Board of Regents Working Group (BoR WG) members

Hannah Carey is Professor Emeritus in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD in Zoology from the University of California, Davis and completed postdoctoral training in gastrointestinal physiology at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine and the Ohio State College of Medicine.
Her research investigates adaptations of the gastrointestinal tract and its microbiome to extreme changes in physiology and nutrition in hibernating mammals, and their potential applications to biomedicine. Dr. Carey is a Past President of the American Physiological Society and the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, and is a AAAS Fellow. She served as a rotating Program Officer in the Directorate for Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2010-2011.

Wayne N. Frankel, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Genetics & Development and in the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University (New York, NY). Frankel earned his masters and doctorate degrees from Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY), and continued his training as a postdoc at Tufts University School of Medicine (Boston, MA).

In 1992 he joined the faculty of The Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, ME) where using mouse models he pioneered various approaches to understand the genetic basis of epilepsy, initially pursuing gene discovery by aligning mouse seizure genes with human epilepsy GWAS hits and pathogenic variants detected by next-gen sequencing.

As human epilepsy gene discovery advanced, he reversed the approach to model human variants in engineered mice, an approach he has continued since relocating to Columbia in 2015. In studying over a dozen different genetic models of DEE in collaborations with neurophysiologists and clinicians at Columbia and externally, his two broad objectives are identifying mechanisms that converge across different genetic etiologies and in advancing treatment by focusing on genetic therapies in otherwise intractable forms of epilepsy.

Frankel has authored or co-authored over 140 research publications, was the founding Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Genetics and has served in various national and international scientific advisory capacities, both in the US (NIH) and international (EU).

Kristi Holmes is the Director of Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center and Professor of Preventive Medicine (Health & Biomedical Informatics) and Medical Education at Northwestern University. She is deeply committed to empowering data discovery and equitable access to knowledge, including the development of computational and social architectures to support these goals. Dr. Holmes directs evaluation for several large centers and institutes, training grants and other strategic initiatives, including the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS), where she serves as an Associate Director of the institute. She is the Chief of Knowledge Management at the Northwestern University Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine (I.AIM) and actively collaborates on several informatics and data science strategic initiatives, bringing experience with highly cooperative technical information projects on the local, national, and international level. Her advisory roles include service on the NLM Board of Regents, the InCommon Steering Committee, the Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) Coordinating Center External Advisory Committee, and her team is also a core development partner with CERN on the InvenioRDM project. Before joining Northwestern University, she was a bioinformaticist at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned a PhD in Biochemistry from Iowa State University.

Ani W. Manichaikul is a biostatistician and statistical geneticist with interests in genetic analysis of complex disease for both rare and common genetic variants in studies of multi-ethnic and admixed populations. Among many of my current efforts, I work actively as an analyst in MESA, performing genetic analyses of a variety of traits (including pulmonary function, emphysema, subclinical atherosclerosis, CVD events, inflammatory markers, fatty acids, lipids, nutrition) in combined samples of families and unrelated individuals. Current efforts in my group include integration of genomic and transcriptomic data with application to lung disease traits, translational studies in collaboration with investigators performing animal studies, assay of protein levels in MESA participants to follow-up of recent genetic association findings, and statistical mediation analysis of inflammatory biomarkers in the pathogenesis of disease. Beyond MESA, I collaborate actively on translational research efforts with basic scientists at the University of Virginia, with a focus on bridging candidate gene association studies in humans with mouse studies, including gene mapping and phenotypic characterization of knockout animals.

Dr. Len Pennacchio is a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), Deputy Director of the DOE Joint Genome Institute, and Adjunct Professor at the University of California Berkeley. He received his PhD in Genetics from Stanford University in 1998 under Rick Myers and then served as a DOE Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Fellow at LBL under Eddy Rubin. He has authored over 170 publications and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House for his contributions to the Human Genome Project and understanding mammalian gene regulation in vivo. Dr. Pennacchio has an extensive background in mammalian genetics and genomics as well as with DNA sequencing technologies and their application to address outstanding issues in both the biomedical, energy, and environment sectors. He serves in numerous advisory roles such as NHGRI’s National Council, NHGRI’s Genome Sequencing Program, the Centre for Genomic Research at the University of Liverpool, as a permanent member of NIH’s GCAT Study Section. He also is an Organizer and Co-Chair of three separate annual Advances in Genome Biology & Technology (AGBT) meetings as well as a “Systems Biology of Gene Regulation and Genome Editing” meeting hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Asia. Currently his research is heavily focused on understanding the spectrum of DNA mutations that contribute to human disease through in vivo functional studies.

