Afterword: CEHG Genetics and Society Symposium 2015

Founded in 2012, CEHG is a research program that fosters interdisciplinary research. Home to more than 25 faculty and more than 200 grads and postdocs, CEHG bridges the divides between various member labs across Stanford campus.

The 2015 CEHG Genetics and Society Symposium (GSS15), which took place on April 13th and 14th in Stanford’s Paul Brest Hall, was a smashing success. It featured 25 speakers from Stanford campus and the San Francisco Bay academic and scientific industry communities. Approximately 175 Stanford affiliates and non-affiliates came together to celebrate the Center’s spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration and meet with experts in the fields of computational, evolutionary and human genomics This is a significant increase from last year’s 150 attendees!

The Mission:

The Genetics and Society Symposium is integral to CEHG’s mission: it provides postdocs and graduate fellows with the opportunity to share their developing research with faculty advisors and their colleagues, encourages conversation between faculty working in diverse scientific disciplines across campus, and introduces CEHG members to speakers from around the Bay Area and beyond (and vice versa).

The Venue:

As you can see from our photos of the space and catering service, Paul Brest Hall was the perfect home for this year’s two-day symposium. The hall was spacious, the food delicious, the staff hands on, and the outdoor picnic area well suited for our lunch and coffee breaks. We enjoyed the venue so much, in fact, that CEHG staff are currently in the process of booking the space for next year!

The entrance to Paul Brest Hall.

The outdoor dining area, where we enjoyed our meals and coffee breaks.

The Speakers:

GSS15 featured four brilliant keynote speakers, each distinguished in his/her field of research.

Gene Myers and CEHG Exec Committee members Marc Feldman, Chiara Sabatti, and Carlos Bustamante

Founding director of a new Systems Biology Center at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dr. Eugene (Gene) Myers presented his open-sourced research on the resurrection of de novo DNA sequencing. Best known for the development of BLAST, the most widely used tool in bioinformatics and the assembler he developed at Celera that delivered the fly, human, and mouse genomes in a three-year period, Dr. Myers participated in GSS15, courtesy of DNAnexus. Follow his blog: https://github.com/thegenemyers.

Co-founding director Carlos Bustamante and Ed Green catch up during a break at GSS15.

Assistant Professor in Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Richard (Ed) Green presented his research on a novel approach for highly contiguous genome assemblies, which draws on his work as an NSF Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany and head of an analysis consortium responsible for publishing the draft genome sequence of Neanderthal. Click here for his 2014 CARTA talk, “The Genetics of Humanness: The Neanderthal and Denisovan Genomes.

Dr. Michelle Mello, Stanford Law School and School of Medicine

Michelle Mello, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Health Research and Policy in Stanford’s School of Medicine, presented findings from her extensive research on the ethics of data sharing. As the author of more than 140 articles and book chapters on the medical malpractice system, medical errors and patient safety, public health law, research ethics, the obesity epidemic, and pharmaceuticals, Dr. Mello provided a valuable perspective from the intersections of law, ethics, and health policy. Click here to read Dr. Mello’s SLS profile.

Dr. Ami Bhatt, Stanford Medicine

Ami Bhatt shared her passion for improving outcomes for patients with hematological malignancies in her talk, “Bugs, drugs, and cancer.” Best known for her recent work demonstrating the discovery of a novel bacterium using sequence-based analysis of a diseased human tissue, her research has been presented nationally and internationally and published in 2013 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Click here for links to Dr. Bhatt’s CAP profile and lab homepage.

 

We had a large group of CEHG faculty members at this year’s event, showcasing the cutting edge research being done in CEHG labs across Stanford campus and indicating considerable faculty commitment to ensuring the Center’s continuing success.

Dr. Julia Salzman

Dr. Mike Snyder

Dr. Stuart Kim

Our symposium would not be complete without our invited CEHG Fellows. These speakers were nominated by organizing committee members to present on topics relating to their CEHG-funded research projects. These young scholars embody CEHG’s continuing commitment to provide funding support to researchers as they transition from graduate studies to postdoctoral scholarships.

Dr. Rachael Bay

Rachel Goldfeder

The Workshop:

There was standing room only when facilitators Chiara Sabatti (Associate Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford), Ken Lange (Chair of the Human Genetics Department at UCLA), and Suyash Shringarpure (postdoctoral scholar in Stanford’s Bustamante Lab) presented their approaches to contemporary problems in statistical genetics!

Dr. Ken Lange, UCLA

Dr. Chiara Sabatti, Stanford

Dr. Suyash Shringarpure, Stanford

Social Media:

Did you know? CEHG is on social media!

GSS15 social media moderators, Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Jeremy Hsu, Katie Kanagawa, and Rajiv McCoy were posting live throughout both days of the event. And our efforts to reach the larger community paid off, with a total reach of 815 on Facebook and more than 7,000 impressions on Twitter!

To catch up on our GSS15 coverage, check out our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/StanfordCEHG?ref=hl and our Twitter feed @StanfordCEHG. Follow both to make sure you are the first to know when we post CEHG-related news and announcements.

