Bing Brunton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology. She joined the faculty in 2014 as part of the Provost’s Initiative in Data-Intensive Discovery to build an interdisciplinary research program at the intersection of biology and data science. She also holds appointments in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Applied Mathematics. Her training spans biology, biophysics, molecular biology, neuroscience, and applied mathematics (B.S. in Biology from Caltech in 2006, Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Princeton in 2012). Her group develops data-driven analytic methods that are applied to, and are inspired by, neuroscience questions. The common thread in this work is the development of methods that leverage the escalating scale and complexity of neural and behavioral data to find interpretable patterns. She has received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (2016), the UW Innovation Award (2017), and the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award (2018) for her work on sparse sensing with wing mechanosensory neurons.

I am the General Manager of Immunomics in Microsoft’s Health Next group. In partnership with Adaptive Biotechnologies, our goal is transform the way we diagnose, monitor, treat, and prevent disease by creating a blood test to scan the body for past and present signs of infections, cancers and autoimmune diseases. The basis of our approach is the T-cell Antigen Map: nature’s mapping of your disease-fighting T cells to antigens, the signals of disease that they target. If we can learn to decode this information, a small blood sample would yield a readout of the antigens your immune system is monitoring, allowing your immune system to tell its own story. Checkout our blogs or project page for more info.

As a researcher in computational biology and machine learning, my interests have largely focused on immunology and virology. I have been deeply involved in Project Premonition, where I led the metagenomics efforts: given a sample of unknown DNA, what organisms contributed the genetic material? In the context of Premonition, we get DNA from mosquitos. Such DNA will come from the mosquito, the host(s) on which it fed, the mosquito’s microbiome, and both vector-borne viruses and blood-borne viruses from the mosquito host. Our long-term vision is to use blood-feeding insects as sensors for tracking viruses and vertebrates in the environment.

Much of my published research has focused on using virus evolution as a window into the host immune response, with HIV serving as a particularly useful substrate. Because HIV has a high rate of mutation, each HIV-positive individual carries a genetically distinct virus. Moreover, as the adaptive immune response learns to target the virus, evolution selects for genetic variants that reduce the effectiveness of the immune response, leaving genetic “footprints” on the virus that we can learn to track. So by developing models of virus evolution, we can generate and test hypotheses about how the immune system interacts with the virus. In addition to providing guiding principles for vaccine design, this approach can reveal fundamental new insights into basic immunology. Tools I’ve developed for this space are available at the PhyloD web service.

Courtney Crane is the Senior Vice President, Research at Mozart Therapeutics. Previously as an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, she established and mentored a research team that developed novel cell therapy platforms using gene edited natural killer cells and macrophages for the delivery of several classes of soluble proteins, including cytokines, bispecific T cell engagers, and full-length antibodies. During this time, she established several industry sponsored research programs, and successfully out-licensed multiple technologies developed in her lab to a publicly-traded biotech company. Dr. Crane received her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Virginia under the mentorship of Dr. Margo Roberts, and completed her postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco studying the dysregulation of immune responses in brain tumors with Drs. Lewis Lanier and Andrew Parsa before starting an independent research program as academic faculty. She is an author on over 30 peer-reviewed publications and patents and continues her role as strategic advisor for public and privately-held biotechnology industry partners.

Dr. Cyril Engmann is Senior Director – Quality and Program Impact, and Institutional Official at PATH. As Senior Director, he serves as the Senior Leader accountable for providing deep scientific, medical, and public health expertise, operational excellence, oversight, and leadership across all divisions of PATH to strengthen organizational impact. As Institutional Official, he oversees all of PATH’s research and regulatory affairs, including the confidential institutional review and/or approval process of proposed research activities involving human subjects.

Prior to this, he was the Director of the Maternal, Newborn, Child Health and Nutrition (MNCHN) global program at PATH. In that role, he led a department of over 120 staff (physicians, public health practitioners, social scientists, nutritionists, economists, engineers and business, policy and communications experts) working on five continents across a diverse and complex portfolio of work spanning the value chain from research, education, policy and planning, programming, implementation science, monitoring and evaluation, market dynamics and technical assistance at global and national level. Prior to joining PATH in 2014, Cyril led the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Newborn Health Strategy where he designed and oversaw a portfolio of grants totaling $200M. He also remains an active, practicing physician and academic at the University of Washington Schools of Medicine & Public Health, Seattle, where he is Attending Neonatologist and Professor of Pediatrics and Global Health.

Widely regarded as a Global Leader in the field and with extensive experience in the research, policy, advocacy and program spheres, Dr. Engmann is credited with initiating and leadership roles on several global efforts adopted by all 194 signatory countries of the United Nations, including the Every Newborn Action Plan, the Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development Framework, the Global Preterm Research Consortium and the Maternal immunization Consortium. He regularly educates and conducts briefings at the United States Congress on maternal, newborn, child health and nutrition–related challenges and solutions domestically and internationally, and chaired a consortium of academic and non-governmental organizations that advised the British Government on their global nutrition portfolio spend. He has led numerous health consultations and educational briefings with Ministries of Health of Ethiopia, India, Ghana, Bangladesh, Kenya, and South Africa among others. Domestically, he sits on the United States National Institute of Health Expert Panel that advises on all US-Government-sponsored COVID-19 Trials.

He has authored over 130 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, abstracts and white papers and was lead author of the expert group who outlined what the next 20 years should look like for the field of Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, and in another publication, for maternal immunization. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major global conferences, and sits on numerous international strategic, policy, and scientific advisory boards and steering committees. Domestically, he serves on the Washington Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship program. In addition to currently mentoring staff and faculty of academic and non-academic settings, he has taught and supervised generations of undergraduate, masters and doctoral-level public health students, and medical students, residents, and fellows in the USA and abroad. He has been an external examiner for the University of Queensland, Australia and Malawi College MPH programs and has practiced medicine in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Cyril is a Board-Certified active pediatrician and neonatologist and Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Pediatric Research.

