MBTP Symposium 2022 Featured Speakers
Dr. Hal Alper is the Kenneth A. Kobe Professor in Chemical Engineering and Executive Director of the Center for Biomedical Research Support at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. He currently leads the Laboratory for Cellular and Metabolic Engineering with a focus on applying and extending the approaches of synthetic biology, systems biology, and protein engineering. Dr. Alper has published over 130 articles and 8 book chapters and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.
Dr. Beth Cimini is a Senior Group Leader, CZI Imaging Scientist and head of the Cimini Lab in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. She obtained a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF, studying splicing variants of the telomere master scaffolding protein TIN2. This work honed her interests in image analysis, leading her to postdoctoral and staff scientist roles with Dr. Anne Carpenter’s lab at the Broad, leading a team collaborating with ~30 outside scientists per year on custom image analysis projects. The Cimini lab focuses on bioimage analysis tool creation (Piximi) and maintenance (CellProfiler), as well as on applying open source tools to novel biological problems. She created and directs the Platform’s Postdoctoral Training Program in Bioimage Analysis, and also leads the Broad efforts towards community engagement and driving biological projects for the Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA).
Dr. Harmen J. Bussemaker is a Professor and former Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and a Professor in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Originally trained as a theoretical physicist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Dr. Bussemaker transitioned to the burgeoning field of genomics as a postdoc at the Rockefeller University in the late 1990s. He has been working in the life sciences ever since, acquiring a background in genetics and molecular biology through intense interdisciplinary collaborations, including a year-long sabbatical in the laboratory of Dr. David Botstein at Princeton University. His research group at Columbia University has pioneered many topics related to the DNA binding specificity of transcription factors and the structure and function of gene regulatory networks based on integrative analysis of functional genomics data of different types. Dr. Bussemaker has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, and a Visiting Professor Fellowship from the Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He has been an organizer of the CSHL conference on Systems Biology, a long-time organizer/instructor of the CSHL summer course on Statistical methods for Functional Genomics, and has served as a judge for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists at the New York Academy of Sciences.