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Conference Chairs

Ferhat Ay, PhD
La Jolla Institute for Immunology

Ferhat Ay is the Institute Leadership Associate Professor of Computational Biology at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) with adjunct appointments at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, Moores Cancer Center, Institute for Genomic Medicine and Bioinformatics and Systems Biology PhD program. Prior to LJI, he was a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University (2015) and a CRA Computing Innovation Fellow in William Noble's lab in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington (2011-2014). Ferhat completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Florida (2007-2011) and his B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Mathematics both from Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey, in 2007. His primary research areas are bioinformatics, computational biology, epigenomics, and regulatory genomics. Ferhat and his lab developed computational methods for studying chromatin conformation capture data (Hi-C, HiChIP), including highly utilized tools such as FitHiC, FitHiChIP, Mustache, HiCNV/HiCTrans and dcHiC. He serves as an Associate Editor for PLoS Computational Biology, Journal of Computational Biology, and as an Editorial Board Member for Genome Biology, and in several different organizational roles for ISCB conferences, including ISMB, RECOMB and RSGDREAM.

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Elise Blaese, MS, MBA
IBM

Elise Blaese is a Senior Project Manager for IBM Research. She supports the work of the IBM Research Healthcare and Life sciences team. She is also a DREAM Director, having worked on outreach, marketing, logistics and management of DREAM Challenges and the Annual DREAM conference since 2011. Elise joined IBM Research in 2008 where she works to find research opportunities for IBM researchers and our partner universities with the NIH. Before joining Research Elise work in IBM’s internal healthcare startups in solutions development and marketing for five years. Prior to IBM, Elise worked for NASA for 10 years in the Space Life Sciences research program where she was a project manager for the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA). Elise also worked in payload Mission Control for four Spacelab missions in the early 90’s.

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Aly Azeem Khan, PhD
University of Chicago

Aly A. Khan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in the Departments of Pathology, Family Medicine, and the College. He develops computational methods to uncover clinically relevant insights about the immune system, translating these into improved diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities for human health. Previously, he was a research faculty member at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago, where he established a basic science research program in computational immunology. In addition to his academic research, he has advanced translational research at Merck, Genentech, Tempus Labs, and currently 23andMe. Dr. Khan earned his Ph.D. in Computational Biology jointly from Cornell University and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His contributions to computational immunology have been recognized with several honors, including the NIH DP2 NIAID New Innovator Award.

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Pablo Meyer, PhD
IBM

Pablo Meyer is Manager of the Biomedical Analytics and Modeling group at IBM research, Director of DREAM challenges and as such has been working on developing models and applying AI to biological/biomedical problems, Systems Biology, Olfaction and Disease.

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Sushmita Roy, PhD
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sushmita Roy is a Professor at the Biostatistics and Medical Informatics Department and a faculty at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning and regulatory genomics. Her group develops and applies computational methods for identifying regulatory networks that exist in living cells and examines their dynamics across different biological contexts. She works closely with experimentalists who study a variety of biological processes ranging from infectious disease, cell fate specification, host microbe interactions, evolution of tissue-specific gene expression that all have a shared goal to understand the underlying regulatory network. Dr. Roy is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award and a James McDonnell foundation scholar award.

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