Cooperative Extension Specialist Animal Genomics and Biotechnology Department of Animal Science, University of California, Davis, USA
Sun., Jan. 10 - 6:15 PM / Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Title: Will PAG Innovations Be Embraced Or Eschewed? The #scicomm Challenge Facing Agricultural Biotechnology

Talk Topic:  Innovations developed by the PAG community are often viewed negatively by the public, which threatens their translation to useful applications outside of academia. Who will step forward to tackle the scientific communication of genomic technologies for agriculture?

Read more: Alison Van Eenennaam

Assistant Professor, Baylor College of Medicine & Rice University, USA
Mon., Jan. 11 -  8:45 AM / Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Title: Reading and Writing Genomes in 3D: The CTCF Code

Read more: Erez Lieberman Aiden

Associate Professor, Duke University Medical School and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA
Mon., Jan. 11 - 8:00 AM / Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Topic: Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Neural Circuits for Vocal Learning

Read more: Erich Jarvis

National Center for Biotechnology Information, USA
Tues., Jan. 12 - 8:45 AM
Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Topic: Biotechnology, Biomedicine, and Ag Genomics Databases at the NCBI

Talk Title: The Genome Era at NCBI – Are We There Yet?

Read more: James M. Ostell

University Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean for Research, College of Agriculture, Colorado State University, USA
Wed., Jan. 13 - 8:45 AM / Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Topic:  During their co-evolution with microbes in the environment, plants developed two major types of resistance: host and nonhost.  Nonhost resistance is a broad-spectrum immunity effective against microorganisms that are pathogenic to other plant species, while host resistance is only effective to certain plant pathogen strains that introduce complementary avirulence effector proteins into their hosts.  Professor Leach studies features common to both types of pathogen recognition and resistance, and how these might be exploited to stabilize crop production.

Read more: Jan E. Leach

Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Professor of Cancer Biology, Director, Center for Cancer Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute;  Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Co-Founder and Board Chair, Genospace, LLC, USA
Tues., Jan. 12 - 8:00 AM / Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Title: Using Networks to Discover Biology in Complex Systems

Talk Topic:  I will present a new way of thinking about the genotype-phenotype connection using network models and their structures to discover biology.

Read more: John Quackenbush

Distinguished Professor University of California, Davis and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Researcher, USA
Wed., Jan. 13 - 8:00 AM / Town & Country Ballroom

Talk Title: Unravelling Hidden Variation in the Young Polyploid Wheat Genomes

Talk Topic:I will provide an overview of the particular characteristics of the polyploid wheat genome and describe the development of sequenced mutant populations that are accelerating the functional characterization of wheat genes.

Read more: Jorge Dubcovsky