Session Chair Profile

Andrew Brooks

Biography

Andy serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository “RUCDR Infinite Biologics”. He oversees the operations of all laboratories within RUCDR, ensuring consistent and superior quality standards for all services. Since joining RUCDR, he has worked to automate and develop the service infrastructure to provide high throughput sample management and analysis for DNA, RNA and protein-based technologies for hundreds of labs globally. His methodologies focus on extending the use of valuable samples by extracting and renewing limited quantities of biomaterial with newly developed technologies. Andy is a molecular neuroscientist whose research focuses on deciphering the molecular mechanisms that underlie memory and learning. These studies investigate gene-environment interactions in the context of aging, neurodegenerative disease and neurotoxicant exposure. He is a well-recognized genomicist and has been involved in the development and implementation of cutting edge molecular based technologies for nucleic acid and protein analyses. Andy also serves as the Director of the Bionomics Research and Technology Center (BRTC) at the Environmental and Occupational Health Science Institute of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and as Associate Professor of Environmental Medicine and Genetics at UMDNJ/Rutgers. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester, School of Medicine.

Speaker Profile

Christopher Ianelli

Biography

Chris conceptualized and founded iSpecimen to address the growing need for human biospecimens by the life science research community. He is responsible for the company’s growth, performance, corporate direction and many of the new strategic partnerships. Prior to launching iSpecimen, Chris served as Managing Director at Leerink Swann, a leading healthcare and life science investment bank, where he managed the expansion and delivery of services and directed strategy to develop new healthcare data and information assets for the firm. Chris was also a co-founder of Health Insight Technologies (now Humedica), a novel healthcare informatics company. Prior to this, Chris was a co-founder and Managing Director of Boston Medical & Scientific Advisors (BMSA), a healthcare investment research firm acquired by Leerink Swann. He received both his PhD in Immunology and his MD from Tufts University and completed his residency training in Pathology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Talk

Finding Patients and Specimens to Drive Precision Research
In the quest for evermore targeted care, the research we conduct must be just as precise as the medicine we envision. Scientists must gain easy access to the specimens and data they need from the patients they want. Learn how precision research is being accomplished on a large scale.

Speaker Profile

Jennifer A. Cheeseman

Biography

Jennifer Cheeseman is the Senior Director of BioDuke, the new biobanking initiative within the Duke University, School of Medicine. She is responsible for overseeing the strategic development of the centralized biobanking initiative while implementing a physical infrastructure that aligns existing resources to leverage economies of scale for optimization and standardization for biospecimen collection, processing, storage, distribution, quality control, and clinical data collection and linkage. Jennifer has spent the last 3 years at Duke University developing research support via core services, improving and developing core infrastructure, improving long term strategic planning and promotion of collaborative and transformative research with collaborators both internally and externally. She serves as the biobanking lead of two Department of Defense biobanking consortiums in collaboration with Duke University, Department of Surgery, the Surgical Critical Care Initiative (SC2i) supporting precision medicine in wounded warriors and the Vascular Composite Allograft Collaborative Initiative (VCAci) supporting translational research in hand transplantation. Prior to joining Duke Jennifer served as the Director of the Emory University Transplant Center Biorepository where she developed and implemented an Integrated Research Support Service that encompassed study development around sample and clinical data collection and linking, financial planning, project management, clinical regulatory and institutional compliance, improving on organizational efficiency within the academic setting at both divisional and departmental levels. Jennifer earned her BS and MS from the University of Florida and is currently completing her MBA at North Carolina State University.