2024 Invited Speakers
Dara Aisner, MD, PhD
Dara Aisner, MD, PhD, is a board-certified certified Anatomic and Molecular Genetic Pathologist. She is a Professor of Pathology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, Colorado and a member of the University of Colorado Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is also board certified in Clinical Informatics. As the Director of the Colorado Molecular Correlates Laboratory and the Vice Chair for Genomic Laboratory Medicine within the Department of Pathology, she participates in numerous initiatives related to molecular diagnostics.
She is a member of guidelines committees including the NCCN Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer panel, among others. Dr. Aisner is a leader in helping establish formal processes helping medical oncologists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals work optimally together, which is especially important in today’s world of precision diagnostics, personalized medicine and next-generation sequencing testing.
Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD
Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD, is the Vice Chair for Translational Research, and Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Mayo Clinic. He additionally serves as the co-director of the precision cancer genomics office across the Mayo Clinic enterprise, and as emerging leader of the early cancer detection and interception program at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is a physician-scientist with a lab that is dedicated to liquid biopsy research.
Dr. Chaudhuri completed his MD at Stanford, PhD at Caltech, and BS degrees in Biology and Computer Science at MIT. He completed his PhD in Biology under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate David Baltimore focusing on microRNAs in cancer, and his residency at Stanford University, where he did postdoctoral work with National Academy of Medicine member Maximilian Diehn demonstrating that circulating tumor DNA serves as a powerful biomarker for molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative-intent localized lung cancer treatment. Dr. Chaudhuri's laboratory at the Mayo Clinic is a translational genomics lab that focuses on the development and application of liquid biopsy cancer diagnostic technologies with the goal of more precisely personalizing solid tumor malignancy treatment. His laboratory is funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Children's Discovery Institute, the Children's Tumor Foundation, and the Melanoma Research Alliance.
Dr. Chaudhuri is also an entrepreneur in the liquid biopsy space. He co-founded Droplet Biosciences, a venture-backed startup company focused on detecting MRD after cancer surgery from lymphatic fluid.
Robert P. Sebra, PhD
Robert Sebra, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and the founding Director of the Center for Advanced Genomics Technology (CAGT) which is focused on accelerating faculty driven innovation to ensure that the Mount Sinai community has access to cutting-edge genomics platforms to accelerate discovery. His research focuses on developing single molecule, bulk, single cell, spatial, and in-situ multi-omics molecular and computational methods and the application of these techniques and datasets for translational science and medical research.
His basic research focuses on RNA biology of early development, tumor progression, and infectious disease to better characterize health and disease progression using integrated data and machine learning approaches. To date, Dr. Sebra has been involved in over 200 publications and is co-founder and CEO of Panacent Bio, Inc., a platform to discover and interpret cellular and transcriptional signatures of disease via comprehensive foundational models and machine learning approaches. Previously, he served as VP of Technology Development at GeneDx. Prior to that, he was a scientist at Pacific Biosciences, after completing his PhD at the University of Colorado.
Chad Vanderbilt, MD
Chad Vanderbilt, MD, is an Assistant Attending Pathologist in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). He sub-specializes in molecular pathology and is a member of the Molecular Diagnostics Service. Dr. Vanderbilt's research, supported by the Warren Alpert Foundation, focuses on computational biomarker discovery for cancer. His laboratory utilizes deep learning methods to train models based on H&E histopathology slides to predict prognosis and response to therapy.
Dr. Vanderbilt is specifically focused on improving the clinical workflow for the diagnosis and management of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. In addition to research focus on computational pathology, Dr. Vanderbilt has expertise in clinical bioinformatics and teach computational skills to the Molecular Pathology fellows and other trainees at MSKCC.