Want to know when speaker videos from the symposium will be available on CEHG’s forthcoming youtube channel? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!

Special Thanks:

From left to right: Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Cody Sam, Yang Li, Anand Bhaskar, and Katie Kanagawa

The GSS15 organizing committee—including Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Anand Bhaskar, Katie Kanagawa, Yang Li, and Cody Sam—would like to take this opportunity to thank CEHG Directors Carlos Bustamante and Marc Feldman, Executive Committee members Hank Greely, Dmitri Petrov, Noah Rosenberg, and Chiara Sabatti, event volunteers Alex Adams, Maude David, and Chris Gignoux, event photographer Deneb Semprum, and everyone who attended this year’s symposium.

We hope you enjoyed attending as much as we enjoyed working behind-the-scenes. We hope to see you all again at GSS16! If you are interested in volunteering for future CEHG events, please contact us at stanfordcehg@stanford.edu.

Upcoming CEHG events:

Don’t miss our popular weekly Evolgenome seminar series, which will continue through Spring term, usually on Wednesdays at noon (location varies). Lunch is always provided. Details will follow, but here is a quick overview so you can mark your calendars!

April 29: Fernando Racimo (Nielsen/Slatkin Lab)
May 6: Pleuni Pennings (UCSF)
May 20: Kelly Harkin
June 3: Sandeep Ventakaram (Petrov Lab)
June 10: Emilia Huerta-Sanchez

Advertisement

Link to Stanford News Center Press Release: “Centuries old DNA helps identify specific origins of slave skeletons found in Caribbean”

Maria Avila-Arcos, postdoctoral CEHG scholar and Bustamante Lab member

Greetings CEHG community!

Click on the link below to read more about this fascinating collaboration between CEHG postdoctoral member Maria Avila-Arcos, CEHG faculty member Dr. Carlos Bustamante, Hannes Schroeder and Thomas Gilbert (both from the University of Copenhagen), and Bustamante lab members David Poznik and Martin Sikora.

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/03/ancient-dna-helps-identify-specific-origins-of-slave-skeletons.html

As Krista Conger, science writer for Stanford Medical School’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs, writes about this groundbreaking study, “The research marks the first time that scientists have been able to use such old, poorly preserved DNA to identify with high specificity the ethnic origins of long-dead individuals. The finding paves the way for a greater understanding of the patterns of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and may transform the general practice of genealogical and historical research.”

The paper was released online March 9th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Please let me know if you would be interested in writing a blog post in response.

Biology Thinks Big! Symposium great success

Blog author: Jeremy is a graduate student in the Hadly lab.

Jeremy Hsu is a graduate student in the Hadly lab. He writes about the Biology Thinks Big! Symposium which he organized. It was a great success. This post was previously published on the Hadly Lab blog. 

On Wednesday evening, we held the first Stanford Biology Thinks Big! symposium, where four Stanford faculty from across the biosciences each gave a short, ten-minute TED-like talk about a big idea in their research or their field.

I first starting thinking about hosting such an event last year, as a way to showcase the amazing diversity of scientific research and viewpoints within the biosciences at Stanford, and to introduce people to science and research in an accessible, engaging format. To that end, I was thrilled with the four speakers we had, with John Boothroyd, Mary Teruel, Carlos Bustamante, and Susan McConnell each representing different departments here at Stanford. Even with such an amazing line-up of faculty, though, I have to admit that I was a bit nervous about turnout for the event – this is the first time anyone’s tried doing such an event here, and I had no idea what to expect.

The first indication that my nervousness was unwarranted, though, came when people starting arriving thirty minutes prior to the start time! More and more people filled in, and the response was overwhelming – not only was our room at maximum capacity (with the aisles filled with people sitting and standing), but our overflow room next door was also absolutely jam packed, with people still trying to peer in from outside the doors.

It was clear that the audience was very enthusiastic and eager about this event. I took a moment to poll the audience at the beginning, and there was a good distribution of undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and general community members!

Despite some of our A/V equipment not cooperating in our overflow room, the excitement of the audience was palpable. Dr. Boothroyd (Department of Microbiology and Immunology) began by talking about his work on a specific microbe, and Dr. Teruel (Department of Chemical and Systems Biology) highlighted the mechanisms behind the development of fat cells.

Next, Dr. Bustamante (Department of Genetics) engaged the audience in a wide-ranging discussion on genetics, before Dr. McConnell (Department of Biology) wrapped up the symposium with an inspiring message on science and conservation, using her own photographs of nature and animals.

It was a great experience to hear four different perspectives on science, and to listen to such a diversity of ideas. Afterward, I was thrilled to see so many students come up to each of the speakers to ask more questions about their work, and many of the students even asked about advice regarding finding and joining a lab or the graduate school process!

Overall, it was clear that everyone was eager to hear the big ideas that Stanford researchers have, and I’m already looking forward to the next time we do this!

— Jeremy