Jafar Anafi is from Nigeria, a graduate of Federal University Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria, and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS-Cameroon) and is highly skilled in Python, Sage Math, and LaTeX. His solid background in mathematics has allowed him to manage teams with exceptional performance. His training at Federal University Birnin Kebbi and AIMS-Cameroon, provided him with advanced knowledge of mathematical sciences, research skills to solve real-life problems, as well as analytical and organizational skills. During his undergraduate degree, his research project was entitled Generalization of T1 Non-Derange Permutation supervised by Prof. Isah Garba from Usman Danfodio University Sokoto, Nigeria. In the Department of Mathematics and he is also doing his Master Thesis on Numerical Analysis (A Python Environment for Numerical Continuation) supervised by Prof. Georg Bader from the University of Germany.

Joshua completed a dual degree in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical and Biological Engineering at Colorado State University. During his undergraduate degrees, he worked as an Undergraduate Lab Assistant in Dr. Munsky’s research group. While in the Munsky Group, he worked with the team on the Stochastic Identification Toolkit (SSIT), Finite State Projection (FSP) in transcription models and using image analysis codes. After graduation Joshua will continue to work with the Munsky Group as a graduate student pursuing a Masters degree in Bioengineering. 

Dr. Keisha Cook, originally from Marietta, GA, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University in the Department of Mathematics. In August 2021, she will transition to Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Clemson University. She received her PhD in computational mathematics from The University of Alabama. She is a member of the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology where she collaborates with a team of mathematicians and experimentalists. Their research group studies intracellular movement in human lung cells. While the experimentalists capture data using various imaging techniques, the mathematicians simulate the processes occurring inside of cells using mathematical models. They develop methodologies to statistically analyze the properties that influence these movements. The analysis is used by experimentalists to provide a deeper understanding of intracellular processes and introduce innovative ways to categorize movement. In addition to research, she teaches courses in probability and stochastic processes.

Outside of teaching and research, is a mentor for the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education program for women entering mathematics PhD programs, an organizer for the Math For All in New Orleans Conference (a conference focusing on highlighting underrepresented minorities in mathematics), and a co-advisor for the Student Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers at Tulane. The service that she enjoys is a direct reflection of the mentors that played a part in helping her reach her goals throughout her career thus far. She strives to support and mentor underrepresented students, postdocs, and researchers throughout her career in academia. She has a keen interest in increasing the number of women and underrepresented students in STEM. Outside of the University, she participates in community service events hosted by STEM NOLA

Zachary Fox received his doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Colorado State University in 2019 where he developed new methods to integrate single-cell microscopy data and stochastic models of gene expression. These tools include new approaches to infer model parameters from data and use stochastic models to design more informative experiments. Zach then attended the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, where he did his postdoc in microscopy automation and optogenetic control of gene expression in synthetically engineered yeast using stochastic models. He worked with Gregory Batt and Jakob Ruess. He is now working on a secondary postdoc at the Center for Nonlinear Studies and Computer, Computational, and Statistical Science at Los Alamos National Lab, with Dr. Yen Ting Lin and Dr. Anatoly Zlotnik. 

Dr. Jaqaman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biophysics and the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas, TX). She did her undergraduate studies in physics at Birzeit University (West Bank), and her PhD research in Computational Biophysics at Indiana University Bloomington. She then did postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA), which introduced her to the fascinating world of quantitative cell biology and cellular biophysics.

Dr. Jaqaman’s research is focused on the spatiotemporal organization of cell surface receptors and its consequences for cell signaling, with particular interest in receptors that regulate angiogenesis. Her laboratory utilizes light microscopy to monitor molecular behavior in its native cellular environment, and develops computer vision and mathematical modeling approaches to achieve a quantitative understanding of the complex relationships between receptor spatiotemporal organization, activation and signaling.

Heidi Klumpe recently finished her PhD in chemical engineering in Michael Elowitz’s lab at Caltech. While there, she studied the context-dependent, combinatorial logic of BMP signaling, using robotic liquid-handling to assess responses to signaling proteins across multiple combinations and receptor contexts. She has been a teaching assistant for Caltech’s “Data Analysis in the Biological Sciences” course, teaching Python basics, Bayesian inference, and image analysis. She also enjoys science communication, as a co-instructor of Caltech’s “Storytelling for Scientists” class and co-host of the “Not My Thesis” podcast.

Carlos F. Lopez, received his BSc and BLA degrees from the University of Miami and his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. He pursued a postdoctoral position at the University of Texas at Austin where he studied theoretical biophysics of protein solvation. He pursued further training at Harvard Medical school where he attained the prestigious HW Pierce/King Trust Research Fellowship and developed novel methods to bridge scales in the study of cellular processes. He subsequently moved to Vanderbilt University at the end of 2012 as an Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology, Biomedical Informatics, and faculty member of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Center for Quantitative Sciences, Center for Structural Biology, Institute for Chemical Biology, and Quantitative Sys-tems Biology Center. In 2017, he moved to the Department of Biochemistry as part of an administrative reorganiza-tion within Vanderbilt University.

He has been the recipient of multiple awards, honors, and fellowships including the NIH K22 Transition Career Development Award (2011), American Association for Cancer Research – Minority Scholar in Cancer Research Award (2012), Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Young Ambassadors Award (2013), Vanderbilt Provost Office Outstanding URM Accomplishments Award (2014, 2015, 2016), Leadership Alliance SR-EIP Faculty Mentor Commendation (2015), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award – the highest honor conveyed by this organization to junior faculty. He was appointed as the Vanderbilt University Liaison to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2017-2019, where he served in the ORNL steering committee to guide the interactions between the national lab and Vanderbilt University.

