Min-Yu Sun (孫敏瑜) received her BS and MS in Life Sciences and Biotechnology from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and her PhD in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology from University of California at Riverside in the United States. Min-Yu joined Dr. Steve Mennerick’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Psychiatry in 2014. Her research is focused on exploring the roles of inhibitory neurotransmission in brain health and diseases. Her findings in the Mennerick lab have revealed a previously unappreciated synaptic role of δ subunit-containing GABAA receptors, and won her the best postdoctoral poster award at the CIMED symposium at Washington University in 2017. Min-Yu plans to continue research into the synaptic contribution of δ-GABAA receptors in neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases, including epilepsy and depression.

While at Wash U, Min-Yu has developed a strong passion for scientific writing and editing, gaining experience by serving as a review editor for journals specialized in Neuropharmacology. Her long-term career goal is to contribute to the society a better understanding of disease onset and treatment, and she has been working toward this goal through communicating the most up-to-date research findings to the public. Min-Yu is hoping to pursue a career in scientific editing/writing and communication, to work with other researchers and healthcare professionals in the Biomedical Sciences field.

馮卓健，台灣大學歷史系學士，台灣大學歷史系英國史碩士，美國猶他州立大學美國史碩士 ，聖路易大學歷史系博士候選人及兼任講師。曾經教授「現代世界的起源：西元1500年以來」，目前與指導教授合授「美國史：1865年之前」。曾經接受101年度教育部留學獎學金，海耶克學者獎金，聖路易大學研究生協會會議論文發表獎金，以及聖路易大學歷史系旅行補助。曾經在數個會議上發表研究論文，包含美國歷史學家組織(Organization of American Historians)年會，英國早期美國史學會年會，密蘇里州歷史會議(Missouri Conference on History)，以及其他美國早期史的專題會議。近期發表論文的學術會議包含在2018年三月在聖路易華盛頓大學舉行的「美國早期的宗教與政治」會議。論文「紐約效忠派對革命時期的歷史記憶：以湯瑪斯瓊斯與威廉史密斯為例」在2019年1月發表於美國革命期刊(Journal of the American Revolution)上。

Chih-Han Chen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at Washington University. His research focuses on the effect of patent law changes on innovation activities. Chih-Han received his B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Economics from the National Taiwan University. He received an Excellent Award in Taiwan Economics Association Best Master’s Thesis, 2013. Chih-Han is a recipient of the Taiwan MOE Washington University Scholarship.

Meihsi Chiang has broad expertise in social and human services as a consultant, researcher, and former social worker. She is an Evaluation Associate/Research Project Coordinator at the Brown School Evaluation Center where she works with nonprofits, foundations, and social service sectors to tell a better story of their impact through evaluation.

Meihsi has particular passion for data visualization which to support organizations communicate research data and evaluation findings in meaningful and understandable ways. She also co-manage the Center’s brand and visual presence, including website design and marketing materials.

Before coming to the U.S., Meihsi was a child protection service social worker in Taiwan and has over 7 years of experience working with disadvantaged children and youth in both urban areas and aboriginal tribes (烏來忠治部落、蘭嶼朗島部落). Meihsi earned her Master of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

胡貽霖，職能治療師，台灣大學職能治療系學士，成功大學職能治療系碩士，美國聖路易華盛頓醫學院職能治療系博士候選人（Washington University School of Medicine, Rehabilitation and Participation Science, Program in Occupational Therapy）。

Yi-Ling is trained as a translational research scientist in occupational therapy and rehabilitation science. Her research focus is on health behavior interventions that enhance successful aging, functional abilities, and community participation for older adults.

My current project is part of Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) financed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The goal is to develop a wide knowledge base in the characterization, predication and control of acid-gas interactions within a broad class of materials to advance future materials discovery. We are using solid-state NMR spectroscopy to provide structural information of materials and how the interactions with materials are impacted to help the future design of better materials.

Education

Graduate School

Ph.D. in Economics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. 2010

S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. 2004

Post Doctoral Education

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, Washington University School of Medicine, 2010-2011

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Washington University in St. Louis Transdisciplinary Research on Energetics and Cancer Center. 2011-2012

Research Interests
Dr. Chang is an applied econometrician and a health economist. Dr. Chang’s research focuses on health and economic consequences of obesity and surgical treatments of obesity. Her research uses economic and econometric/statistical modeling to evaluate program and treatment effects. Dr. Chang’s research areas include treatment effect and policy evaluation; cost-effectiveness analysis; meta-analysis; and comparative effectiveness.

Dr. Chang teaches “Decision Analysis for Clinical Investigation and Economic Evaluation” in the Master of Population Health Sciences degree program.

Dr. Lin is an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine. She received M.D. degree from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. degree from Stanford University. After completing residency and fellowships at Stanford University, she joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in August 2018, subspecializing in breast and cardiothoracic pathology.