Cyril has dedicated his life to addressing social injustice, improving health, and combating health inequity. He is passionate about driving organizational impact through strategic, interdisciplinary, purpose-driven partnerships, and in utilizing data evidence to improve the human condition and put bold solutions into action.

Marcos Frank received his PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford University and conducted post-doctoral research in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (Department of Neuroscience) from 2002-2013. In 2014, Dr. Frank joined WSU (now the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine) as Professor and is currently the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Interim Director of the Gleason Institute for Neuroscience. Research in the Frank laboratory is focused on sleep, brain plasticity, neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative disorders. This work has appeared in the Journals Neuron, ScienceAdvances, Cerebral Cortex, Current Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Neuroscience. Dr. Frank is also the author of several review articles and book chapters on the topics of glia, sleep function and brain plasticity, and is the senior editor of Current Advances in Sleep Biology (Nova Biomedical Books) and Brain Activity in Sleep (Elsevier). Among other institutions, Dr. Frank has given invited talks on his work at Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins and Stanford University and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom. Dr. Frank has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1997 and has led several sponsored research programs with private pharmaceutical companies.

Professor Kutz was awarded the B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Washington in 1990 and the PhD in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1994. Following postdoctoral fellwoships at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (University of Minnesota, 1994-1995) and Princeton University (1995-1997), he joined the faculty of applied mathematics and served as Chair from 2007-2015.

Dr. Jessica Ray joined the University of Washington Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering as an Assistant Professor in January 2019. Previously, Dr. Ray was a Miller Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley investigating low-cost engineered adsorbents for removal of trace contaminants in urban stormwater. Jessica received her B.S. (Chemical Engineering, 2009) and Ph.D. (Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, 2015) from Washington University in St. Louis. As a graduate student, Dr. Ray’s research examined nanomaterial fate and transport by employing advanced surface chemistry analytical techniques for which she received the Environmental Protection Agency Students to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship to support her research. At the University of Washington, Jessica plans to design, characterize and apply low-cost composites (e.g., adsorbents, functionalized polymers, modified membranes) for selective removal of contaminants in stormwater and wastewater. In the future, Dr. Ray plans to expand the portfolio of composites to investigate ways to recover nutrients and other valuable materials from wastes.

Daniel Slichter received his A.B. in physics from Harvard in 2004, and his M.A. (2007) and Ph.D. (2011) in physics from UC Berkeley. He was then an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow at NIST Boulder, where he currently works as a staff physicist. Daniel’s research interests lie in using engineered quantum systems for quantum simulation and quantum computation applications, and to study aspects of quantum measurement and entanglement. He has worked with quantum coherent systems realized using superconducting circuits, as well as systems based on trapped atomic ions in vacuum. Daniel has also conducted research on nanopore-based DNA sequencing, ultra-low-field MRI for cancer screening, and angle-resolved photoemission probes of high-Tc superconductors. Daniel is a Hertz Fellow and a winner of the Hertz Foundation Thesis Prize.

Dr. Caleb Stoltzfus earned a doctorate in physics from Montana State University in 2016 where he studied nonlinear optics, two-photon imaging, and ultrafast spectroscopy. In 2017, he applied his expertise in automation and optical theory to develop micro-optical hyperspectral liquid crystal devices in a joint position at Spectrum Lab and Advanced Microcavity Sensors, LLC. He was awarded the Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2018 for cross-disciplinary application of 3D and 2D optical analysis to answer outstanding questions in the fields of tuberculosis, tumor biology and vaccine efficacy at the University of Washington, Department of Immunology. There he developed and implemented 3D spatial statistics software “CytoMAP” to quantify the spatial organization of cells and structures in a range of biological tissues. This led to successful collaborations and publications with Seattle Children’s Research Institute, the NIH-funded ImpacTB consortium, and industry leaders in tumor immunotherapy. In 2021, he became Principal Engineer at Alpenglow Biosciences to continue studying the 3D organization of cells in tissues and advance the field of spatial biology for academic and industry partners.

Kathleen currently leads strategy, operations and partnerships in Microsoft’s cross-organizational Health and Life Science moonshot factory, Health Futures, within Microsoft Research & Incubations. She is responsible for driving incubation strategy and defining partnerships across life sciences and biomedical technologies in addition to driving investment strategy in emerging portfolio areas, such as population health, global access and mental health. Prior to joining Microsoft, Kathleen led corporate development and partnership creation across the healthcare ecosystem at Castlight Health, a start-up enabling better health navigation, and investment strategy and growth in venture capital. She also spent time leading strategy development in machine learning, medical informatics and emerging technologies within the health payer space. She began her career in financial services, developing investment strategies and establishing new co-developed product partnerships for Barclays.

Kathleen is also an early stage investor and active volunteer with a number of humanity, health and sustainability focused non-profits and is a member of several professional societies to support and mentor women in STEAM.

Sarah Warren, Ph.D., is the Senior Director of Translational Science at NanoString Technologies where she leverages multiplexed, molecular profiling technologies to address key research areas in oncology, immunology, and beyond. Her role enables her to work with academics, biopharmas, and clinicians to identify unmet needs in translational research and create novel products for transcriptional and proteomic profiling. She is also active in the immuno-oncology research community to promote the science and application of cancer immunotherapy to improve patient outcomes. Prior to joining NanoString, she was a founder and director of research at Oncofactor Corp, a biotech startup focused on developing therapeutics which targeted novel immune checkpoints. She has a PhD in immunology from the University of Washington and performed her graduate work at the Institute for Systems Biology.