ASHG Annual Meeting Know Before You Go

Dr. Kevin T.A. Booth is a Laboratory Genetics and Genomics Fellow at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Chemistry and his Doctor of Philosophy in Molecular Medicine from the University of Iowa. Dr. Booth went on to complete his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, where his research focused on gene therapy for hereditary hearing loss. Dr. Booth has made substantial contributions to our understanding of the genetic, genomic, allelic, and phenotypic landscapes of hereditary hearing loss and the development of gene therapy approaches for genetic hearing loss. Dr. Booth's achievements have been recognized by numerous prestigious awards, including the Rex Montgomery Dissertation Prize in 2019 and the NIH Future Research Leader Award in 2021.

Maria is a freelance scientific consultant for drug development in the gene therapy / gene editing space. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Athens, Greece and her PhD in Human Molecular Genetics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She did her postdoctoral training at the University of Birmingham, UK and at Yale School of MedicineShe was an Assistant Professor at Yale doing translational research, before joining the biotech industry, where she served in positions of increasing responsibility (Biogen, Goldfinch Bio, Beam Tx). Her therapeutic areas of expertise include diseases of kidney, liver (metabolic), CNS, and reproductive system. She was an EMBO and HSFP postdoctoral fellow and has received numerous awards for her research including awards from the American and European Societies of Human Genetics (ASHG and ESHG).

Dr. Beth Sullivan is James B. Duke Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke University and Associate Dean for Research in Duke University School of Medicine. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology, Chemistry, and Classics from Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) and earned her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Her lab studies mechanisms of human genome stability in normal and disease states, with a focus on the genomics and epigenetics of the centromere, functional characterization of alpha satellite DNA variation, and genome engineering of human artificial chromosomes and chromosome rearrangements.