Advisory Board and Editors Genetics
Ali Torkamani
Dr. Torkamani obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Stanford University, where he received a Bing Foundation Chemistry Research Fellowship, and his doctorate in biomedical sciences at the University of California, San Diego under the mentorship of Dr. Nicholas Schork as an NIH Genetics Predoctoral Training awardee. In 2008, he joined the Scripps Translational Science Institute as a Research Scientist and Donald C. and Elizabeth M. Dickinson Fellow, and shortly thereafter as an Assistant Professor of Molecular and Experimental Medicine and Mario R. Alvarez Fellow. As an Assistant Professor Dr. Torkamani received a Blasker Science and Technology and PhRMA Foundation Award. In 2012, Dr. Torkamani advanced to Director of Genome Informatics at STSI where he leads various human genome sequencing and other genomics initiatives. Dr. Torkamani is also co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cypher Genomics, Inc.
Dr. Torkamani’s research covers a broad range of areas centered on the use of genomic technologies to identify the genetic etiology and underlying mechanisms of human disease in order to define precision therapies for diseased individuals. Major focus areas include human genome interpretation and genetic dissection of novel rare diseases, predictive genomic signatures of response to therapy – especially cancer therapy, and novel sequencing-based assays as biomarkers of disease.
Brett Trost
Dr. Brett Trost is a Scientist in the Molecular Medicine Program at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada. He is a computational biologist with a particular interest in human genetics.
Rohit Upadhyay
Dr. Rohit Upadhyay is a Research Scientist in the School of Medicine at Tulane University.
He has skills and expertise in the following areas; Cancer Genetics, Cell and Molecular biology, Kidney Injury, Pharmacology, and Molecular mechanisms of complex diseases.
Robert VanBuren
Assistant professor in the department of Horticulture at Michigan State University. Previously I was an NSF-NPGI postdoctoral associate at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. I completed my PhD at the University of Illinois under Ray Ming. My broad expertise are in the areas of plant genetics, genomics, evolution and molecular biology. I am interested in crop improvement and domestication, the evolution of sex chromosomes, and adaptive traits to arid environments such as the evolution of CAM photosynthesis and desiccation tolerance in resurrection plants.
Natascia Ventura
Natascia Ventura received her MD and PhD degrees at the University of Rome and her post-doctoral training at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since 2012 she leads the Mitochondrial-associated aging and diseases group and her research mainly uses C. elegans as a powerful genetic tractable organism to unravel mechanistic aspects of mitochondrial-stress control of longevity and to develop models for human mitochondrial-associated diseases.
Ranjit Vijayan
Dr. Ranjit Vijayan obtained his PhD in Life Sciences Interface/Biochemistry from the University of Oxford, UK, and his DipGrad in Management from the London School of Economics & Political Science, University of London, UK. In 2004 Dr Vijayan obtained his MSc in Computer Science from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, and prior to this his BEng in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Dr. Vijayan's research interests include; molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules, protein structure modeling, structure based drug discovery, genomics & transcriptomics, pharmacogenomics and high-performance computing.
Khor Waiho
Researcher at the Institute of Tropical Aquaculture and Fisheries, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. Dr. Khor Waiho obtained his Ph.D. in Aquaculture from Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (2016) and completed a 2-year postdoctoral (Biology, 2017-2019) at Shantou University, China. His current research focus includes the impact of climate change on crustacean growth and reproductive biology, population biology and fishery, and the aquaculture of economically important crustacean species.
Chris Wallace
I am a statistician who works with biological and genomic datasets to understand the mechanisms underlying human disease and identify possible treatments. My main focus is on autoimmune diseases.
Graham P Wallis
Professor in Genetics, University of Otago. Past Vice-President, Society for the Study of Evolution. Past Convenor of EEB Panel, Marsden Fund, New Zealand. Past Marsden Fund Council Member. Associate Editor: Pacific Conservation Biology. Past Associate Editor: Evolution, Molecular Ecology. Temminck Fellow, National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, 2008, 2011. Research Interests: hybrid zones, biogeography, molecular evolution, molecular systematics, conservation genetics. Current projects: Adaptive evolution of a larval glycoprotein in galaxiid fishes (with Luca Jovine, Karolinska Institutet); New Zealand biogeography (with Jon Waters & Dave Craw, Otago); Minimising adaptation to captivity for conservation of threatened species (with Catherine Grueber, Univ Sydney); Molecular systematics of European newts (with Pim Arntzen, National Museum of Natural History, Leiden)
Shibiao Wan
Dr. Shibiao Wan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy, and the Co-Director for the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (BISB) PhD Program at University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). He is also an Assistant Professor (courtesy) in the Department of Biostatistics at UNMC.
With more than 15 years of experience in machine learning, bioinformatics, and computational biology, Dr. Wan has published >60 articles in top-tiered journals such as Genome Research, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Circulation Research, Briefings in Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics. Dr. Wan is the Editor-in-Chief for Current Proteomics, and an Associate Editor/Academic Editor/Editorial Board Member for a series of prestigious journals such as Briefings in Functional Genomics, Heliyon, BMC Bioinformatics, International Journal of Microbiology, PeerJ Computer Science, BioMed Research International, and Computational and Mathematical Methods, and a guest associate editor for multiple high-impact journals.
He is a Scientific Program Committee (SPC) member for American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium and a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member for >20 machine learning related international conferences including IEEE ICTAI. Dr. Wan is also a reviewer for >70 prestigious journals including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Nature Computational Science, Science Advances, Nucleic Acids Research, Advanced Science, Cancer Research, Genome Biology, and Genome Medicine. Dr. Wan has received a number of accolades including the Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award in 2025 by Springer Nature, the New Investigator Award in 2024 by UNMC, the FIRST Award in 2023 by Nebraska EPSCoR, the Outstanding Young Alumni Award in 2022 by HK PolyU as well as the Global Peer Review Awards (top 1%) in “Cross-Field” and “Biology and Biochemistry” in 2019 by Clarivate. Dr. Wan is a member of AACR, AMIA, ISCB and ACM and an IEEE Senior Member.
Christian Wehenkel
Professor of forest genetics, forest ecosystem analysis, forestry, biometrics, forest growth, and biodiversity, Universidad Juarez del Estado de Durango. Author / co-author of more than 170 international and national publications.Technical manager of more than 40 national and international projects. Evaluator of CONHACYT, Mexico and other institutions. Member of the Latin American Forest Genetic Resources Network (LAFORGEN).
Claus O Wilke
Professor and Department Chair, Department of Integrative Biology, The University of Texas at Austin. Received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bochum, Germany, in 1999. Postdoc at Caltech, 2000-2005.