Andrzej Kloczkowski is Principal Investigator in the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. He is a Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Dr. Kloczkowski’s NIH-funded research program focuses on computational structural biology and bioinformatics, including protein structure prediction from the amino acid sequence, prediction of biomacromolecular dynamics using elastic network models, development of coarse grained models and potentials for proteins and nucleic acids, and studies of protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid integrations. He is also interested in application of machine learning methods to various biomedical and clinical problems, and has ongoing collaboration with several experimental and clinical centers.

Dr. Kloczkowski applies statistical mechanics, polymer physics and computer modeling of physicochemical system to a variety of problems that are important for molecular biology and medicine. Much of his work is driven by NIH funding to study “High-Accuracy Protein Models Derived from Lower Resolution Data.” Previous work has focused on lattice models of proteins used to study the physical nature of protein folding, prediction of protein structures from the amino acid sequence, prediction of the 3D structure of human telomerase, protein dynamics, prediction of protein function, protein packing and statistical potentials, systems biology and relating phosphorylation of protein domains to signaling and metabolic pathways with an emphasis on cancer. Dr. Kloczkowski directs his work towards highly complex biological problems, especially those important in medicine such as phosphorylation and other post-translational modifications, systems biology and modeling of cells.

Dr Zhou, MD/PhD, is presently a Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Medicine, Associate Vice President of Global Medical Development, Associate Dean of International Research, and Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. He has published more than 320 peer-reviewed papers in biomedical journals, which has been cited more than 7,500 times by colleagues with an H-index of 44. He is the editor or editor-in-chief of 7 medical journals and the editorial board member of other 25 medical journals. To date, he has trained 24 PhD students, 12 MSc/honors students, 14 postdoctoral staff and 15 visiting doctors from other countries.

Professor Zhou's major research interests include pharmacokinetics, pharmacogenetics, evaluation of herbal medicines and drug delivery.

Dr. Quincy's research has focused on the application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to environmental and life sciences. They have developed and applied NMR methodology for assessing exposure of fresh-water small fish models to chemicals of environmental concern by means of metabolomics. More recently, they have developed a novel methodology of cell culture-based metabolomics for assessing chemical exposure using human and fish cell lines. His current projects: applications of NMR spectroscopy to metabolomics, nano particles and plant biology; and assessing chemical toxicity by cellular metabolomics of human cell cultures.

His laboratory focuses on histone epigenetic mechanisms that regulate gene transcription and that are coupled to melanoma progression. They utilize a suite of techniques in their studies including proteomics of human biopsies, immunohistochemistry, cell culture, tumorigenicity assays, ChIPseq, biochemical and proteomic approaches for analyses of protein complexes, and cutting-edge mass spectrometry for the analysis of histone post-translational modifications. They have a unique environment that provides for discovery-based studies like proteomics as well as hypothesis-driven studies like those they perform in cell culture and with skin biopsies. In addition to their melanoma work, they develop new technologies for epigenetic studies such as tools for detection of in vivo protein interactions and quantitative assays for histone modifying proteins.

His areas of expertise include proteomics, epigenetic technology development, and melanoma cancer biology. His group is currently pursuing a series of proteomic studies including the most comprehensive to date proteomic analysis of FFPE patient melanoma. Additionally, He directs the UAMS Proteomics Facility and have extensive experience in collaborative research projects involving various areas of mass spectrometry. His group has expertise in using mass spectrometry to identify proteins in complex mixtures as well as quantifying protein abundance using various procedures (e.g., label-free, spectral counting, stable isotope tags & SILAC). His group also performs various quantitative analyses of posttranslational modifications.

Dr. Victor Zhang has developed and implemented numerous NGS based for molecular diagnosis of heterogeneous disorders. He obtained his Ph.D from Rice University and did postdoctoral studies from Baylor College of Medicine. He completed his clinical fellowship from Emory University School of Medicine. He is currently assistant director of Mitochondrial Diagnostic Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine, a premier reference testing service center in US. He has published more than 20 papers in reputed journals and been invited to give multiple presentations on these topics nationally.

Jorge is the technical director for the CRI responsible for planning and oversight of the Bioinformatics Core at the University of Chicago.

Wangs Alliance project extends to tumor glycomics with a current focus in exploration of glycan markers of prostate cancers and anti-glycan autoantibody signatures in prostate cancer patients. This is in partnership with Co-Investigator Ten Feizi at Imperial College London, UK. The Feizi group pioneered carbohydrate ligand discovery; the unique neoglycolipid technology coupled with mass spectrometry established by them was the basis of an advanced microarray system encompassing sequence-defined carbohydrate chains of glycoproteins and glycolipids. Among outputs are assignments of ligands for numerous endogenous carbohydrate recognition systems and those in pathogen host interactions including the oncogenic simian virus 40, SV40 and the pandemic H1N1 2009 influenza A virus.

