2026 Experimental Biology and Medicine Conference

Carolina González is a staff scientist at the Scripps Research Institute, where her work focuses on developing explainable graph neural network models for drug repositioning. Her research integrates biomedical knowledge graphs, machine learning, and interpretability methods to uncover mechanistic insights into drug-disease relationships.

Dr. Shehzad Z. Sheikh is a Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, with joint appointments in Genetics & Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and Toxicology & Environmental Medicine. He earned his PhD in Microbiology & Immunology at UNC and completed postdoctoral training in chromatin biology and high-throughput genomics. Dr. Sheikh is a physician-scientist whose work bridges mucosal immunology, genomics, and clinical inflammatory bowel disease. He established his independent laboratory in 2012 and has maintained continuous NIH funding since that time. He currently directs the Center for Gastrointestinal Biology and Disease’s T32 Basic Science Training Program and is deeply committed to mentorship and trainee development.

Dr. Weida Tong is Director of the Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at NCTR/FDA. He is former Chair of the Global Coalition for Regulatory Science Research (GCRSR) and founder and Chair Emeritus of the international MAQC Society. With over 400 publications, Dr. Tong’s research spans a wide spectrum of bioinformatics applications in toxicology and drug safety. His current focus centers on advancing the use of AI in toxicological research. In today’s presentation, Dr. Tong will use drug-induced liver injury (DILI) as a case study to demonstrate how AI as a NAM can enhance DILI assessment through technologies such as large language models (LLMs), deep learning, and generative AI.

Ellen Shrock received her A.B. in Integrative Biology from Harvard College, where she conducted research with Prof. George Church on recoding the E. coli genome and on xenotransplantation. She received her PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard University, where she studied the phenomenon of antibody immunodominance in the laboratory of Prof. Stephen Elledge. In 2023 she moved to the laboratory of Prof. David Baker as a Postdoctoral Scholar and continues to study mechanisms of immunogenicity. 

James A. Glazier, PhD, is Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering and a Director of the Biocomplexity Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. His research develops physics-based, mechanistic multicellular “Virtual Tissue” simulations that link molecular and cellular perturbations to emergent tissue injury, repair, and disease phenotypes, with a growing emphasis on New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) and in vitro-to-in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE) for toxicology and drug discovery.

Glazier is the founder and long-term lead developer of CompuCell3D, an open-source, multiscale agent-based modeling environment that supports simulations of development, cancer, immune processes, and tissue repair. CompuCell3D has been adopted by hundreds of research groups worldwide and by U.S. federal agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a core component of regulatory-facing computational toxicology workflows. His work emphasizes enabling broad reuse of models through durable software infrastructure, documentation, and training, including an ongoing international workshop program on multiscale virtual-tissue modeling.

In parallel, Glazier leads community efforts that connect mechanistic modeling to translational needs. He is a founder and senior leader of the GLIMPRINT-IMAG/MSM ecosystem, including the NIH IMAG/MSM Working Group on Multiscale Modeling and Viral Pandemics, which coordinates cross-sector activities around multiscale immune modeling, standards, validation, and model reuse. He is also a founding leader of OpenVT, an NSF-funded initiative to create a FAIR, interoperable ecosystem for virtual tissue models and to incentivize reproducible modeling practices.

Glazier is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (London), and has served as Chair of the APS Division of Biological Physics.

Thaddeus (Thad) Schug, Ph.D., is a Health Scientist Administrator in the Population Health Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Thad completed his graduate studies in biomedical sciences and nutrition at Cornell University. His graduate work focused on the relationships between nuclear hormone receptors and cancer. He conducted his postdoctoral studies at the NIEHS, where he investigated the Sirtuin family of genes, which are involved homeostasis, metabolism, and inflammation. Thad manages a broad scientific portfolio of grants that includes research on male and female reproduction, metabolism (including obesity and diabetes), developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD), the endocrine system, cardiovascular disease, and bone health. Thad is also a co-coordinator for the Complement Animal Research in Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) Program.