2025 Invited Speakers
Yassmine Akkari, PhD, FACMG
Yassmine Akkari, PhD, FACMG is a Senior Director at the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She is triple certified in Clinical Cytogenetics, Molecular Genetics, and Ph.D. Medical Genetics, and contributes to both constitutional and somatic clinical sign-outs.
She has served as the President of the Cancer Genomics Consortium (CGC), the Vice Chair of the CAP/ACMG Cytogenetics resource Committee, and the Chair of the Association of Molecular Pathology (AMP) Training and Education and Program Committees. Currently, she is a member of the WHO Low- and Mid-Income Countries Committee, the Children’s Oncology Group Cytogenetics Committee, the Chair of AMP’s Finance and Global Congress program committees, and the Vice-Chair of the ACMG International Outreach and Engagement Committee.
Mark Cowley, PhD
Associate Professor Mark Cowley is a computational biologist, specializing in cancer genomics and precision medicine. Since joining the Children’s Cancer Institute in 2018 as head of the Computational Biology Group, Mark has built a multidisciplinary team of ~40 researchers, engineers and students.
He also leads the Luminesce Alliance Data Enabling Platform, the co-lead of the ACRF Child Cancer Liquid Biopsy Program, and the President of AGTA, the leading genomics organization in the region. In his role as the Genome Informatics and Data Enabling Platforms lead for the Zero Childhood Cancer Program (ZERO), Mark oversees the development of innovative analytical methods and systems for the realtime analysis of Whole Genome, Transcriptome, and Methylome data for every childhood cancer patient in Australia. He is also pioneering approaches for liquid biopsy and molecular monitoring of patients with disease. Through numerous national and international collaborations, Mark is instrumental in establishing secure, federated, and standardscompliant genome data sharing technologies, with the goal of leveraging real-time health data from electronic medical records. As Deputy Director, Mark is also responsible for establishing CCI's Research Enabling Platforms and collaboration portfolio, which empowers researchers with access to cutting-edge technologies, resources, and capabilities.
Sheryl Elkin, PhD
Sheryl Krevsky Elkin, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer at QIAGEN Digital Insights, Oncology Group. Dr. Elkin joined QIAGEN through the acquisition of N-of-One, and has led a team establishing a rigorous process for analysis and presentation of scientific and clinical evidence for physicians.
Dr. Elkin played a lead role in the development of the Nof-One clinical interpretation methodology and has been a key player in the integration of N-of-One with the QIAGEN Clinical Insights software. Prior to joining N-of-One, Dr. Elkin was a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Cancer Research. She earned her doctorate in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard Medical School and an A.B. in Biology and Music from Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.
Donald Karcher, MD, FCAP
Donald Karcher, MD, FCAP is Professor and Immediate Past Chair, Department of Pathology, at the George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, DC. He received his MD degree from the Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans and completed residency training in anatomic and clinical pathology at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston (San Antonio), Texas.
He then served as Director of Hematopathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC and subsequently at LSU Medical Center in New Orleans. From 1984 to the present, Dr. Karcher has been on the faculty in the Department of Pathology at the George Washington University Medical Center, rising through the ranks to become Chair of Pathology in 1999, a role in which he served for 20 years. He is Board-certified in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology and Hematopathology, and he continues to actively practice and teach hematopathology, flow cytometry, and laboratory administration at GW.
Dr. Karcher is active in many national and international medical and pathology organizations. He currently serves as President of the College of American Pathologists (CAP), following service as chair of the CAP Council on Government and Professional Affairs and Council on Education and for many years as a member of the CAP Board of Governors and Executive Committee. For several years, Dr. Karcher has been a leader in the Association of Pathology Chairs (APC), now called the Association for Academic Pathology (AAPath), the preeminent organization of academic pathology departments in the US and Canada, and served as APC President in 2014-2016.
Roger Klein, MD, JD, FCAP
Roger D. Klein, MD, JD is a board-certified molecular pathologist who was formerly Chief Medical Officer of OmniSeq, Inc., a tumor profiling company acquired by LabCorp. He was medical director of molecular oncology and at several academic institutions, including Cleveland Clinic.
In addition, he has served as a medical, strategic, and regulatory consultant in the biotechnology, clinical laboratory, diagnostics, and medical device industries for Clients have leading pharmaceutical and diagnostic test manufacturers, a major Silicon Valley Law firm, a major Medicare contractor, and the Department of Justice. A leading figure in the field, Dr. Klein has advised the Departments of Health & Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and held leadership roles on and participated in numerous professional society committees at the Association for Molecular Pathology, the College of American Pathologists, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute, and the American Medical Association. Dr. Klein has over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has received numerous professional and community awards. He completed medical school and an internship at Case Western Reserve Medical School, residency and fellowships at Yale Medical School, and a fellowship at Mayo Clinic. He earned his law degree at Yale Law School. He is licensed to practice medicine in New York, Ohio, and Florida, licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia, Ohio and member of the United States Supreme Court Bar.
Shashikant Kulkarni, MS, PhD, FACMG
Shashikant Kulkarni, MS, PhD, FACMG is a Professor and Vice Chairman of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine leading Molecular Pathology and Cytogenetics at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is an academic leader and a senior executive with over 25 years of experience in clinical genomics, translation research and a proven ability to provide cost-effective and evidence-driven precision medicine diagnostic tools in both academic and corporate setting.
