Dr. Brenda Andrews, Principal Investigator, Director, Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR), Toronto, Canada

Dr. Mikhail Berezin, Assistant Professor of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, Missouri

Dr. Berezin is focusing on novel mechanisms for optical imaging in medicine. His research interests lie in the design of fluorescent probes with high specificities to a variety of diseases for diagnostics and image-guided treatment. Current projects include the design of optical molecular and nanothermometers for measuring thermal fluctuations in vivo and controlling thermal ablation of cancer, synthesis of ROS/RNS nanoprobes for imaging injuries and developing novel optical imaging modalities in the extended near-infrared spectral range.

Dr. Bettina Berger, Postdoctoral Fellow, The Plant Accelerator, University of Adelaide, Urrbrae, Australia

Dr. Berger is currently the senior scientist in The Plant Accelerator (www.plantaccelerator.org.au), headquarters of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility. She is central in developing technologies for the high throughput phenotyping of plants to quantify traits of salinity and drought response and using these technologies in a forward genetics approach to identify genes contributing to salinity and drought tolerance in crop plants.

Dr. Berger did her Ph.D. within the International Max-Planck Research School in Cologne on the regulation of glucosinolate biosynthesis in Arabidopsis but has now turned her attention to whole plant physiology and the use of non-destructive phenotyping to probe abiotic stress tolerance in crops such as wheat and barley.

Keith Boyarsky, Technical Director of Analytics, Toronto Raptors

The last few years have seen optical tracking data from STATS LLC's SportVU system take a prominent place in NBA analytics. With the Raptors, Boyarsky, a graduate of the University of California - Berkeley (B.S. Mechanical Engineering), has led the effort to derive insightful and actionable intelligence from this massive raw dataset. One area of focus, which recently gained attention in a profile on Grantland.com, is defensive positioning: the location of all ten players and the ball is used to both evaluate the correctness of players' positioning within a team's scheme as well as suggest more optimal schemes.

Dr. Anne Carpenter, Director, Imaging Platform, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dr. Carpenter directs the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She leads a team of biologists and computer scientists to develop image analysis and data mining methods and software that are freely available to the public through the open-source CellProfiler project. She collaborates with dozens of biomedical research groups around the world to help identify disease states, potential therapeutics, and gene function from microscopy images. Carpenter is a Massachusetts Academy of Sciences fellow, an NSF CAREER awardee, and has also been funded by the NIH, Human Frontiers in Science, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Shital Dixit, PhenoFab/KeyGene

Dr. Dixit is the Manager of Business Development at PhenoFab^® (www.phenofab.com), a joint facility of KeyGene and LemnaTec providing digital plant phenotyping services worldwide. She identifies and drives new projects in PhenoFab, brings innovation to its product pipeline, and offers client-driven solutions. She has a Ph.D. in the area of plant molecular genetics from Wageningen University- The Netherlands where she researched on abiotic stress resistances in crops. She worked as a scientist at KeyGene N.V. where she, with her team, developed non-destructive protocols on HTP phenotyping platforms to make High-Tec plant images and data analysis and extracted and exploited invaluable information with the genetic data resources, bridging the gap between genotyping and phenotyping.

Dr. Robert Furbank, Scientific Director and Group Leader, High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre,CSIRO, Canberra, Australia

Dr. Furbank leads the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre (HRPPC), a National Facility in Canberra Australia which has developed and deployed novel phenotyping technologies for crop and model plants in controlled environments and the field. Dr. Furbank’s research aims to improve crop yield and product quality by researching carbon partitioning and photosynthesis. Dr. Furbank has worked for 30 years on C4 photosynthesis and his recent research focuses on improving yield potential in cereal and biofuel crops through increasing photosynthetic capacity and efficiency using Phenomics, biochemical, and molecular approaches.

Dr. Michael Gore, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Dr. Michael Gore recently joined the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University as an Associate Professor, after three years of work as a Research Geneticist with the USDA-ARS at U.S. ALARC in Maricopa, AZ. His research combines population genomics and quantitative genetics to dissect complex trait variation in cotton, Brassica napus, maize, and guayule. In addition, he has developed field-based, high-throughput phenotyping tools to rapidly measure plant physiological and morphological traits under high temperatures and water-limited conditions.