Sánchez Alvarado received a BS in molecular biology and chemistry from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, and a PhD in pharmacology and cell biophysics from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Cincinnati, OH. He performed postdoctoral and independent research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Embryology in Baltimore, MD. In 2002, he joined the faculty of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City where he held the H.A. & Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair. In 2005, he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He joined Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City in 2011 and became Scientific Director of the Stowers Institute in 2019 and is now serving as the Institute’s Executive Director & Chief Scientific Officer.

Sánchez Alvarado is a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Latin American Academy of Sciences, a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences USA, a Fellow of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, a recipient of a National Institutes of Health MERIT award, Priscilla Wood Neaves Chair in the Biomedical Sciences, and the EE Just Medal for Scientific Achievement. He has served on numerous scientific advisory committees and boards including the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health, and presently serves on the Board of Directors of American Century Investments.

Kenneth D. Stuart, Ph.D. is a Principal Investigator at the Seattle Children's Research Institute (SCRI) and a Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington where he was previously chair of the Department of Pathobiology. He is also an Affiliate Investigator in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He founded The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI) that focused on global infectious diseases including malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and neglected parasitic diseases which merged with the Center from Global Infectious Disease Research at SCRI.

He received a BA in Biology from Northeastern University, Boston, MA; a MA in Biology from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. He received postdoctoral training in biochemistry at the National Institute for Medical Research, London and SUNY Stony Brook before becoming an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of South Florida (1972-76). He relocated to Seattle in 1976 and created SBRI.

Dr. Stuart is an expert in molecular and cell biology and performs research on complex pathogens and the diseases that they cause including African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, and malaria. He led the formation of the international consortium that sequenced the genomes of the parasites which laid the foundation for many scientific advances by numerous researchers. He is particularly recognized for his groundbreaking studies of RNA editing and is also known for his numerous contributions to the understanding of protozoan pathogens that cause extensive human disease, primarily in less developed countries. These include immune evasion processes, viral contribution to pathogenesis, pathogen regulatory processes and human immune responses to malaria infection and vaccination.

Tandy Warnow is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, and Professor and Associate Head of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler and did postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at USC. Her research combines computer science, statistics, and discrete mathematics, focusing on developing improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in biology and historical linguistics. Her main research is focused on algorithmic problems in computational biology with the aim of developing methods that biologists will use and that will have transformative accuracy and scalability. Her current work is on large-scale and complex estimation problems in phylogenomics (i.e., genome-scale phylogeny estimation), multiple sequence alignment, and metagenomics. Her awards include the NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award (1996), a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2003), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011). She was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015, of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2017, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021.

Dr. Wu is the Unidel Edward G. Jefferson Chair Professor in Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Delaware and has served as the Founding Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology since 2010 and the Data Science Institute since 2018. She received her PhD from Purdue University and has conducted bioinformatics research for 30 years in areas encompassing genomic and protein sequence and functional annotation, biological text mining and natural language processing, biological ontology, semantic data integration, knowledge network analysis, and bioinformatics cyberinfrastructure. She has published 300 peer-reviewed publications with an h-index of 72 and been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher.

As the Director of the Protein Information Resource (PIR), she has co-led the international UniProt Consortium since 2002, which now serves as a hub of protein knowledge with over 8 million pageviews monthly from >900,000 unique sites worldwide. She is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and AAIA Fellow, and received the Purdue Distinguished Agriculture Alumni Award. She has served on the National Institute of General Medical Sciences Advisory Council (2017-2021), the ACM SIGBio Board of Directors (since 2010), and the Editorial Board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) (since 2014). She has launched several degree programs since 2010, including the MS, PSM, PhD, and graduate certificate programs in Bioinformatics Data Science, as well as a new NIH T32 Graduate Training Program in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Biomedical Data Science.