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Scientific and Medical Advisory Board

Michael Ashburner, Ph.D., is Professor at the Department of Genetics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He has served as Visiting Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute, Senior Scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California. Dr. Ashburner sits on many advisory boards and committees, including the National Research Council Committee on Metagenomics, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Scientific Review Board, and the Scientific Advisory Board at Applied Biosystems (ABI). In 1990, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Widely recognized as one of the foremost experts in genetics and biological ontologies, Dr. Ashburner is the co-founder of the Gene Ontology project (GO).

Pui-Yan Kwok, M.D., Ph.D., is the H. Bachrach Distinguished Professor in Cardiovascular Genetics at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSF, he was a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Kwok is a recognized leader in the large-scale discovery and analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), new genotyping technologies, and the application of genomics in the study of human disease.

George Miklos, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading experts on disease genes. Currently Director of Secure Genetics, Ltd. and Chief Scientific Officer of Human Genetic Signatures, Ltd., Dr. Miklos's previous appointments included Adjunct Professor in the Neurobiology Department at The Scripps Research Institute and Fellow and Group Leader at the Research School of Biological Sciences, The Australian National University. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Washington, and has served as a consultant or adviser for several pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Celera Genomics, BioTraces, and Novartis Pharmaceuticals.

James Scott, M.D., Ph.D., Head of Genomic Cardiology, Imperial College London, England. He was previously Chief of Academic Medicine and of NHS clinical service, Chief of Cardiology and Head of Molecular Medicine at The Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital. He was founder and first Head of The institute of Genetics and Genomics and founder of the Bioinformatics Center at Imperial College London. He previously worked at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. He was a founder member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a Chartered Biologist and Fellow of the Institute of Biology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (The UK National Academy of Sciences).

Terry Speed, Ph.D., is Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley and head of the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne. Dr. Speed has served on a number of scientific advisory boards including the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State University, the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, the Department of Biology of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and the Department of Statistics, Oxford University. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the 2002 Pitman Medal by the Statistical Society of Australia. Dr. Speed has served as a consultant to companies that include GeneData and Affymetrix. He brings to Omicia more than 35 years of experience in biostatistics, most recently specializing in the design and analysis of genetic association studies.

John Witte, Ph.D., is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Witte’s research program constitutes applied and methodological genetic epidemiology, with the overall aim of deciphering the mechanisms underlying complex diseases. His applied work is focused on prostate cancer, and complements other work done at the UCSF Prostate Cancer Center. Dr. Witte joined UCSF in 2005 from Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine At Case, Witte was honored with a teaching award, the 1999-2000 Glennan Fellowship, given for innovation in teaching and education. He was honored again in 2002-2003 with the Visiting Scientist award from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. From 1994-95 he was an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. He earned his master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles.