Appendix D

Study Committee Biographies

Dr. Brenda L. Bass is distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah. She is known for her contributions in defining double-stranded RNA-mediated pathways, including the discovery of adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADAR) editing enzymes and models and experiments that established Dicer’s role in RNA silencing. Dr. Bass is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2007 she was elected and served as president of the RNA Society. She has received research support from the Pew Scholars Program, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; her National Institutes of Health support includes a Director’s Pioneer Award (2011) and Transformative Research Award (2020). Dr. Bass obtained a B.A. in chemistry from Colorado College and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center prior to joining the faculty of the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Dr. Taekjip Ha is George Yancopoulos in honor of Frederick Alt professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Additionally, he is senior investigator for the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Ha’s research is focused on pushing the limits of single-molecule detection methods to study complex biological systems. His group develops state-of-the-art biophysical techniques and applies them to study diverse protein-nucleic acid, protein–protein complexes, mechanical perturbation, and response of these systems both in vitro and in vivo. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Dr. Ha served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee that conducted a decadal review of atomic, molecular, and optical science, and he was an expert witness in the patent ligation between Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Pacific Biosciences of California between August 2018 and March 2020. Dr. Ha received his B.S. in 1990 from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, in 1996 in physics.

Dr. Nicholas Morgan Adams is systems design engineer at Thermo Fisher Scientific and adjoint associate professor at Vanderbilt University. He spent the first part of his career as research professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, where he developed user-focused technologies that reduce the barriers for access to life-saving health care across the globe. The technologies he developed have been recognized as the “Top Ten” by the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening and as one of the “Coolest Things on Earth” by GE Reports. Building on this academic experience, Dr. Adams now leads the development of the next generation of genetic sciences technologies in the research and development group at Thermo Fisher Scientific. After receiving a B.S. in biology at Utah Tech University, he completed a Ph.D. in chemical and physical biology at Vanderbilt University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical engineering at the same institution.

Dr. Juan D. Alfonzo is currently executive director of the RNA Initiative at Brown University and until recently was Arts and Sciences distinguished professor of microbiology and former director of the Center for RNA Biology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the study of transfer RNA (tRNA) processing and modification in various organisms, including humans. The Alfonzo laboratory uses a multipronged approach that involves a combination of biochemistry, cell biology, biophysics, and omics to characterize various modification and tRNA processing enzymes. A major emphasis of the Alfonzo laboratory is the enzymology of modification enzymes to understand the basis for substrate specificity and to connect such studies with how intracellular compartmentalization affects tRNA modification and function. He was recipient of an Ohio State University distinguished teaching award and is elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. In 2022, Dr. Alfonzo published an editorial in Nature Genetics entitled, “A Call for Direct Sequencing of Full-Length RNAs to Identify All Medication,” in which he and his co-authors outlined future research needs related to mapping and sequencing RNA chemical modifications. He obtained his Ph.D. in microbiology at Indiana University followed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, working on the biochemistry of RNA editing and modification in trypanosomes.

Dr. Jeffrey Baker worked for over 20 years in the biopharmaceutical industry leading interdisciplinary technical teams supporting process development and commercial manufacturing. In 2011, he was appointed deputy director for the Office of Biotechnology Products in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In 2019, Dr. Baker was detailed to the Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office until being recalled to FDA to participate in responses to the global pandemic. He retired from the agency in 2021 but remains active in the biotech community as senior fellow to the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals and through a breadth of consortia and academic relationships. Dr. Baker received the Eli Lilly President’s Award twice for the development of two first-in-class protein therapeutics and six FDA Center Awards for leadership in review practice, guidance development, and inspection program management. In 2018, he received an FDA Honors Award for contributions to “modernizing the U.S. regulatory system for biotechnology products through sustained creative leadership and collaboration.” Dr. Baker holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Northwestern University and a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of North Texas, and pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His academic research was on nucleic acid metabolism in procaryotic and eucaryotic systems.