Dr. Po-Yin Yen is an Assistant Professor both in the Institute for Informatics at Washington University School of Medicine, and Goldfarb School of Nursing, Barnes-Jewish College, BJC HealthCare. Dr. Yen is a registered nurse with informatics training, especially in the areas of health information technology (HIT) usability evaluation, human computer interaction, time motion study, data visualization, and systematic reviews. She has led teams to advance usability research, accelerate systematic review process, identify barriers of clinicians’ acceptance and adoption of electronic health record systems, and examine user behaviors in using HIT. She also mentor undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral trainees in Biomedical and Nursing Informatics research; and has been working on establishing an academic-practice partnership in clinical informatics to enhance the translation of informatics research to clinical settings. Her goals are to promote informatics training to the next generation of health professions education and to apply innovative and trending informatics approaches to improve clinical practice.

Congenital Heart Disease: Lead computational biologist for the whole exome sequencing (WES) and array genotyping analysis working groups in the Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium. I developed a novel statistical framework using the expected frequency of de novo mutation, controlling for local sequence context, to estimate the expected frequency of extremely rare transmitted variants. This enables comparison of the observed frequency of damaging variants in each gene to the expected value, completely independent of control subjects. I applied this methodology to a WES dataset of 2,871 congenital heart disease (CHD) probands to demonstrate that ~1.8% of cases are attributed to rare transmitted mutations (Jin SC, et al., Nature Genetics 2017). Novel genes were implicated, including dominant loss of function mutations in the VEGF receptor FLT4 in tetralogy of Fallot, recessive mutations in MYH6 in Shone syndrome, and discovery of a recessive founder mutation in GDF1 Ashkenazim that accounts for ~5% of CHD in this population. In addition, heterozygous de novo mutations in 46 different genes encoding chromatin modifiers account for 3% of probands. Sixty-six different genes had two or more de novo damaging mutations, with more than 70% of these being disease-causing. There is very high locus heterogeneity, with an estimated 400 different genes causing CHD by de novo mutation.

Cerebral Palsy: Co-lead the Bioinformatics group with Drs. Michael Kruer, Jozef Gecz, and Richard Wintle to perform large-scale whole exome/genome sequencing analyses for the International Cerebral Palsy Genomics Consortium. We identified significant enrichment of de novo mutations in 249 cerebral palsy cases, which could account for ~12% of patients and revealed significant enrichment of a novel pathway, GTPase signal transduction, in the cerebral palsy pathogenesis via pathway and network analyses (Jin SC, et al., under review Nature Genetics).

Rare Mendelian Diseases: Lead genomic analysis and methodology development in several genetic studies of complex disease, including congenital hydrocephalus, Vein of Galen malformation, Chiari malformation, trigeminal neuralgia, Dent disease, arachnoid cyst, nephrotic syndrome, and congenital hemangioma, for the Yale Center for Mendelian Genomics.

Mar. 2011-Sept. 2014 Graduate Research Assistant, Washington University School of Medicine
Prof. Alison M. Goate (advisor), Department of Genetics
Prof. Carlos Cruchaga (co-advisor), Department of Psychiatry

Conducted pooled deep-resequencing experiments, and performed genomic/statistical analyses for known Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s associated genes to demonstrate that: (1) rare variants in a novel gene PLD3 significantly confer risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD); (2) rare variants in TREM2 increase risk for late-onset AD; (3) variants in TREML2, a gene adjacent to TREM2, protect against late-onset AD; (4) novel causal mutations in PSEN1, GRN, and MAPT are found in familial AD cases; (5) the effect of PSEN1-p.E318G on AD susceptibility is dependent on an interaction with APOE-ε4 alleles and mediated by Aβ deposition and: (6) novel variants in the primary Parkinson’s Mendelian and genome-wide association study (GWAS) identified genes that contribute to the Parkinson’s disease.

Performed GWAS using cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers, disease age at onset, brain gene expression, and myeloid cell expression as disease endophenotypes to identify common risk variants in SPI1 associated with AD.

Performed in-vitro cell-based functional experiments to show that risk variants in TREM2 may impart effects by modulating ligand-binding efficiency.

Christine obtained her PhD in Plant Biology at Michigan State University Plant Research Labs (PRL) working on hormone signaling and how plants respond to herbivore stress using the plant model system Arabidopsis. With an interest to translate her findings in Arabidopsis to economically important crop species, she obtained a USDA postdoctoral fellowship to characterize hormone responses in millet (Setaria viridis) and corn. Through her postdoctoral experience, she participated in developing genome editing, RNA-seq and high throughput phenotyping pipelines in grass systems. She joined Monsanto (now Bayer Crop Science) as a genome editing scientist in 2017. Christine is passionate about improving modern agriculture through innovative science and dynamic collaborations. She welcomes conversations on GMO, gene editing and plant biotechnology. She is also a mother of a 19-month-old son and enjoys maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle well spent with family while actively pursuing her scientific career.

Chia is an upstream process development scientist in the Bioprocessing R&D organization at Pfizer working in cross-functional teams to help progress biotherapeutic programs to the clinic and toward commercialization. Chia is a chemical engineer by training and received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. After joining Pfizer, Chia worked on several monoclonal antibody programs at both early and late stages, from developing drug substance processes for first-in-human trials to drug substance process validation and contributing to regulatory submissions. Chia is interested in protein expression and viral production in cell culture and enjoys collaborations to solve challenging problems with existing and new modalities. Chia is based in Chesterfield, MO and is currently leading upstream development efforts in gene therapy at Pfizer.