Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School
Associate Member, Broad Institute

Karen Adelman earned her Ph.D. in 1999 from Universite de Paris VI, working at the Institut Pasteur under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She then joined the laboratory of John Lis, Ph.D., at Cornell University for her post-doctoral training. In 2005, she established her own laboratory at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH), and was promoted to Senior Investigator in 2011. In 2016, she joined the Harvard Medical School faculty as a Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology.

Dr. Chen obtained her PhD in the lab of Dr. Matthew Lorincz at the University of British Columbia, where she studied chromatin mechanism of transcription, specifically looking at histone phosphorylation. She then completed a post-doc fellowship in the lab of Dr. Nada Jabado at McGill University, where she studied histone mutations found in cancer and germline developmental disorders. In 2023, she joined Terry Fox Laboratory at BC Cancer to start her own independent research group. Her lab will study epigenetic mechanisms of brain tumors and neurodevelopmental disorders using a combination of primary clinical samples, experimental models, and computational-based approaches.

Amélie Fradet-Turcotte is an associate professor at Université Laval and a researcher at CHU de Québec Research Center since 2015. She did her postdoctoral studies at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto and holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Université de Montréal. As a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Jacques Archambault at the Institut de Recherches Clinique de Montréal (IRCM), she studied how replication of oncogenic viruses impacts the biological processes of the host cell. Amélie then pursued her quest to understand how external stresses shape cellular behavior by joining the team of Daniel Durocher in Toronto. There, she unravelled chromatin-dependent mechanisms central to the repair of DNA breaks, a process essential to maintain genomic stability in cells. As a Canada Research Chair in Molecular Virology and Genomic Instability, her research interest is in understanding the regulation of the molecular processes that safeguard our genetic material in normal and infected cells as well as the consequences of their deregulation on cancer development. Of interest with this conference, her team acquired a unique expertise in studying chromatin-dependent DNA damage signaling both in cellular and in vitro.

Gavin Kelsey is head of the Epigenetics Programme at Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, and affiliate group leader at the Centre for Trophoblast Research and Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science-Metabolic Research Laboratories at the University of Cambridge. Gavin obtained a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from King’s College London and then a Ph.D. in Genetics from University College London. Between 1987 and 1995, he was a post-doc at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, where he held a post-doctoral fellowship from EMBO (1987-1999). In 1995, Gavin joined the Babraham Institute as a Group Leader, holding an MRC senior (non-clinical) fellowship from 1995-2005. His group currently focuses on understanding how epigenetic information is established in germ cells and the impact of gamete-derived epigenetic states in the early embryo. This extends to investigating how epigenetic information may be altered by factors such as advanced maternal age, or diet, or by assisted-reproduction procedures As part of these investigations, the group has pioneered methods for profiling epigenetic information genome-wide in very low numbers of cells and single-cells, including mutli-omic methods that obtain transcriptomic and epigenetic data from the same cell.

Dr. Mathieu Lupien is a Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, a Professor at the University of Toronto and holds a cross-appointment with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. He serves on the Research Executive and the Research Council on Oncology to the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Lupien earned his PhD in experimental medicine at McGill University under the leadership of Dr. Sylvie Mader and carried out postdoctoral training in medical oncology as an Era of Hope Fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School under the mentorship of Dr. Myles Brown followed by a PLDA at Harvard Business School. Dr. Lupien joined the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and the University of Toronto in 2012.

Dr. Lupien’s research focuses on conquering cancer by treating it as a disease of the chromatin. Amongst key discoveries, he revealed a new type of genomic variation, known as chromatin variants, to pioneer the identification of cancer drivers in the non-coding cancer genome. His work also showed that cancer-specific chromatin variants could support oncogenesis independently of genetic variants (mutations). Finally, his research showed the efficacy of epigenetic therapy that targets chromatin variants to block cancer development and progression. Among other honours, Dr. Lupien is a recipient of the Allan Slaight Collaborator Award, the Mona Gauthier Award, the Canadian Cancer Society Bernard and Francine Dorval Award for Excellence, a three-time recipient of the Investigator Award from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, is a two times recipient of the Till and McCulloch Discovery of the Year award and co-founder of CoBE.

Dr. Anjana Rao is a professor in the Division of Signaling and Gene Expression and the Pfizer Endowed Chair in Cancer Immunology and Oncology at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She is a leader of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Rao identified important regulators of T cell differentiation at both the genetic and epigenetic level and showed how they influence subsequent immune responses. She received the 2016 Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology and has also been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her current research continues to focus on characterizing the molecular mechanisms that underlie signaling activity and gene expression in T cells.

Dr. Samantha Wilson received her Ph.D. in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Wilson’s doctoral work focused on characterizing DNA methylation profiles of placentas from pregnancies with preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). Dr. Wilson completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, shifting her research focus to non-invasive prenatal screening and computational biology. Her work at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre focused on developing non-invasive methods of assessing placental health using epigenomics, bioinformatics, and machine learning approaches. She joined the faculty of Health Sciences in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at McMaster University as an Assistant Professor in July 2022. Dr. Wilson’s research program at McMaster builds off her previous work to develop non-invasive methods to assess fetal and placental health and understand the etiologies of placental dysfunction.