Dr. Susan J. Baserga is William H. Fleming M.D. professor of molecular biophysics & biochemistry at Yale University. She is also professor of genetics and therapeutic radiology at the Yale School of Medicine. Her laboratory has pioneered the molecular basis of how ribosomes are made

in our cells and is now pursuing the mechanistic basis of human diseases called ribosomopathies. In 2023, Dr. Baserga was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. She has won the Charles W. Bohmfalk Prize for basic science teaching at the Yale School of Medicine (2014) and the William C. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) for outstanding contributions to scientific research and a demonstrated commitment to the training of young scientists (2016). She was named ASBMB fellow (2023) and was elected to the National Academy of Inventors (2018). Dr. Baserga is a 1980 Yale College graduate and was the first woman graduate of Yale College to receive tenure in the biological sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale. She completed her M.D. (cum laude, Alpha Omega Alpha) and Ph.D. (human genetics) at Yale in 1988.

Dr. Lydia María Contreras is professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She previously served appointments in the Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology and is currently part of the graduate study committees of the biochemistry, cell molecular biology, and microbiology departments. Dr. Contreras’s expertise lies in conducting fundamental studies of cellular stress responses, and she leads efforts in using molecular assays and techniques to evaluate cell toxicity induced by different sources of air pollution. She has served as the primary investigator for multiple National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health projects and received the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Food, Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Division Early Career Award and American Chemical Society Division of Biochemical Technology Young Investigator Award. Dr. Contreras has previously served on the National Research Council’s panel on life sciences. She received a B.S.E. in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Cornell University in 2008. Dr. Contreras was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Marlene Belfort at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center.

Dr. Markus Hafner is senior investigator for the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), where he leads the RNA Molecular Biology Laboratory. Dr. Hafner studies posttranscriptional gene regulatory (PTGR) processes, including messenger RNA processing and splicing, transport and localization, translation, and turnover using systems-wide approaches in human cells. PTGR is controlled by dynamic ribonucleoprotein complexes, and Dr. Hafner developed widely used techniques to characterize RNA-binding protein preferences and targets, as well as mechanisms of gene silencing by small RNAs. Before joining NIAMS in 2014, he completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Tuschl, one of the pioneers in the field of RNA interference. Dr. Hafner’s interest in RNA was sparked during his graduate studies in chemistry/biochemistry at the University of Bonn, Germany, where he used RNA aptamers as tools to select small-molecule inhibitors for a family of small GTPases.

Dr. Sarath Chandra Janga is associate professor of bioinformatics and data science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University at Indianapolis and faculty member of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Janga’s specific research interests include developing methods for mapping RNA regulatory networks by integrating cutting-edge genomic technologies and data science approaches within his laboratory’s broader field of computational and systems biology. In particular, his lab employs single-molecule RNA sequencing approaches for developing high-throughput methods to map RNA modifications in model and nonmodel systems. Dr. Janga has over 110 publications with a H-index of 39 and an i10-index of 87. His lab has been supported by grants towards these research directions from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the life science industry. He served on multiple national panels, including

multiple NIH study sections, NSF CAREER, and Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer panels. Dr. Janga has also served on international panels for Swiss, Polish, Israeli, Czech, Danish, and Croatian national foundations and the Wellcome Trust, and he has reviewed committees covering genomics, imaging technologies, and computational biology. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology at University of Cambridge in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2010 to 2012.

Dr. Patrick A. Limbach is an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of chemistry at the University of Cincinnati. He has been serving as vice president for research for the University of Cincinnati since 2016 and is also the current board president for the University of Cincinnati Research Institute. Dr. Limbach’s research laboratory has focused on the identification, quantification, and sequence placement of modified ribonucleosides with an emphasis on characterizing and understanding the modification profiles of transfer RNAs from a variety of organisms. He and his group have developed numerous mass spectrometry-based approaches, tools, and reagents for the analysis of modified RNAs. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a lifetime member of Phi Kappa Phi. He received his B.S. degree from Centre College in Kentucky, his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University training under professor Alan G. Marshall, and conducted postdoctoral training at the University of Utah in the laboratory of professor James A. McCloskey. Dr. Limbach holds two patents related to mass spectrometry-based analysis of modified RNAs; one patent covers the preparation of ribonucleases (reagents used in the analysis) and the second patent covers a method for preparing samples for mass spectrometry analysis. Dr. Limbach served on the Scientific Advisory Board and was an NIH-funded collaborator with the start-up company RiboNova through January 2021.

