Richard Myers, Ph.D.
Director, HudsonAlpha Institute
Professor and Chairman, Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Director, Stanford Human Genome Center

Dr. Richard Myers received his bachelor of science in biochemistry from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1977, his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley with Robert Tjian and performed postdoctoral work at Harvard University with Tom Maniatis. He began his first faculty position at the University of California at San Francisco in 1986 and moved his laboratory to Stanford University’s Department of Genetics in 1993, where he is professor and chair until he moves fulltime to HudsonAlpha in July 2008. Dr. Myers’s research program is focused on human genetics and genomics. Work in his laboratory has led to the identification of genes involved in several inherited diseases, and his genome center contributed more than 10 percent of the data in the public Human Genome Project’s efforts to sequence the human genome. His lab continues to use genomics tools and genetics to understand how genes interacting with the environment contribute to human diseases and other traits.

Dr. Myers directs a number of teaching activities for the local schools, from the primary level through the junior college level, as well as for a number of lay groups; these include lectures, organized tours of his genome center, laboratory exercises and curriculum development. He is particularly interested in increasing and nurturing diversity in the scientific community and is active in several programs involved with under-represented groups at the graduate school level and earlier.

Dr. Myers has won several awards, including the Pritzker Award and an honorary doctorate of human letters from the University of Alabama. He currently serves on a number of advisory panels and editorial boards, including the Advisory Council, the HapMap Advisory Committee and the Review Group for Large-scale DNA Sequencing Centers of the National Human Genome Research Institute, as well as the Biology and Biotechnology Program Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Energy. He is an editor of Genome Research and reviews manuscripts for a variety of other journals.

Greg Barsh, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Chair, Department of Genetics, and Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics, Stanford University

Dr. Greg Barsh is professor of genetics and pediatrics, and associate chair of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Barsh received an M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington, obtained postgraduate training at UC Los Angeles and UC San Francisco, and has been a member of the Stanford faculty for 18 years. Dr. Barsh’s research accomplishments based on the application of mouse coat color genetics to basic problems in cell signaling, gene regulation and human disease have been recognized by several awards, including the E Mead Johnson Award from the Society of Pediatric Research and the Takeuchi and Seiji Awards from the International Society for Pigment Cell Research. He is also a former investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, director of the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program, and deputy editor of PLoS Genetics.

David Cox, M.D., Ph.D.
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Perlegen Sciences, Inc.

Dr. David Cox, recognized internationally for his research on the molecular basis of human genetic disease, is co-founder and chief scientific officer of Perlegen Sciences, Inc. Perlegen, with headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., facilitates development of genetically-targeted, late-stage therapeutics and diagnostics, and works toward uncovering the genetic causes of diseases.

Dr. Cox has been chief scientific officer of Perlegen since its formation in 2000. He was professor of genetics and pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, as well as the co-director of the Stanford Genome Center. He obtained his A.B. and M.S. degrees from Brown University, R.I., and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington, Seattle. He completed a pediatric residency at the Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Conn., and was a fellow in both genetics and pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Cox is certified by the American Board of Pediatrics and the American Board of Medical Genetics. He was an integral participant in the large-scale mapping and sequencing efforts of the Human Genome Project while carrying out research involving the molecular basis of human genetic disease.

He has served on several international and national councils and commissions including the Council of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC).

Dr. Cox's honors include election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has served on numerous editorial boards.

Prior to joining TPG Biotech in 2004, Dr. Duyk served on the board of directors and was president of research and development at Exelixis where he led a 550+ person group focused on the discovery and development of small molecule therapeutics. Prior to Exelixis, he was one of the founding scientific staff at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. As vice president of genomics at Millennium, Duyk was responsible for building and leading the informatics, automation, DNA sequencing and genotyping groups as well as the mouse and human genetics group. Prior to his tenure at Millennium, Dr. Duyk was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) in the Department of Genetics and assistant investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). While at HMS, Dr. Duyk was a co-principal investigator in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Cooperative Human Linkage Center. Dr. Duyk has been and continues to be a member of numerous NIH panels and oversight committees focused on the planning and execution of the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Duyk holds a Ph.D. and M.D. from Case Western Reserve University and completed his medical and fellowship training at University of California, San Francisco. While at UCSF, Dr. Duyk was a fellow of the Lucille P. Markey Foundation and was also awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Duyk serves on the board of directors of Replidyne, Macrogenics, Aerie, FoldRx, Amyris, Galleon, Moksha8, ShangPharma, Agria, Renewco and JCR.