Wangs long-term research interest is in the immunogenic sugar moieties that play key roles in the host recognition of complex carbohydrates and immune responses to carbohydrate antigens.

Jiang Wu is currently an associate research fellow at Pfizer Worldwide Research & Development. In the past decade, he has played a leading role in developing and applying various proteomics technologies to support drug discovery programs in oncology, inflammation, neuroscience, and metabolic diseases. Prior to joining Pfizer, he was a lab head of the proteomics and protein chemistry at Wyeth and a group leader of biomarker mass spectrometry at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. He obtained his doctorate degree in chemistry from Michigan State University. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in the field of proteomics and protein mass spectrometry.

Proteomics Technologies, Protein Chemistry, Protein Mass Spectrometry

Jimmy Efird holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health and as Epidemiologist/Chief Statistician (Leader, Shared Resources) in the Center for Health Disparities Research under the direction of Dr. Hope Landrine. He also serves as Director of Epidemiology and Outcomes Research for the ECU Heart Institute and is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences. Prior to joining ECU, Dr. Efird was Director of the Biostatistics Facility at the John A. Burns School of Medicine (Honolulu, Hawaii) and an Associate Member of the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii.

Genetic epidemiology, cancer informatics, brain tumors, soft-tissue sarcomas and HPV-related cancer

His general area of research is in optimal design of experiments with applications to clinical trials and non-linear models. He is particularly interested in the construction of multiple-objective designs. These designs are appealing because they are flexible and they capture the goals of the practitioners more accurately. His work is published in both theoretical and applied journals in statistics, including pharmaceutical sciences and theoretical biology. In 1997, He won the First Independent Research Support and Transition Award from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. He participated in several rheumatoid arthritis (RA) studies, including "High versus Low Dose Pencillamine in Systemic Sclerosis" and "Long Term Observational Study of Early Severe RA Patients". Earlier on, He also served as the director of the "Multipurpose Arthritis Center Data Analysis Core" from 1995-1998. Currently, He is the biostatistician for the "Multi-Center Phase II Trial of Oral Type I Bovine Collagen in Scleroderma" supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has also participated in NIH-supported research work in dentistry and environment health science.

Victor P Andreev, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Miami School of Medicine. Dr. Andreev is a bioinformatician and computational scientist with a strong background in mathematics, physics, and analytical chemistry. Prior to University of Miami, he worked for the Northeastern University, Boston, and prior to this for the Institute for Analytical Instrumentation, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia. Dr. Andreev is a member of several editorial boards, including the Journal of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmacoproteomics.

Proteomics, pharmacogenomics, bioinformatics, and systems biology of mental disorders, metabolic syndrome, immune disorders, and aging. Computational biology, signal processing algorithms

Dr. Daoud is leading a multidisciplinary team studying the biological basis for racial disparity in liver cancer outcomes in African Americans versus Caucasian Americans. Using liver cancer tissues from the Kansas University Tissue Bank, and in collaboration with a research team at Harvard Medical School, Daoud and his collaborators have identified 32 proteins – out of 787 quantified – show enormous differences between the two races, meaning a difference in disease progression, disease pathway and/or disease response to treatment. The team has targeted four of those proteins for closer study and will increase the size of its patient base. The proteins under study could represent part of the signaling pathway(s) of the disease etiology.

The overall interest of our research program is in translational cancer therapeutics, with a major emphasis on integrating high throughput genomics and proteomics approaches for biomarker discovery and classification for better utility in the molecular pharmacology of cancer.

Prof. Shahzad, currently based in Vienna, Austria, is one of the pioneers, working for the progress of Translational Medicine (TM) field. Prof. Shahzad is currently serving as Director of Administration and Secretary General for “International Society for Translational Medicine (ISTM)”. He is also acting as a chair for Translational Medicine SIAC group at ‘Drug Information Association’ (DIA). Prof. Shahzad is serving as editor-in-chief for ‘Molecular Medicine & Therapeutics (MMT)\' Journal and for ‘Translational Biomedicine’ Journal. Prof. Shahzad has advised and participated in establishing Translational Medicine infrastructure for several Organizations. Dr Shahzad is invited speaker for many international life sciences conferences. He is professor of Microbiology (V) and Professor of Medicine (V), at Harbin Medical University. In addition, various organizations are getting benefited from wide expertise of Prof. Shahzad in his capacity as a medical advisor and medical scientific expert.