Mini-Symposia

PPMH convenes quarterly mini-symposia addressing themes in precision medicine research at UNC Chapel Hill. Participants at these events engage in discussion with leading precision health researchers. Click on the banners below to see recordings from past events.

Upcoming event:

Wednesday October 4, 2023. Cystic Fibrosis: Precision Treatment of a Rare Monogenic Disease

Past events:

 Wednesday March 22, 2023: Precision Nutrition: Connections Between Food, Environment, & Health

Presenters at the March 22, 2023 Mini-Symposium:

• Alice Ammerman, DrPH: Blending Precision Nutrition and Precision Public Health Approaches: “Neighborhood-omics”

November 7, 2022: Biomedical Imaging for Precision Diagnosis, Prognosis, & Therapy

Presenters at the November 7, 2022 Mini-Symposium:

• Mark Shen, PhD: Longitudinal neuroimaging to study the brain development of infants with neurodevelopmental disorders
Assistant Professor, UNC School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry

• Eran Dayan, PhD: Artificial intelligence-based stratification of progression along the Alzheimer disease continuum
Associate Professor, School of Medicine, Department of Radiology

• Andrew Satterlee, PhD: A living ex vivo platform for functional, personalized brain cancer diagnosis
Associate Director, Brain Slice Technology Platform, Eshelman School of Pharmacy

May 25, 2022: Integrating Machine Learning Into Your Clinical Research

 May 18, 2022: Machine Learning Tools & Precision Medicine in Clinical Research

May 18, 2022 Presenters:

• John Sperger: Precision medicine overview and SMART trial designs and how those can be used with ML methods to infer precision medicine decision support
Graduate student, Department of Biostatistics

• Katharine McGinigle MD/MPH & Nikki Freeman: Precision medicine machine learning analytics to improve PAD treatment decisions and outcomes
Associate Professor, Department of Surgery (McGinigle) and Graduate student, Department of Biostatistics (Freeman)

• Michael Adams MD & Kushal Shah: Machine learning with EHR data: Addressing diagnostic odysseys among pediatric patients with rare genetic diseases
Clinical Fellow, School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics (Adams) and Graduate student, Department of Biostatistics (Shah)

 May 11, 2022: Machine Learning Tools & Precision Medicine in Arthritis & Autoimmunity

May 11, 2022 Presenters:

• Daniel de Marchi: Machine learning didactic overview (unsupervised vs supervised methods, advantages, limitations, & requisite data requirements)
Graduate student, Gillings School of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics

• Anna Kahkoska, MD/PhD: Type 1 diabetes phenotypes
Assistant Professor, Gillings School of Public Health, Department of Nutrition

• Amanda Nelson, MD & Tom Keefe: Osteoarthritis phenotypes
Associate Professor, School of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, & Immunology (Nelson) and Graduate student, Department of Statistics & Operations Research (Keefe)

Precision Medicine Approaches to Addressing COVID-19

Presenters at the February 23, 2022 Mini-Symposium:
• Melissa Miller PhD and Jeremy Wang PhD: Real-time genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in an academic medical center Professor, Department of Pathology, and Director, Clinical Molecular Microbiology Laboratory (Miller) and Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics (Wang)

• Ryan Kelly: Predicting the unprecedented: An ongoing saga to forecast the impacts of COVID-19 on UNC Health and the communities we serve
Principal Data Scientist, ISD Enterprise Analytics & Data Sciences (EADS), UNC Health Shared Services

• Emily Pfaff PhD: What can we learn from 3.6 million COVID cases?
Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine

Pharmacogenomics and Decision Support in the EHR

Presenters at the October 27, 2021 Mini-Symposium:

• Daniel Crona, PharmD, PhD: The ongoing quest for perfection – or at least precision – of tacrolimus dosing in bone marrow transplant
Associate Professor, Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics, Eshelman School of Pharmacy

• Klarissa Jackson, PhD: Interindividual variability in drug metabolism: Implications for precision medicine in ethnically diverse populations
Assistant Professor, Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics, Eshelman School of Pharmacy

• Erin Heinzen, PharmD, PhD: The impact of recent gene discovery on treatment selection in epilepsy
Associate Professor, Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics, Eshelman School of Pharmacy

Precision Medicine Approaches to Addressing Social Determinants of Health

Presenters at the June 30, 2021 Mini-Symposium:

• Gail Henderson, PhD: It shouldn’t take a pandemic: Social determinants of health in the U.S.
Professor, Department of Social Medicine and Director, Center for Genomics & Society

• Emily Vander Schaaf, MD: Healthcare or Health? Clinicians’ Emerging Roles in Addressing Social Needs
Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of General Pediatrics

• Karamarie Fecho, PhD: Leveraging Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Data to Democratize and Accelerate Open Translational Research
President, Copperline Professional Solutions & Research Collaborator, UNC-CH

Machine Learning and Precision Analytics

Presenters at the April 14, 2021 Mini-Symposium:

• Shawn Gomez, PhD: Data-driven approaches towards linking kinotype with phenotype
Professor, Pharmacology and UNC/NC State Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering

• Amanda Nelson, MD: Machine learning for phenotyping in osteoarthritis
Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Immunology

• Alex Rubinsteyn, PhD: Machine learning in personalized cancer vaccine design
Assistant Professor, Computational Medicine and Lineberger Cancer Center

Health Disparities and Precision Medicine

Presenters at the December 9, 2020 Mini-Symposium:

• Victoria Bae-Jump MD/PhD: Racial Disparities and Underlying Molecular Subtypes in Endometrial Cancer
Professor of Gynecologic Oncology

• Sam Cykert MD: Building Systems to Combat Black-White Disparities in Cancer Treatment: The Case of Precision Medicine
Professor of General Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology and Director of the UNC School of Medicine Program on Health and Clinical Informatics

• Kirsten Nyrop PhD: Weight and Weight Gain in Black and White Women with Early Breast Cancer within the Larger Context of the Obesity Epidemic.
Assistant Professor of Oncology

Precision Health @UNC

Presenters at the August 12, 2020 Mini-Symposium:

• Rick Stouffer MD: CYP2C19-Genotype-Guided Antiplatelet Therapy after Percutaneous Coronary Intervention
Ernest and Hazel Craige Distinguished Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine

• Amber Cipriani, PharmD: A Path Toward Implementation of Preemptive Pharmacogenomics
Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapy, Eshelman School of Pharmacy

• Billy Kim MD and Jason Merker MD/PhD: Precision Oncology efforts at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
Rush S. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Medicine (Kim); Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine & Genetics from the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (Merker)