Speaker Biosketches

Presentation Title: "New Horizons- emerging therapies and targets in thyroid cancer"

Dr. Ringel is Professor and Ralph W. Kurtz Chair of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at The Ohio State University. He is the Co-Director of the Center for Cancer Engineering and Co-Leader of the Cancer Biology program at Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Ringel’s NIH-funded laboratory is interested in defining the signaling pathways that regulate thyroid cancer metastatic progression and therapeutic resistance. His group’s work has led efforts defining the roles of PI3 kinase/AKT and PAK signaling in thyroid cancer progression, identifying novel metastasis suppressing pathways, such as RCAN 1.4, defining transcriptional regulation of RET in medullary thyroid cancer, and developing new 3D models of cancer progression. He has an active clinical practice focused on thyroid cancer. He has been a member of the thyroid cancer NCCN guidelines committee, been an elected board member of the American Thyroid Association and International Thyroid Oncology Group, a member of the National Cancer Institute Head and Neck Steering Committee, and is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and also the American Association of Physicians (AAP). He has been awarded both the Van Meter and Sidney Ingbar Awards for research accomplishments from the American Thyroid Association (ATA). He is co-Chair of the ATA Thyroid Cancer Guidelines task force and is the Editor-in-Chief of Endocrine-Related Cancer.

Marcelo Febo, PhD,  is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He is Director of Preclinical Imaging in the William L. and Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute’s Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy (AMRIS) facility. Dr. Febo obtained his PhD from the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus under the mentorship of Dr. Annabell C. Segarra. He then went on to train in magnetic resonance imaging under the mentorship of Dr. Craig F. Ferris at the Center for Comparative Neuroimaging of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Early in his career he conducted addiction research using novel approaches to imaging awake rats. Since 2013 he has carried out work in areas of Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury using high field fMRI and connectomics analysis. His laboratory is funded by NINDS, NIBIB and NIA.

Dr. Gur-Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Regenerative Medicine at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Gur-Cohen’s work unearth the lymphatic capillary network as a novel stem cell niche component, and her multidisciplinary strategy has advanced our knowledge of how stem cells synchronize and coordinate tissue regeneration. Dr. Gur-Cohen completed her postdoc training with Dr. Elaine Fuchs at The Rockefeller University in New York and earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Immunology in Dr. Tsvee Lapidot’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dr. Gur-Cohen has received several awards and prizes for her work, including the prestigious Breakout Award for Young Investigators, the HFSP and EMBO postdoctoral award, the Revson-Weizmann Award for Advancing Women in Science and the Helen and Martin Kimmel Stem Cell Award. Dr. Gur-Cohen’s laboratory is innovating to develop new experimental tools and provide molecular to unlock the secrets of how stem cells communicate with their surrounding environment to accelerate wound healing and eliminate cancer as a life-threatening disease

Yangming Ou, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School Dr. Ou's research focuses on improving healthcare by medical image analysis, machine learning and imaging informatics. His lab develops big data repositories and AI algorithms on brain MRIs and non-MRI data (demographics, socioeconomics, genetics, behavior, etc.). The data and algorithms are applied to quantify normal brain development (N>70,000), study impact of nutrition and environment in brain development (N>200,000), and develop biomarkers in common and rare brain diseases (>3,000). The lab, under 10+ active NIH and foundational grants, has 14 members including two faculty, 4 postdoctoral fellows, 3 PhD students, research assistants, data managers, and interns.

Dr. Sajad Khazal joined Loma Linda University as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine in July 2023.

Dr. Khazal graduated from the College of Medicine/University of Baghdad in 2002, ranked first in his class. He completed his general pediatric residency training from the Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York where he was nominated the best resident as a teacher for two consecutive years. He also served as 4^th year chief resident. He then completed Pediatric hematology oncology and transplant and cell therapy training at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles where he also served as chief fellow. Dr. Khazal is board certified by the American Board of Pediatrics in both general pediatrics and pediatric hematology oncology. In 2015, Dr. Khazal joined the bone marrow transplantation and cell therapy team at Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Montefiore in New York City as a clinical assistant professor. In 2017, he was recruited to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston where he established a Texas Medical Board approved clinical fellowship training program in Transplant and Cell therapy and served as program director. He also served as the medical director and the director of clinical research of Transplant and Cell Therapy. He was instrumental in establishing the young adult transplant and cell therapy service and the CAR-T program at MD Anderson Cancer Center and an active member of the combined adult and pediatric high-risk hematological malignancies and transplant and cell therapy program.

While at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Khazal was promoted to clinical associate professor in 2022 and served as a clinical investigator and principal investigator of multiple investigator-initiated and industry sponsored clinical trials. His main research interests are in high-risk hematological malignancies and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation/cell therapy for malignant diseases and post-transplant maintenance strategies. Dr. Khazal is an active FACT (Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy) site auditor. He has more than 40 peer reviewed publications and is known for superb clinical care.

Dr. Kremsky specializes in bioinformatics analysis of high-throughput sequencing data such as RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, BS-sdq, etc. He has extensive experience in the application of Bioinformatics to the study of epigenetic phenomena and RNA Biology, and has a particular interest in Epigenetics. With the advent of the field of Epigenetics and its subsequent maturation into a fully-fledged subfield of Molecular Biology, it has become clear that biological phenotypes, including states of disease, are much more plastic and amenable to external factors than was once believed.  For Dr. Kremsky, the field of Epigenetics represents a beacon of hope for our species, providing the possibility that we may one day learn how to manipulate our epigenomes in ways that are safe, inexpensive, and that keep us free from disease.  While this may seem to be a remote possibility reachable only in the very distant future, the exponential growth of technology and recent advances in the field suggest that we may begin to see the use of epigenomic manipulations to successfully treat and cure disease in our lifetimes, and he cannot think of no other field of science with such broad potential for the improvement of human health.

Dr. Stahovich received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1988. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1990 and 1995 respectively. He conducted his doctoral research on computational sketch understanding techniques at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. After serving as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, Dr. Stahovich joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Riverside in 2003. He also holds cooperative appointments in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Electrical Engineering Department at UC Riverside.