Marcia McNutt, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, Science
Marcia McNutt (BA in Physics, Colorado College; PhD in Earth Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography) is a geophysicist who became the 19th Editor-in-Chief of Science in June 2013. From 2009 to 2013, Dr. McNutt was the Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, which responded to a number of major disasters during her tenure, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. For her work to help contain that spill, Dr. McNutt was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard’s Meritorious Service Medal. She is a fellow of AGU, the Geological Society of America, AAAS and the International Association of Geodesy. Her honors and awards include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as honorary doctoral degrees from Colorado College, the University of Minnesota, Monmouth University and the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. McNutt was awarded the Macelwane Medal by AGU in 1988 for research accomplishments by a young scientist and the Maurice Ewing Medal in 2007 for her significant contributions to deep-sea exploration.
Polly Matzinger, PhD
Senior Investigator, T Cell Tolerance & Memory Section, Laboratory of Immunogenetics, NIAID, NIH
Polly Matzinger has worked as a bartender, carpenter, jazz musician, playboy bunny, and dog trainer. She is currently chief of the section on T Cell Tolerance and Memory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH. She worried for years that the dominant model of immunity does not explain a wealth of accumulated data and proposed an alternative, the Danger model, which suggests that the immune system is far less concerned with things that are foreign than with those that do damage. This model, whose two major tenets were conceived in a bath and on a field while herding sheep, has very few assumptions and yet explains most of what the immune system seems to do right, as well as most of what it appears to do wrong, covering such areas as transplantation, autoimmunity, and the immunobiology of tumors. The model has been the subject of a BBC "horizon" film and has featured in three other films about immunity, and countless articles in both the scientific and the lay press. In her spare time, Polly trains border collies for competitive shepherding trials, composes songs that are not really worth listening to, and is working on the next major question in the immune system, namely "once it decides to respond, how does the immune system know what kind of response to make?" A first answer to this question seems to be “local tissues send instructions to immune cells, guiding them to make the right kind of response.” This has major implications for autoimmunity, cancer immunotherapy, and vaccine design.
Stefanie Tellex, PhD
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Brown University
Stefanie Tellex is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Assistant Professor of Engineering at Brown University. Her group, the Humans To Robots Lab, creates robots that seamlessly collaborate with people to meet their needs using language, gesture, and probabilistic inference, aiming to empower every person with a collaborative robot. She completed her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in 2010, where she developed models for the meanings of spatial prepositions and motion verbs. Her postdoctoral work at MIT CSAIL focused on creating robots that understand natural language. She has published at SIGIR, HRI, RSS, AAAI, IROS, ICAPs and ICMI, winning Best Student Paper at SIGIR and ICMI, and Best Paper at RSS. She was named one of IEEE Spectrum's AI's 10 to Watch and won the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University. Her research interests include probabilistic graphical models, human-robot interaction, and grounded language understanding.
Karine Gibbs, PhD
Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University
Karine Gibbs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Her research group endeavors to discern the fundamental mechanisms by which cells and organisms distinguish genetic ‘self’ from ‘non-self’. They leverage the physiological simplicity and experimental tractability of a bacterium that combines a concept of self with sensing, signaling, and movement to produce sophisticated social behaviors.
Recently, Karine received a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering and a George W. Merck Fellowship. She graduated with an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. As a graduate student with Dr. Julie Theriot, she studied the cell biology of pathogens and developed tools to follow the movements of proteins on the bacterial surface. She was a Stanford Graduate Fellow, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an ASM Robert D. Watkins Minority Graduate Research Fellow. Upon defending her graduate thesis, she received the Professor Sidney Raffel Award at Stanford in recognition of outstanding academic achievement in graduate studies in Microbiology and Immunology. She studied with Dr. E. Peter Greenberg for her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, where she received a University of Washington Bacterial Pathogenesis Training Grant Postdoctoral Trainee award. In Dr. Greenberg’s research group, she began her investigations of the molecular mechanisms underlying self-recognition in bacteria.
Recently, Karine received a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering and a George W. Merck Fellowship. She graduated with an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. As a graduate student with Dr. Julie Theriot, she studied the cell biology of pathogens and developed tools to follow the movements of proteins on the bacterial surface. She was a Stanford Graduate Fellow, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an ASM Robert D. Watkins Minority Graduate Research Fellow. Upon defending her graduate thesis, she received the Professor Sidney Raffel Award at Stanford in recognition of outstanding academic achievement in graduate studies in Microbiology and Immunology. She studied with Dr. E. Peter Greenberg for her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, where she received a University of Washington Bacterial Pathogenesis Training Grant Postdoctoral Trainee award. In Dr. Greenberg’s research group, she began her investigations of the molecular mechanisms underlying self-recognition in bacteria.
