Using Social Media as a Scientist

Dr. Chris Gunter is the Senior Advisor for Genomics Engagement at the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the head of the Engagement Methods Unit in the Social Behavioral Research Branch. She earned her Ph.D. in human genetics at Emory University and then completed postdoctoral work at Case Western Reserve University. Following that, she worked in editorial positions for Human Molecular Genetics, Science, and Nature, and currently has editorial positions at the preprint server bioRxiv and the journal CSHL Molecular Case Studies. Her work has two major foci: scientific studies on autism genetics, and development and measurement of science communication methods.

Dr. Janina M. Jeff works as a population geneticist, bioinformatician, STEAM-activist, educator, motivational speaker, and podcaster. Dr. Janina M. Jeff is the first African American to graduate with a PhD in Human Genetics from Vanderbilt University and graduate of Spelman College (class of 2007). She is currently a Staff Bioinformatics Scientist at Illumina, where she develops pipelines for content annotation, selection, and design of population genome-wide content as well as selection of clinically annotated variants for Illumina’s genotyping array portfolio that enables healthy population screening.

In 2018, Janina was selected as one of three winners (out of 18,000) from Spotify’s Sound-Up Bootcamp for her podcast, “In Those Genes”, is an international award-winning podcast that uses genetics to decode the lost histories of African descended Americans through the lens of Black culture. In Those Genes has been recognized by the American Society of Human Genetics, NY Festivals, IndieWire, The New York Times, and Third Coast Audio Festival. The podcast has also received grant funding from Spotify, Illumina, and 500 Women Scientist.

Janina was recently named as one of the top 100 Influential African Americans by The Root magazine, as well as Top 40 Under 40 Alumna with Spelman College, The National Quality Minority Forum and The Network Journal. Additionally, her TEDx talk, “Afrofuturism Through the Power of the Genome,” similar to her work, challenges the misuse of genetic information and empowers the Black community to learn the value that lies within their genomes’ work.

Dr. Jennifer "Piper" Below, PhD is an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her lab works to understand the genetic basis of human disease, with a focus on bringing computation to unmet needs. One focus of the lab is understudied speech and language traits, with ongoing research projects investigating genetic susceptibility factors in developmental stuttering, developmental language disorder, and prosody. Her team has leveraged data within Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s electronic health records and the linked DNA databank, BioVU to characterize comorbidities of these traits phenome-wide and build machine learning-based models for imputing speech and language traits in the health record, where they are significantly underreported. She has partnered with institutions across the world to collect biospecimens from people with clinically characterized speech and language disorders for genetic analysis, as well as with the direct-to-consumer genomics company, 23andMe, who have provided results of genetic analyses on >100k self-reported stuttering cases and >1M controls including analyses in Hispanics and Latinos and Caucasian, African, and Asian ancestry groups. Collectively these data have allowed her to investigate the genetic architecture of speech and language traits across global populations and make discoveries about the genetic etiology of speech and language in Humans.