External Advisory Committee
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Tom Baillie, PhD, DSc
Dean, School of Pharmacy,Vice Provost, Strategic Initiative, University of Washington
Thomas A. Baillie, Ph.D., D.Sc. is Dean, School of Pharmacy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Prior to returning to the University of Washington in October, 2008, Dr. Baillie was Global Vice President of Drug Metabolism & Pharmacokinetics at Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, PA (1994-2008). In his previous academic career, he held successive faculty positions at the University of London, the University of California San Francisco and the University of Washington. Dr. Baillie's research interests lie in the application of mass spectrometry and associated techniques to the study of xenobiotic metabolism and chemical toxicology. He is the author of some 250 publications, and serves on the advisory boards of several scientific journals and professional organizations. He was awarded a Senior International Fogarty Fellowship (1988-89) for studies at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden) on the role of oxidative polymorphisms in the metabolic disposition of drugs in human subjects. Susan M. Blaney, M.D.
Professor of Pediatrics | Texas Children’s Cancer Center | Baylor College of Medicine
Susan Blaney, M.D. is the Head of the Neuro-Oncology and Pharmacology Programs at Texas Children’s Cancer Center/Baylor College of Medicine. She is also the Associate Director of Clinical Research for the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center and an Associate Director for the General Clinical Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Blaney serves as the Vice-Chair of Developmental Therapeutics for the Children’s Oncology Group Phase I and Pilot Consortium and is on the Steering Committee for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium. Her expertise is in the development of new anti-cancer agents for children with recurrent or refractory malignancies, with a special emphasis on central nervous system tumors.Tom Caskey, M.D., F.A.C.P.
Managing Director | Cogene Ventures
C. Thomas Caskey advises on biotechnology and biomedical projects. Dr. Caskey is Managing Director of Cogene Ventures. He served as Senior Vice President, Research at Merck Research Laboratories (West Point and IRBM - Rome) and is a former Trustee and President of the Merck Genome Research Institute. A member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Caskey has been awarded numerous academic and industry-related honors for his work in human genetics. He earned his medical doctorate from Duke University and is board certified in internal medicine, human genetics and molecular genetics.-
Barry Coller, M.D. (Committee Chair)
Professor | Physician-in-Chief, Vice President for Medical Affairs | The Rockefeller University
Barry S. Coller, M.D., is Vice President for Medical Affairs at The Rockefeller University and physician-in-chief of its hospital. A renowned physician, researcher and medical educator, Dr. Coller is an expert on the basic molecular mechanisms involved in blood clotting and thrombosis. His research accomplishments include the development of a monoclonal antibody to platelets that was developed into the drug abciximab, which is used throughout the world to prevent and treat heart attacks in select patient populations. Rory Collins, F.R.C.P, Fmed.Sci
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology | University of Oxford | Principal Investigator and CEO | UK Biobank
In 1985 Rory Collins became co-director, with Professor Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford's Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). In 1996 he was appointed British Heart Foundation Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Oxford. He became Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of the UK Biobank genetic-epidemiology study of 500,000 people in September 2005. His work has been in the establishment of large-scale epidemiological studies of the causes, prevention and treatment of heart attacks, other vascular disease, and cancer.Pamela B. Davis, M.D., Ph.D.
Dean, School of Medicine, and Vice President for Medical Affairs, Case Western Reserve University
Pamela B. Davis, M.D., Ph.D. is Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland OH. She received her AB from Smith College, the Ph.D. and M.D. degrees from Duke, and did residency training at Duke in Internal Medicine, then became a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health, where she trained in pulmonology. In 1981, she moved to Case Western Reserve University, where she rose through the ranks to become the Arline and Curtis Garvin Research Professor of Pediatrics, Physiology & Biophysics, and Molecular Biology, and to direct the Willard A. Bernbaum Center for Cystic Fibrosis Research. In 2003 she became Vice Dean for Research at the School of Medicine, and in 2006, Interim Dean, and in 2007, Dean. Her research interests are the inflammatory response in the lung of patients with cystic fibrosis, as well as gene transfer approaches to the CF basic defect. Her work has been continuously funded for 30 years by the NIH, and she is now the principal investigator of the University’s CTSA. She has received the Paul A. DiSant’Agnese award and the Doris Tulcin Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, election to the Cleveland Medical Hall of Fame, the Smith College medal, and the Maurice Saltzman Award from the Mt Sinai Health Care Foundation, among other honors, and has steadily been named in “Best Doctors” and “Top Doctors”.David Ginsburg, MD
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
David Ginsburg is James V. Neel Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Human Genetics, Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Medicine, a member of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan Medical School, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received his B.A. degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University in 1974 and his M.D. degree from Duke University School of Medicine in 1978. His postdoctoral clinical and research training was at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ginsburg joined the faculty at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in 1985.Dr. Ginsburg’s laboratory studies the components of the blood-clotting system and how disturbances in their function lead to human bleeding and blood-clotting disorders. The lab has studied the molecular basis of the common disorder von Willebrand disease and is identifying modifier genes that control severity for this and related diseases. The lab has also defined mutations in ADAMTS13, an enzyme that processes von Willebrand factor, as the cause of Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia Purpura. Studies of the bleeding disease combined deficiency of factors V and VIII by the Ginsburg lab identified mutations in a novel pathway for the transport of a select subset of proteins from the ER to the Golgi. Finally, the lab studies the plasminogen activation system, the mechanism by which blood clots are broken down, and has explored the role of this system in a variety of disease processes including atherosclerosis and microbial infection.