Dr. Kulkarni is a board-certified medical geneticist [American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ABMGG) with dual certifications in Clinical Molecular Genetics & Genomics as well as Clinical Cytogenetics & Genomics] focused on utilizing genomic and multi-omic tools to aid patient-centric precision diagnostic solutions. His passion and research expertise are devoted towards creating innovative solutions for oncology diagnostics with the goal of eliminating cancer.
Lisa Lansdon, PhD, FACMG
Lisa Lansdon, PhD, FACMG is an Assistant Director of the Molecular Genetics Laboratory in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, as well as an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.
Her primary clinical focus is genetic testing for pediatric patients with cancer, whereby she analyzes and interprets molecular genetic test results in addition to performing clinical test validations. Her current research interests include exploring the clinical utility long-read sequencing and RNA expression profiling in pediatric cancer diagnostics, as well as existing and emerging technologies utilized to detect macrogenomic events in solid tumors.
Beth Pitel, MS, CG(ASCP)CM
Beth Pitel works as a Clinical Variant Scientist in the Division of Laboratory Genetics and Genomics with an emphasis of oncology at Mayo Clinic. Beth has helped develop clinical genetic testing using several different testing modalities including NGS oncology panels, RNAseq, Mate Pair sequencing, chromosomal microarray, and qPCR.
Beth is the lead on the Genomics of Oncology Annotation Team (GOAT) at Mayo Clinic, which creates interpretive resources for the laboratory based on current knowledgebase content, database content, commercial oncology NGS assays, and prevalent literature. Beth has worked at Mayo Clinic since 2007 and completed her master’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular biology in 2015 with foci on cancer biology and bioinformatics at the Mayo Graduate School. Her interpretation worked has led to several presentations and webinars for various well-known entities. Beth is an active member of the Cancer Genomics Consortium (CGC), contributes to the Genomic Resources Development Committee (GRDC), and has been a proponent for cancer-specific gene lists. Additionally, she has contributed to the ClinGen Somatic Working Group in addition to her involvement in the Variant Interpretation for Cancer Consortium (VICC) as a co-director and a virtual molecular tumor board co-lead. Beth has co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts and is frequently involved in clinical and translational research at Mayo Clinic.
Gordana Raca, MD, PhD, FACMG
Gordana Raca, MD, PhD, FACMG is the Director of Cytogenomics at the Center for Personalized Medicine, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and Professor of Clinical Pathology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Raca’s research and clinical interests are focused on genetic and genomic abnormalities in hematologic malignancies, and on the use of cytogenomic and molecular techniques (including Chromosomal Microarrays, Next Generation Sequencing and Optical Genome Mapping) for detection of copy number changes and balanced rearrangements in genomic DNA. Dr. Raca is the Past-President of the Cancer Genomics Consortium and currently serves on the Children’s Oncology Group Cytogenetics Steering Committee, American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Laboratory Quality Assurance Committee and ClinGen Somatic Working Group.
Fritz Sedlazeck, PhD
Fritz Sedlazeck, PhD is an Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine and an adjunct Associate Professor at Rice University. He is leading a research group since 2017 at the Human Genome Sequencing Centre at Baylor College of Medicine. His research focuses on developing computational methods to detect and analyze genomic variations with a focus on Structural Variations.
Structural Variations are genomic events that manipulate multiple positions in a genome, which impact evolution, genomic disorders, regulation as well as play an important role in explaining multiple phenotypes. Dr. Sedlazeck groups focuses on the mechanisms of the formation of SV across multiple species and to improve our understanding how these complex alleles evolve and impact phenotypes. Over the past years, Dr. Sedlazeck lead multiple efforts from large scale short reads (e.g. Topmed, CCDG) to long reads (CARD, All of US) to study SV occurrence, impact and mechanism of SV.
Alex Wagner, PhD
Alex Wagner, PhD is a Principal Investigator at The Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine (IGM) at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. His research is focused on the development of tools and standards for advancing precision medicine and our knowledge of genomic alterations in cancers.
Dr. Wagner serves as director of the Variant Interpretation for Cancer Consortium (VICC), co-lead of the Genomic Knowledge Standards Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), co-lead of the BRIDGE Center Standards Core for the NIH Bridge2AI program, and member of the HGVS Variation Nomenclature Committee. He is a proponent of open science, FAIR data sharing, and AI-assisted scalable variant interpretation. Dr. Wagner has co-developed several precision medicine web tools, including the Drug-Gene Interaction Database, the database of Clinical Interpretations of Variants in Cancer (CIViC), and the VICC metaknowledgebase. His research continues to explore new models and tools to address the challenges of variation and genomic knowledge representation, including his work as a lead designer of the GA4GH Variation Representation Specification and the VICC Gene Fusion specification.
Daynna Wolff, PhD, FACMG
Dr. Wolff is currently a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and is the Director of the Cytogenetics and Genomics Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is certified as a Clinical Cytogeneticist and as a Clinical Molecular Geneticist by the American Board of Medical Genetics and is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics.
Dr. Wolff completed her B.A. degree in biology at the University of Notre Dame of Maryland and her Ph.D. in Human Genetics at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Dr. Wolff did postdoctoral training at Stanford University and clinical fellowships in Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics at Case Western University. Prior to coming to MUSC in 1998, she was Director of Cytogenetic and Molecular Genetics at Case Western Reserve University Hospitals. She is active in and has held positions of responsibility in the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, the Cancer Genomics Consortium and the Association for Molecular Pathology. She has authored numerous book chapters, practice guidelines, and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of cytogenetics, genetic laboratory standards and guidelines and molecular diagnostics. Her current research focuses on the use of DNA copy number microarray analysis to determine diagnosis of and prognosis for various tumors.
