Mentors for the 2018 Innovation Lab

Dr. Eberwine is the Elmer Holmes Bobst Professor Systems Biology at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. His scientific interests revolve around the variation in function of single cells in complex cellular networks. This interest led him to develop, among other methodologies, single cell PCR, the aRNA amplification protocol and to coin the phrase “expression profile” to describe the relative abundances of RNAs, thus pioneering the field of single cell biology.

Dr. Laura Heiser is an assistant professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at the Oregon Health & Science University. Dr. Heiser's research is focused on identifying pathways and aberrations associated with therapeutic response and resistance in cancer. In her studies, she uses an integrative systems biology approach to understand cancer as a complex system. Dr. Heiser is also an active member of the DREAM Consortium, which is a community-based effort to rigorously assess and advance algorithms in computational biology.

Dr. John Lowengrub is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Lowengrub's research areas include applied and computational mathematics along with mathematical and computational biology.

Dr. Vinay Pai has a background in biomedical imaging and biomedical informatics. He has been in the federal government for more than a decade and his last posting was as director of the division of health informatics technologies at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to federal service, he was on faculty at New York University School of Medicine and at SUNY Upstate Medical University, in the department of radiology. He has seven patents in medical device development and novel approaches in magnetic resonance imaging.

Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti is the Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Systems Biology, and Medicine and is Director of Clinical Informatics at the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University. Professor Tatonetti's lab at Columbia is focused on detecting, explaining, and validating drug effects and drug interactions from large-scale observational data.

Dr. Navin Varadarajan is an associate professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston. Professor Varadarajan's Single-cell Lab is developing high-throughput screens designed to characterize a wide range of biological functions ranging from the properties of proteins in single cells to antigen mediated cellular cytotoxicity.

Organizing Team

Jack Van Horn (USC)

Jeana Kamdar (USC)

Jennifer Couch (NIH)

Eric M. Johnson Chavarria (NIH)

Facilitating Team

Stavros Michailidis (KnowInnovation)

Donnalyn Roxey (KnowInnovation)

Tim Dunne (KnowInnovation))