Dr. Patel has over 10 years of practical experience and understands the challenges of managing biorepository informatics projects. He is currently the lead coordinator for Clinical Research Informatics at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and an Instructor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, OH. He is responsible for developing informatics toolsets that help integrate large clinical data sets with research data for supporting translational research activity. More recently, he has become the Bioinformatics PI for the Aids and Cancer Specimen Resource, a multi-center international biorepository project supported by the NCI. Prior to coming to Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Patel received his informatics training at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of Dr. Michael Becich as well as Dr. John Gilbertson from Harvard / Mass. General Hospital. During his training, he lead many activities including developing common data elements, methods for data integration, honest broker processes, and inventory management tools for several multi-center biorepository projects.

Dr. Patel received his M.D. from St. Matthew's University and received his clinical training in the United Kingdom. His expertise includes extensive knowledge of data mining large clinical data sets and work flow integration with informatics toolsets supporting biorepository activities. He is an editorial board member for Biopreservation and Biobanking and the Journal of Pathology Informatics and has authored several scientific papers as well as textbook chapters on informatics topics.

Dr. Bodour Salhia is an Assistant Professor in the Integrated Cancer Genomics Division. Her research is aimed at integrating high-throughput genomics discoveries with functional validation of candidate genes in multiple myeloma, breast cancer and CNS metastasis. Dr. Salhia's research interests revolve around understanding the epigenetic mechanisms mediating cancer progression. Her research aims to reverse these epigenetic alterations by targeting genes responsible for driving the related changes underlying cancer. Cancer is the accumulation of multiple genetic and epigenetic events. An understanding of these aberrations and their molecular specific contexts will be paramount for advancing genetic discoveries to direct patient benefit. She received her Honors Bachelor of Science Degree (1998) in Biological Sciences from the University of Toronto.

She pursued graduate studies in Molecular and Cellular Biology and obtained a Master of Health Sciences (2001) and a Ph.D. (2006) from the Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumor Research Center, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis focused on the role of the Rho-GTPases and their regulatory members in glioma invasion. Dr. Salhia completed her post-doctoral research work at TGen, where she is dedicated to community outreach initiatives, education and population disparities programs and commits much time and effort to such causes.

Jay Bowen completed a Master's Degree in Molecular Virology at The Ohio State University and has 15 years of experience in cancer biology, biorepository and laboratory management. During this time, he worked for both the Pediatric and Midwestern Divisions of the Cooperative Human Tissue Network, and the Children's Oncology Group and Gynecologic Oncology Group biorepositories. Since 2009, he had directed the Biospecimen Core Resource at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. In this role, he oversees the receipt of biospecimens and associated clinical data from over a 75 biorepositories worldwide, pathology review and molecular extraction of qualifying specimens, and distribution to TCGA sequencing and molecular characterization centers. He also has directed the development of a robust data warehouse to manage the biospecimen and associated clinical data from these patients for upload to the TCGA Data Coordinating Center.

Francine C. Gachupin is Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, College of Medicine; Assistant Director, Cancer Disparities Institute, Arizona Cancer Center; and Assistant Director of the Native American Research and Training Center, all at the University of Arizona. Dr. Gachupin is a tribal member of the Pueblo of Jemez in New Mexico. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of New Mexico and her Master of Public Health degree in Epidemiology from the University of Washington. She studies primarily chronic diseases and related behavioral risk factors. Much of her training has been at the National Institutes of Health and most of her work has occurred at four separate tribal based epidemiology centers - Portland Area, Aberdeen Area, Albuquerque Area and Navajo Area. She was former Chair of the Portland Area Indian Health Service (IHS) Institutional Review Board (IRB); co-Chair, National IHS IRB; Board Member to the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP); and, Manager of the University of New Mexico IRB.

Dr. Rehan Akbani obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2009. He earned his MS and BS with Honors degrees from there as well, graduating with a perfect 4.0 GPA. After graduating, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. In less than two years, he was promoted to Assistant Professor. His contributions to the MD Anderson TCGA Genome Data Analysis Center (GDAC) were recognized by the GDAC, and he was made the chair of the GDAC's Analysis Working Group. Later, he was promoted again and he became the co-director of the GDAC along with Dr. John Weinstein, the department chair.

Within TCGA, Dr. Akbani's most noteworthy contributions have been in the area of quality control of TCGA data with a focus on detecting, quantifying and correcting batch effects. Dr. Akbani and Dr. Weinstein became co-chairs of the TCGA Batch Effects Working Group, whose objective was to detect and mitigate sources of batch effects within TCGA. Furthermore, Dr. Akbani headed MD Anderson's GDAC project to create a batch effects website for TCGA, where users can assess and visualize batch effects within TCGA data, and have the ability to download batch effects corrected data.

In addition to batch effects, Dr. Akbani has made noteworthy contributions to TCGA proteomics data being generated by Dr. Gordon Mills' lab at MD Anderson. An RPPA data processing pipeline is being planned for automating the task of processing raw RPPA data to make it ready for downstream analysis. Dr. Akbani has also developed a cluster of clusters algorithm that classifies tumor samples into "super clusters" based on a combination of different data type clusters, such as mRNA clusters, miRNA clusters, copy number clusters, etc.

Dr. Kimberly Bussey is an Assistant Professor in the Integrated Cancer Genomics Division. The Bussey lab seeks to understand the contribution of the epigenetic abnormalities to tumor phenotype, particularly the development of cell populations capable of self-renewal, low proliferation rate, increased tumorigenicity, and resistance to therapies, in the context of large-scale chromosome rearrangement. In collaboration with the Center for Biosignatures Discovery Automation at Biodesign at Arizona State University, the Bussey lab is exploring the role of epigenetic alterations on nuclear architecture and cellular physiology using the novel technologies of CellCT and the microsystems-bases platforms for measuring gene expression and physiological parameters

Dr. Bussey received her B.S. in general biology from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. in molecular and medical genetics from Oregon Health & Science University. Dr. Bussey did post-doctoral fellowship and worked as a contract scientist with John Weinstein, M.D., Ph.D. and the Genomics and Bioinformatics Group in the Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology at the NCI. Dr. Bussey has a background in medical and molecular genetics, rare tumors, cancer cytogenetics, and bioinformatics. Her work has included the cytogenetic and molecular characterization of pediatric germ cell tumors, and the first integration of array CGH data with microarray expression data for the NCI-60 panel of cell lines. She was the lead architect on MatchMiner, a program designed to facilitate the integration of large, high-throughput data sets. She also contributed to GOMiner, one of the first programs to assign biological meaning to high throughput data sets by determining enrichment in Gene Ontology categories.