Dr. Anjali Iyer-Pascuzzi, Assistant Professor, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

Dr. Iyer-Pascuzzi received a Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Environmental Biology from U.C.- Berkeley, a Master’s in Plant Pathology, and a Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics, both from Cornell University. During her post-doctoral work at Duke, she developed an imaging and phenotyping system for non-destructively quantifying root system architecture and used systems biology approaches to investigate the intersection of root development and environmental stress. She joined Purdue’s Department of Botany and Plant Pathology in January 2013 where her research focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms and gene regulatory networks underlying root responses to biotic stresses

Dr. David Kramer, Hannah Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

Dr. Kramer is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the MSU DOE Plant Research Lab at Michigan State University. His research focuses on how the biophysical and biochemical machinery of photosynthesis functions in living organisms. His work has resulted in the development of new high throughput and high resolution tools for assessing photosynthesis in plants and algae. He will discuss recent work using these tools on photosynthetic responses to dynamic environmental conditions that reveals previously obscure gene functions.

Dr. Randall Peterson, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Scientific Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center, and Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute, Charlestown Navy Yard, Charlestown, Massachusetts

Dr. Peterson is a chemical biologist whose research utilizes high-throughput screening technologies to discover new drug candidates for cardiovascular and nervous system disorders. Unlike conventional drug discovery programs that utilize simplified, in vitro assays, Dr. Peterson’s laboratory conducts their screens with living zebrafish. He is the recipient of a EUREKA award from the National Institutes of Health and is the Charles and Ann Sanders MGH Research Scholar.

Dr. Jesse Poland, Research Geneticist, USDA-ARS, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Kansas State University, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas

Dr. Poland is a Research Geneticist with USDA-ARS and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Agronomy at Kansas State University. Dr. Poland’s research group is located on the KSU campus with field research across the state. Dr. Poland currently supervises three graduate students and a post-doctoral scholar and sits on the graduate committees of five other students at Kansas State University and Colorado State University, where he holds affiliate faculty status.

Research in Dr. Poland’s group is focused on wheat genetics and germplasm improvement. They are currently developing new marker technologies for use in breeding, diversity studies, and association genetics. In collaboration with public breeding programs, Dr. Poland is exploring the use of genomic selection methods in wheat breeding. In the area of germplasm development, Dr. Poland’s group is focused on developing new breeding lines with resistance to the major pests of wheat including stem rust, strip rust, leaf rust and Hessian Fly. Dr. Poland’s lab is developing high-throughput phenotyping approaches for field-based evaluation of breeding lines with the primary focus being genetic characterization of heat and drought tolerance and development of improved germplasm.

Dr. Edgar Spalding, Professor of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

Dr. Spalding’s interest in studying seedling growth and development from a biophysical perspective were sparked while an undergraduate at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, pursued through doctoral studies at Penn State, and through postdoctoral work at Yale. While a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Spalding’s research has retained a focus on seedling growth and development but the experimental approaches range from patch clamp electrophysiology of individual channel molecules, to statistical genetic analyses of development in populations quantified through image analysis.

Dr. Robert Tanguay, Distinguished Professor and Director of the NIEHS Toxicology Training Grant, Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon

Dr. Tanguay is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology and the Director of the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory. He received his B.A. in Biology from California State University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California-Riverside and postdoctoral training in developmental toxicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over the past several years he has developed automated high throughput instrumentation to accelerate phenotype discovery in zebrafish. Phenotypic anchoring coupled with the inherent molecular and genetic advantages of zebrafish are used to define the mechanisms by which chemicals, drugs, and nanoparticles interact with and adversely affect vertebrate development and function.

Dr. John Vogel, Research Molecular Biologist, USDA, ARS, PWA, WRRC-GGD, Albany, California Dr. Vogel has led a group at the USDA-ARS Western Regional Research Center for the past ten years. His research is focused on using Brachypodium distachyon and closely related species as model grasses with an emphasis on topics relevant to biomass crops. Creating experimental resources (e.g. genome sequences, efficient transformation systems, over 20,000 T-DNA lines) has been a major focus of his research. Dr. Vogel is also leading a collaborative project with the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Facility in Canberra, Australia to phenotypically characterize natural accessions and homozygous T-DNA lines. For more information visit: http://brachypodium.pw.usda.gov/