He is a council member of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards of the NHGRI DNA Sequencing Advisory Panel, chair of the KOMP (Global Mouse TKO project), ESC (Expressed Sequenced Consortium), co-chair advisory panel Cancer Genome Anatomy Project, Program in Genomics Applications (NHBLI); the Bioethics Advisory Group at Case Western Reserve University; the Spinal Muscular Atrophy Foundation; WIL Laboratories; VLST; and FoldRx.

Dr. Duyk is a former member of the board of directors of Avidia, recently sold to Amgen.

Dr. Thomas J. Hudson is president and scientific director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. He is implementing the institute’s strategic plan, working with cancer research institutions across Ontario to leverage existing strengths. The plan focuses on prevention, early diagnosis, cancer targets and new therapeutics. Its innovation platforms include imaging and interventions, bio-repositories and pathology, genomics and high-throughput screening, and informatics and biocomputing. Dr. Hudson is recruiting more than 50 internationally recognized principal investigators.

Dr. Hudson was the founder and Director of the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre and Assistant-Director of the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research. Dr. Hudson is internationally renowned for his work in genomics. At the Whitehead Institute, Dr. Hudson led the effort to generate dense physical and gene maps of the human and mouse genomes. He is a leader in the development and applications of robotic systems and DNA-chip based methodologies for genome research. In June 1996, he founded the Montreal Genome Centre based at the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute. In 2003, this group expanded to become the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre. Dr. Hudson and his team were founding members of the International Haplotype Map Consortium. Dr. Hudson’s interests in human genetic diseases focus on the dissection of complex genetic diseases. Disease projects in Dr. Hudson’s laboratory included the search for genes predisposing to lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, coronary artery disease, asthma, diabetes and colon cancer. The laboratory also used the DNA-chip technology to characterize breast and ovarian cancer.

In 2007, Dr. Hudson was appointed to the rank of professor (status-only) in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. He taught in the departments of Human Genetics and Medicine at McGill University and practiced medicine at the McGill University Health Centre – Montreal General Hospital.

Dr. Hudson is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was one of the co-founding members of P3G and is currently serving as its scientific director. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Human Genetics.

The recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Hudson has received the 2005 Achievement of the Year in Healthcare from Maclean’s magazine, the 2005 Award for Research in Immunology by the Canadian Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the André-Dupont 2002 Young Investigator Award given by Quebec’s Clinical Research Club, an Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a Burroughs-Wellcome Clinician-Scientist Award, The 2002 Prix de la Santé from the Armand-Frappier Foundation, the 2001 Young Scientist Award by the Genetics Society of Canada, the 2000 Scientist of the Year by Radio-Canada, and the 1999 Canada’s Top 40 Under 40.

Val C. Sheffield, M.D., Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Professor, Department of Pediatrics
Director, Division of Medical Genetics
Director, Interdepartmental Research Program in Human Molecular Genetics, University of Iowa

Dr. Sheffield received his bachelor of science degree in zoology from Brigham Young University and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sheffield completed a pediatric residency, a medical genetics fellowship and postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Sheffield is interested in identifying genes and disease mechanisms involved in single-gene and complex human genetic disorders, including hereditary blindness, deafness, autism, obesity, and cardiovascular disorders. The identification of genes, sequence variations, and mechanisms involved in complex human disorders holds great promise for improving health care, but at the same time presents a difficult challenge to the scientific community.

To better understand the genetics of complex human disorders, Dr. Sheffield’s laboratory has studied isolated human populations and Mendelian (single-gene) disorders that share a phenotypic component with common complex disorders. He has used isolated human populations to map more than 35 disorders and has used positional cloning methods to identify 15 disease-causing genes. This work has provided insight into the types of genes, mutational events and gene product interactions that are likely to contribute to common complex disorders. Recent progress in the laboratory has resulted in the identification of genes involved in a heterogeneous autosomal recessive disorder known as Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS). Most recently Dr. Sheffield’s lab identified defects in a single gene that underlies a hereditary form of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of irreversible vision loss in the developed world.

Barbara Wold, Ph.D.
Director of the Beckman Institute and Professor of Molecular Biology, California Institute of Technology

Dr. Barbara Wold is the Bren professor of molecular biology and director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech. She began working on genome structure and gene regulation during embryo development for her Ph.D. thesis at Caltech, and developed ways to assay cis-regulatory element function during postdoctoral work at Columbia. She established joined the biology faculty at Caltech in 1981 where she and her colleagues have focused on learning the architecture and logic of gene networks that drive cell state transitions. They study skeletal muscle development, degeneration and regeneration as a favored model system. Recent work emphasizes new ways to quantitatively map the inputs and outputs of gene networks in a genome-wide manner using “next generation” ultra-high throughput DNA sequencing, and applying these methods to muscle and brain networks.

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