Jessica Baker Flechtner, PhD
Senior Vice President of Research, Genocea Biosciences
Jessica Baker Flechtner, Ph.D. joined Genocea Biosciences in 2007, soon after the company was founded, and currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Research. Dr. Flechtner is a pioneer in the development of novel vaccines directed toward T cell immunity, and has more than 19 years of experience in immunology, infectious disease, cancer, and vaccine development. She leads Genocea’s efforts to develop T cell-directed vaccines and immunotherapies against infectious diseases and cancer. Prior to joining Genocea, Dr. Flechtner developed vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer, infectious disease, autoimmunity and allergy in several companies including Mojave Therapeutics and Antigenics Inc. (now Agenus). She is an inventor on seven pending and three issued patents and has multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications. Dr. Flechtner performed her post-doctoral work at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She holds a Ph.D. in Cellular Immunology and a B.S. in Animal Science from Cornell University, and is a member of the American Association of Immunologists and American Society for Microbiology.
Michele Trucksis, PhD, MD
Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Seres Health, Inc.
Michele Trucksis is an Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Seres Health, Inc., a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seres Health is the leading microbiome therapeutics company with an approach to treating disease by restoring a dysbiotic (unhealthy) microbiome to a healthy state. The company has received a “first-in-field” indication by the FDA due to the novel nature of the drug, an Ecobiotic® drug composed of an ecology of bacteria found in healthy humans' gastrointestinal tract. Michele is an Associate Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. Prior to joining Seres Health, she held various positions of increasing senority at Merck Research Laboratories, the research and development division of Merck & Co. Inc. where she was responsible for medical, clinical and global development and strategy for Antifungals and Antibacterials. She received her BS from Youngstown State University; PhD in Biochemistry, Kent State University; her MD from Case Western Reserve University; completed her Internship and Residency training in Internal Medicine at Yale; and a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University. Michele was in academic medicine with a basic research laboratory (studying cholera and tuberculosis) for ~10 years before joining Merck.
Susan Perkins, Esq.
Vice President of Intellectual Property, Paratek Pharmaceuticals
Susan has been sole in-house patent counsel for multiple start-up biotechnology companies, managing portfolios for clinical stage and preclinical drug candidates while building platform technology IP. Prior to joining Paratek as a member of the management team, Susan was Head of Intellectual Property at Aileron Therapeutics, a leader in Stapled Peptide therapeutics. Before that, she led IP at Avila Therapeutics (acquired by Celgene), Syntonix Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Biogen Idec) and Leukosite (acquired by Millennium Pharmaceuticals for which Susan continued as patent counsel). Before going in-house, Susan was associated with the law firm of Campbell & Flores in San Diego, CA. She began as a Patent Examiner with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. She holds a JD with Honors from the George Washington University, which included an internship with the Honorable Randall Radar of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Susan holds an advanced degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina. In 2011, Susan was recognized as an Emerging Leader by FierceBiotech.
Tanya Sokolsky, PhD
Director of R&D and Lab Operations, Parabase Genomics
Tanya Sokolsky, Ph.D. joined Parabase Genomics, a Boston-based neonatal diagnostic startup, in 2013 and is currently the Director of R&D and Lab Operations. She leads the efforts for Parabase Genomics to develop comprehensive genetic and molecular assays that meet the specific needs of newborns, for whom an early diagnosis can be critical to prevent mortality or lifelong debilitation. Dr. Sokolsky has brought her expertise in next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) technologies and workflows to build the laboratory from the “ground up”. Within her tenure the company has gone from first fundamentals in an incubator space to establishment of independent CLIA-certified clinical operations. Prior to joining Parabase Genomics, she was at Applied Biosystems/Life Technologies where she drove novel solutions for the launch of three NGS platforms, being named on four issued patents, and advancing in positions of increasing leadership. She earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Cornell University with Dr. Eric Alani. Her postdoctoral research was performed with Dr. Tania Baker at MIT, where her work received funding from both the American Cancer Society and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Margaret Lynch, PhD
Life Science Undergraduate Research Advisor, Harvard University
Dr. Margaret A. Lynch is the Life Sciences Undergraduate Research Advisor at Harvard University and also serves as the advisor for Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe (WISHR). She was inspired to pursue a career in science by Mr. Warren, her seventh-grade life sciences teacher. Margaret earned a B.A. in Biology from Williams College and a Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. After conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and the University of California, Davis, Margaret spent over a decade as a Faculty Lecturer at Tufts University, where she taught courses and labs in molecular and cellular biology, advised students, and directed the Biology Department’s undergraduate research courses. Margaret is also an experienced medical writer and is currently serving on the Workshop Subcommittee of the American Medical Writers Association.