Dr. Ginsburg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of the E. Donnall Thomas Lecture and Prize from the American Society of Hematology, the Basic Research Prize and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Heart Association, and the 2004 ASCI Award from the American Society of Clinical Investigation. He currently serves on Councils for the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
Philip Greenland, MD, FACP, FAHA, FACC, FRCP (Hon.)
Harry W. Dingman Professor of Preventive Medicine and Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Dr. Greenland's research, teaching, and clinical interests focus on the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. He has authored over 300 papers, book chapters, and monographs on topics related to heart disease prevention, heart disease in women, risk prediction, and other aspects of heart disease. From 2004-2008, Dr. Greenland was Chief Editor of Archives of Internal Medicine. He is a member of the NHLBI Board of External Experts, of the NHLBI's Observational Study Monitoring Board for the Framingham Heart Study, and a recent standing member of the NIH Study Section on Cardiovascular and Sleep Epidemiology (CASE). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, elected in 2008. Dr. Greenland was, from 2005-2012, the Senior Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Director of the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He was also Principal Investigator of Northwestern University's Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from 2007-2012.David B. Searls, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President, Informatics | GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals
David B. Searls heads informatics at GSK, managing both bioinformatics and cheminformatics functions at major research centers in North Carolina, the Philadelphia area, and the UK. His office is in King of Prussia, PA. Prior to 1995 he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of Genetics and Computer and Information Science. His research interests lie in the computational linguistics of biological macromolecules, data integration, systems biology, and the application of decision sciences to drug discovery. He has undergraduate degrees in both philosophy and life sciences from MIT, a Masters in computer science from Penn, and a PhD in biology from Johns Hopkins.Griffin Weber, MD, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer of Harvard Medical School (HMS); Director of the Biomedical Research Informatics Core (BRIC) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC); Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Biotechnology, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Griffin Weber, MD PhD is an investigator on Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), an NIH National Center for Biomedical Computing, for which he developed a web-based open source platform that enables a variety of functions including queries of large clinical repositories, visualization of temporal data, identification of random matched cohorts, and statistical comparison of groups of patients. He also created the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE), which is a federated query tool that connects multiple i2b2 databases. The i2b2 software is currently used over 30 academic health centers across the country. Dr. Weber’s other area of research involves expertise mining and social network analysis. He invented the Harvard Catalyst Profiles website, which contains research profiles for 20,000 faculty that are linked together through both Passive Networks, which are automatically generated based on information known about investigators, and Active Networks, which the users themselves create by indicating their relationships to other researchers. These networks have numerous applications, ranging from finding individual collaborators and mentors to understanding the dynamics of an entire research community.-
Rebecca Cooke, MBA, (Ex Officio)
Vice Dean for Administration and Finance, University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine
Rebecca Cooke is the Vice Dean for Administration and Finance for the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, a position she started in July, 2011. Her responsibilities include Finance; Space and Operations; Research Support Services; Faculty Affairs and Professional Development; Office of Organizational Effectiveness; and Decision Support and Analysis. Prior to arriving at the Perelman School, Rebecca was the Senior Associate Dean for Administration and then the Chief Operating Officer at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. The Feinberg School houses undergraduate medical education, PhD programs, and ten graduate and professional programs serving 2,500 students. Rebecca worked closely with the Dean and senior management of the medical school, university and clinical affiliates to plan and implement strategic direction. From 1999 to 2007, Rebecca was the Administrator of the Department of Medicine at the Feinberg School where she was responsible for the administration and financial management of the department’s clinical practice, research grants and educational programs. Prior to arriving at Northwestern, Rebecca worked in the Dean’s office at Thomas Jefferson University’s Jefferson Medical College where she was the Director of Administrative Affairs for the newly formed faculty foundation. Starting in 1989, Rebecca spent six years in departmental administration at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she worked in Cardiology, Oncology, Gastroenterology, Nephrology and Endocrinology. Rebecca received an MBA in Health Care Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and has a BS in Business Administration from Towson State University.