Stephanie Felker received her Ph.D. from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2023. She is working in the lab of Dr. Greg Barsh at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Her research aims to characterize ancestry-specific contributors of genetic disease to improve equity in precision medicine. Specifically, she aims to isolate ancestry-specific polymorphisms arisen from the diversity of recent human evolution in the context of disease and disease risk. Additionally, she aims to reassess the penetrance of variants associated with rare disease in large-scale genomic cohorts.

Jeremie Lever is a general surgery resident and surgeon scientist trainee at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he also earned his M.D. and Ph.D. in the Medical Scientist Training Program. He is performing a post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Karin Hardiman studying the role of intratumoral clonal heterogeneity and how this contributes to neoadjuvant treatment resistance, invasion, and metastasis. This is clinically relevant because certain subclones may be responsible for resistance, patients who demonstrate treatment resistance and eventual metastasis have much worse outcomes, and these patients represent a subpopulation at high risk for mortality. In order to address this need, Jeremie is investigating clonality in organoid models of human rectal cancer using single cell RNA sequencing. He will further associate which subclones are responsible for resistance, the means by which this resistance may be shared, and identify candidate target genes for development of therapeutics. Jeremie plans to hold a career in academic colorectal surgery to see patients and lead an independent research program on mechanisms of disease in colon and rectal cancer.

Kendall Walton received his B.S. in Biochemistry from Auburn University in 2011 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Alabama in 2017. He has completed 4 years of postdoctoral work at UAB in the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Sztul. He is currently working in the laboratory of Dr. Anindya Dutta in the Department of Genetics at UAB. His research focuses on the identification of extrachromosomal circular DNA.