRIDGE platform. Prior to joining Sage Bionetworks, Dr. Norman spent 12 years as a science, alliance and business leader at two start-up biotechnology companies (Ironwood and Ambrx). Dr. Norman is a co-inventor on seven issued patents including that for the composition of Linzess (which Dr. Norman developed), a First in Class treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Dr. Norman holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

Brian Bot, Senior Scientist and Community Manager, Sage Bionetworks, United States

Brian is with Sage, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to exploring open source models in the advancement of biomedical research in Seattle, Washington. Previously, Brian worked in the Department of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics at the Mayo Clinic for 7 years. He has extensive experience in working with clinical and genomic data and has a passion for exploring innovative ways to make science more open and transparent. Brian's current work involves implementation of strategies and technologies for making complex high dimensional genomic analyses more accessible. At its heart, this work is driven to re-envision how scientists can ensure reproducibility of their research results and communicate complex genomic science to one another and to the public at large. Brian has been an invited speaker at a number of national and international events about his experience in making science more open and transparent.

Materials