Recently, he has also become a member of the Cancer Systems Biology Consortium as part of his research activities with NIH/NCI. His work employs novel computational modeling tools in combination with experimental data to explain and predict how intracellular molecular interactions give rise to cell-decision processes and cell-community behaviors. The overall goal of his work is to attain a mechanistic and predictive understanding of dynamic cellular systems, how they are regulated in healthy cells, dysregulated in dis-eases such as cancer, and leverage this knowledge to guide experiments toward novel therapies. To this end he devel-ops novel theories and numerical methods to explain how systems-level biochemical interaction networks process biochemical signals and lead to a phenotypic outcome.

Professor Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Southern California in 1969, an M.S. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. From 1975 to 1980, she was a Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, and from 1980 to 1986, a Research Associate in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Technical University of Munich. Professor Luthey-Schulten has been at the University of Illinois since 1987, where she is currently the Murchison-Malley Professor of Chemistry, co-director of the NSF Center for the Physics of Living Cells, and co-investigator at the NIH Resource of Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics at the Beckman Institute.

Her research group currently develops the GPU-based software Lattice Microbes for spatially-resolved stochastic simulations of whole cells at biologically relevant length (micron), time (hours), and concentrations (nM to mM) scales. Their simulations of a minimal cell and simple eukaryotic cells integrate a broad range of experimental data with hybrid stochastic-deterministic methodologies to determine the time-dependence of metabolites, proteins, and nucleic acids involved in cellular processes of metabolism, genetic information processing, and growth.

Michael is a 4th year Ph.D. Student in Biomedical Engineering and is currently co-advised by Dr. Munsky and Dr. Stasevish. He works on problems characterizing variability in single-cell, single-molecule experiments using computational and mathematical tools, and uses control theory derive new control techniques to control random processes. His current work is building an automated microscope that can eventually be used for the control of cell populations, and developing new control techniques for optogenetic controlled systems.

Gregor Neuert is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics in the Basic Sciences in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. He applies multidisciplinary systems biology approaches to address fundamental questions in signaling transduction and gene regulation of protein-coding and long non-coding RNA in single cells. Dr. Neuert obtained his Ph.D. in physics in Hermann Gaub’s laboratory at the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany, with research in single-molecule biophysics. His postdoctoral research involved experimental and theoretical biophysics studies on gene regulation in single cells as a Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft (DFG) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Alexander van Oudenaarden’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. He established his independent laboratory at Vanderbilt in 2012 and holds secondary appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Pharmacology. Since joining Vanderbilt, he won an NIH Directors New Innovator award, secured NIH R01 research grants, and is a Vanderbilt School of Medicine Basic Sciences Dean’s Faculty Fellow.

Kaan is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland working with Ramon Grima and Guido Sanguinetti. Coming from a pure maths background his research is in modelling and inference for stochastic biochemical systems, focusing on the Chemical Master Equation and its variants. He is currently working on likelihood-free inference and automated model reduction for stochastic models which are not easily amenable to standard methods.

Elizabeth Read is Assistant Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. She holds undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics from the University of Colorado and a PhD in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Read is a member of the UC Irvine Center for Complex Biological Systems and the NSF-Simons Center for Multiscale Cell Fate.

Eric received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Colorado State University in 2013. He then worked as an analytical chemist for two years in industry before working as product development lead and cofounder of a start-up company until 2018. Currently, he is working on his Master’s Degree and is interested in single-cell microscopy and the integration of stochastic models with transcription and translation dynamics. In his current work he is helping with the optimization of smFISH experiments and assisting with the automation of image processing.

Brooke Silagy received her B.S. in Chemistry from Michigan State University in 2016. After a break from academia working in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, she is currently pursuing her M.E. in Chemical Engineering from Colorado State University. In addition, she works as a graduate research assistant with Dr. Brian Munsky’s group applying the design of computational algorithms to integrate single-molecule gene expression data with stochastic models. 

Lisa Weber is currently an Instructor and PhD Candidate in Chemical Engineering at Colorado State University. She received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado-Boulder, an MS in Mechanical Engineering with a biological emphasis from the University of Denver, and has engineering experience in multiple industries (Oil and Gas, Pharmaceuticals, and Aerospace). Her research involves performing computational modeling of various biological processes, including aspects of gene expression and DNA/Oligonucleotide binding interactions in relation to multiple experimental variables, integrating computational methods with experimental data. She also has an interest in helping engineering students foster more inclusive professional identities by (performing research on) implementing and teaching implicit bias, inclusion, and diversity-related topics to undergraduate engineering students. In addition, she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow from 2017-2019, and she is currently the Instructor for CBE 160: Introduction to MATLAB for Chemical and Biological Engineers (from 2018-Present). 

Jesse Wilson is a Boettcher Young Investigator, Rhoden Professor, and Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Colorado State University. Prior to joining CSU’s faculty, Jesse trained as a postdoc in Warren Warren’s lab at Duke University, working on in-vivo transient absorption microscopy of melanoma. He earned his PhD in Randy Bartels’ lab at Colorado State University, developing techniques in ultrafast pulse shaping and impulsive Raman spectroscopy.

Huy Vo is a postdoctoral researcher in Munsky Group at Colorado State University. He earned a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the university of Alabama in 2017. His current research focuses on developing new computational tools to design informative single-cell experiments that account for both intrinsic noise and measurement uncertainty.