Dr. Julius B. Lucks is professor and associate chair of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University. His research combines experimental and computational approaches to investigate the fundamental principles that govern how RNA molecules fold and function in living organisms, and how these principles can be used to engineer RNA biotechnologies. He has pioneered high-throughput approaches to measuring RNA structures that have helped to bring RNA structural biology into the “omics” era, as well as approaches to engineering synthetic RNAs that act as sensors and circuits for scalable diagnostic technologies. Dr. Lucks has been recognized with a number of awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the American Chemical Society’s Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award, and a Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and most recently was inducted into the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineers. Dr. Lucks is a founding member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium and provided consultant services to Bio-gen Inc. and Translate Bio between May and September of 2021. He received a B.S. in chemistry from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. in theoretical chemistry from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University. Dr. Lucks was a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Mary A. Majumder is Dalton Tomlin professor at the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Her work focuses on ethical, legal, and social issues associated with cutting-edge biomedical research. Dr. Majumder’s recent projects have focused on policy challenges associated with sharing genomic and other health-related information through large-scale, longitudinal data resources or commons, sharing of variant and related phenotypic information in the context of hereditary cancer, and sharing data generated from Brain

Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative–funded studies and other neuroscience research. Dr. Majumder has written extensively on issues of privacy and governance. She received a Ph.D. from Rice University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and completed a fellowship in clinical ethics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr. Nicole M. Martinez is assistant professor in the departments of Chemical and Systems Biology and of Developmental Biology at Stanford University. Her laboratory studies RNA modifications, mRNA processing, and their roles in development and disease. Dr. Martinez is a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence (K99/R00) awardee, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator and a member of the RNA Society. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, where she worked on RNA modifications. Dr. Martinez obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied alternative splicing.

Dr. Kate D. Meyer is assistant professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Neurobiology at Duke University School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies how the RNA modification, m6A, is regulated in cells and its role in gene expression and cell function. Dr. Meyer’s lab has also developed tools for detecting m6A in cells and for studying how m6A binding proteins recognize target mRNAs. Prior to starting her lab at Duke, she trained with Dr. Samie Jaffrey at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she helped develop the first method for global m6A profiling and uncovered key functions of m6A in regulating translation. She has received several awards recognizing her contribution to the field of epitranscriptomics, including the Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists, the Tri-Institutional Breakout Prize for Junior Investigators, the Searle Scholars Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award.

Dr. Keith Nykamp is senior molecular geneticist at Invitae Corporation, where he leads research and development of Invitae’s genetic insights platform. In addition to his work with Invitae, Dr. Nykamp serves as key personnel for The GREGOR Consortium, a National Human Genome Research Institute–funded grant supporting genomics research focused on developing tools and approaches for elucidating the genetics of rare genetic disease. Technologies developed by his group support the interpretation of genetic variation and molecular diagnoses for millions of individuals each year. His research employs large-scale functional assays, computational biology, machine learning algorithms and software engineering to assess the impact of DNA variation on messenger RNA (mRNA) splicing and protein function. Dr. Nykamp received a Ph.D. from the University of Florida studying mechanisms of mRNA export and polyadenylation with professor Maurice Swanson and trained as a postdoctoral fellow with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Dr. Judith Kimble’s laboratory, where he explored the role of RNA regulation in stem cell proliferation and differentiation.

Dr. Tao Pan is professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at The University of Chicago. Throughout his career he has made significant contributions to several areas of RNA science, including catalysis, folding, biology, modification, and functional genomics. His current interests focus on the functional genomics and biology of transfer RNA and the dynamic epitranscriptome of RNA modifications. Dr. Pan has developed multiple technologies to study RNA modifications transcriptome-wide and applied those to biological investigations in basic and clinical science. He was the recipient of the National Institutes of Health director’s Pioneer Award on adaptive mistranslation and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received his Ph.D. in biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University and did postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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