Next Generation Approaches to Work-Life Balance and Caregiving

Beryl Cummings completed her PhD in human genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute, where she was part of the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) team. After her training, Beryl was an early hire into the human genetics team at Maze Therapeutics. She is currently a Senior Associate at Third Rock Ventures, working on building new biotech companies. She is motivated by continually learning the best ways to leverage human genetics in drug discovery and is passionate about bringing new therapies to rare disease families.

Jay Shendure is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Director of the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing, and Scientific Director of the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine. His 2005 doctoral thesis with George Church included one of the first successful reductions to practice of next generation DNA sequencing. Dr. Shendure's research group in Seattle pioneered exome sequencing and its earliest applications to gene discovery for Mendelian disorders and autism; cell-free DNA diagnostics for cancer and reproductive medicine; massively parallel reporter assays, saturation genome editing; whole organism lineage tracing, and massively parallel molecular profiling of single cells. Dr. Shendure is the recipient of the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics (2012), the Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences (2019) and the Mendel Award from the European Society of Human Genetics (2022) and is an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He serves or has previously served as an advisor to the NIH Director, the US Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Allen Institutes for Cell Science and Immunology. He received his MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School in 2007. 

Mary Canady has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of California, Riverside and is the founder of Biotech Networks, the leading resource for more than 50 thousand life scientists to connect, learn, and grow, with hubs across the US.  

Dr. Canady has led marketing and communications teams to meet business objectives at large global life science companies as well as at biotech startups.  

Mary is also a leader in advancing science communication, advocacy, and diversity and has led organizations and teams to further her life’s mission to empower every scientist to make a bigger impact.  

Dr. Reddi is a Professor and Chief for the Division of Precision Medicine and Cytogenetics and Director of the Precision Medicine Laboratory in the Department of Pathology at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). Dr. Reddi has a doctoral degree in biotechnology and trained in Clinical Molecular Genetics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she also led a translational research program focused on thyroid cancer. In 2018 Dr. Reddi received the prestigious “Women of Innovation Award” in the Category of Large Business Innovation and Leadership from the Connecticut Technology Council, which recognizes extraordinary creativity and leadership in bioscience and technology. Her research interests include cancer biology, viro-therapeutics and the genetics of somatic and inherited disorders. Dr. Reddi is passionate about impacting patient-care through innovation and translation and is known for inspiring women in Biomedical sciences through her leadership ethic.