Speakers

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  Dana Pe’er, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

  Dana Pe’er is Chair of the Program in Computational and Systems Biology and Scientific Director of the Gerry Center for Metastasis and Tumor Ecosystems at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She received her PhD in computer science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. George Church at Harvard University. Dr. Pe’er is a recognized pioneer in the development of computational approaches to analyze large-scale single-cell genomics data. She established that cell transcriptional phenotypes reside on low-dimensional manifolds, which can be explored using graph-based methods to determine cell types, cell states, and continuous cell trajectories within complex tissues. Her group combines computation with emerging single-cell technologies to investigate diverse questions in cancer progression, tumor plasticity, immunity and developmental biology. Dr. Pe’er currently leads computational analysis for the Human Cell Atlas project and serves on the steering committee, and she directs a National Cancer Institute-sponsored Human Tumor Atlas Network center at the Sloan Kettering Institute. She has been recognized by a number of honors including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, the Overton Prize and the MD Anderson Ernst W. Bertner Memorial Award.

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  Rameen Beroukhim, Harvard Medical School

  Rameen Beroukhim is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Beroukhim received fellowship training in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital after receiving his M.D. and residency training at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to this, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, under the direction of Dr. Nigel Unwin at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he developed electron crystallographic methods to determine the structures of ion channels. He received his postdoctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute in the laboratories of Drs. William Sellers and Matthew Meyerson, where he studied patterns of somatic copy-number alterations and their roles in oncogenesis across large numbers of cancers.

  Dr. Beroukhim’s laboratory, which is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute, focuses on understanding the effects of somatic alterations in chromosome structure across cancer types, and on the development, progression, and attendant vulnerabilities of brain cancers in particular. In this his laboratory emphasizes the application of genomic technologies to systematically probe these questions, and the development of computational approaches to interpret them. He also maintains a clinic in which he cares for patients with brain tumours.

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  Serena Nik-Zainal, University of Cambridge

  Serena is a CRUK Advanced Clinician Scientist at the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Consultant in Clinical Genetics. Serena went to the UK as a PETRONAS scholar from Malaysia in 1993, obtaining a First in Physiology at University of Cambridge before completing her medical degree in 2000. She trained as a physician and specialized in Clinical Genetics. She undertook a PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2009 pioneering exploration of breast cancers through whole genome sequencing (WGS).

  Serena demonstrated how detailed downstream analyses of all mutations present in WGS breast cancers could reveal mutational signatures, imprints left by mutagenic processes that have occurred through cancer development. She also identified a novel phenomenon of localised hypermutation termed ‘kataegis’. Serena continues to explore large cancer datasets using computational approaches while investigating biological underpinnings of mutational signatures through cell-based model systems. She led a clinical project, Insignia recruiting patients with DNA repair/replication defects, aging syndromes and neurodegeneration, and is also focused on advancing the field of mutational signatures into the clinical domain.

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  Moderator: Julia Simundza, Nature Cancer

  Julia joined Nature Cancer upon its launch in April 2019. She completed her PhD at the New York University Sackler Institute of Biomedical Sciences in 2015, where she studied lineage markers in mammary gland development and breast cancer. Julia is based in the New York office and handles manuscripts in many areas of cancer with a focus on cancer genomics.