Presenter: Azeez Butali, DDS, PhD, FICD, FAMedS, FAAAS

Professor of Oral Pathology, Radiology, & Medicine; Professor of Iowa Institute for Oral Health

Dr. Butali joined the College of Dentistry in 2013 after completing his postdoctoral fellowship in craniofacial genetics at the University of Iowa. Dr. Butali directs the African Craniofacial Anomalies Network, collaboration between scientists in Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda. His studies use a variety of techniques and approaches, including next generation sequencing approaches. He is also involved in the investigation of subclinical phenotypes for orofacial clefts as well as examining the role of micronutrients in oral clefts prevention. He is currently collaborating with researchers in Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Dundee (Scotland), Seattle (WA), Pittsburgh (PA), and Puerto Rico. His research is currently funded by National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research. 

Dr. Butali is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, most recently being awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). 

Presenter: Anya Prince, JD

Professor Prince’s teaching and research interests explore health and genetic privacy, with a particular focus on genetic discrimination, the health privacy implications of big data, and the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic testing. Her research particularly explores the intersections of social and biological data by interrogating the ethical and legal implications of how genetic data can be used to predict social traits and behaviors and, conversely, how social data can be used to predict medical information, including reproductive information. Her interdisciplinary work has been published in legal, bioethics, and medical journals, including the Boston College Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Iowa Law Review, JAMA, the American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and Genetics in Medicine.

In 2022, she was awarded a four-year R01 grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the ethical, legal, and social implications of sociogenomic polygenic scores. In 2023, she was awarded a Bridging Bioethics, Research & Policymaking grant from the Greenwall Foundation to develop resources regarding state-level genetic privacy legislation. In addition to these grants, Professor Prince is an investigator, consultant, or advisory board member on multiple other NIH-funded projects. She had previously been awarded a Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) from NHGRI to examine the use of genetic information by life, long-term care, and disability insurers.

Professor Prince is a former Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, where she taught Employment Law and Genetics and the Law. Before joining the legal academy, she served as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the UNC Center for Genomics and Society (CGS) in the Department of Social Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Professor Prince has also worked as a Skadden Fellow and Staff Attorney at the Cancer Legal Resource Center in Los Angeles, California.

Presenter: Aline Petrin, PhD

Assistant Professor, Iowa Institute for Oral Health Research and Orthodontics

I am an assistant professor in the College of Dentistry. My research focuses on craniofacial birth defects, with a primary focus on the genetics and epigenetics of nonsyndromic cleft lip and palate. My current projects investigate the role of DNA methylation in the etiology of orofacial clefts and combine epigenetic and genetic approaches to better understand how the epigenome influences the molecular basis of craniofacial birth defects.

Presenter: Drew Kitchen, PhD

I am an anthropological geneticist with interests in human population history and the origins of human infectious disease. I use an evolutionary perspective to investigate the processes that have produced observed, modern distributions of human genetic and pathogen/parasite diversity. To do this, I primarily employ computational methods (e.g., phylogenetics, population genetics, and simulation) to the analysis of novel and publicly available genetic and cultural data.

My current research projects involve: 1) identifying the major historical events / determinants of Native American diversity, focusing on the original peopling event ~15 KYA and the post-Columbian population crash; 2) investigating the effect of human demographic history on the evolution of human pathogens and parasites, including the effect of agricultural lifestyles on the human microbiome; 3) understanding the molecular evolution and macro-evolutionary processes affecting pathogen genetic diversity; and 4) the application of evolutionary principles to infer the complex history of human cultural diversity, especially with regard to the construction of language phylogenies.

Research Interests

• Genetics and Genomics
• Human Evolution
• Ancient Human Demography and Migration
• Peopling of the Americas
• Pathogen Evolution
• Origins of Infectious Disease in Humans
• Molecular Evolution
• Macroevolution
• Language Evolution

Presenter: Patrick Breheny, PhD

My research focuses on the analysis of high-dimensional data, particularly those that arise from the fields of genetics and genomics. As the data generated by experiments in these fields continues to grow in size and complexity, there is an ever greater need for sound statistical procedures that yield scientific insight from large amounts of information. Methodologically, my primary area of research is in penalized regression.

I have been particularly motivated by genetic association studies and gene expression studies. These studies are high dimensional, yet have structures imposed upon them by the underlying biology. Consequently, penalization, shrinkage, hierarchical modeling, visualization, and empirical Bayes methods are particularly useful tools here. Below are examples of the research I have been involved with in this area; several contain methodological innovation, although the focus of the article is generally on the scientific results rather than the methodology.

• Penalized multimarker vs. single-marker regression methods for genome-wide association studies of quantitative traits

  Yi H, Breheny P, Imam N, Liu Y and Hoeschele I

  Genetics, 199: 205–222. Journal PDF

  Featured article. Link

• In Vivo identification of eugenol-responsive and muscone-responsive mouse odorant receptors

  McClintock TS, Adipietro K, Titlow WB, Breheny P, Walz A, Mombaerts P and Matsunami H

  Journal of Neuroscience, 34: 15669–15678. Journal PDF

  Featured article. Link

• Genomics of mature and immature olfactory sensory neurons

  Nickell MD, Breheny P, Stromberg AJ and McClintock TS

  Journal of Comparative Neurology, 520: 2608–2629.

Presenter: Ferhaan Ahmad, MD, PhD, FRCPC, FAHA, FACC

Current Positions

• Associate Professor of Internal Medicine-Cardiovascular Medicine
• Associate Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics
• Associate Professor of Radiology
• Director, Cardiovascular Genetics Program, Carver College of Medicine
• Director, Cardiovascular Disease Fellowship Program, Internal Medicine

Research Interests:

Dr. Ahmad is the Director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Program at the University of Iowa, which brings together basic scientists at the Carver College of Medicine and clinicians at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) who are focusing on heritable cardiovascular disorders. He directs a laboratory conducting basic and translational research into the genetic and genomic mechanisms underlying inherited cardiovascular disorders, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, dilated cardiomyopathy, arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, glycogen storage cardiomyopathy, inherited arrhythmias, and pulmonary hypertension. His laboratory uses a wide range of techniques in human and mouse genetics and genomics, and fosters crosstalk between clinical studies, human molecular genetic studies, animal modeling, basic cellular and molecular studies, and computational systems biology analyses. At the UIHC Cardiovascular Genetics Clinic, an interdisciplinary team evaluates, counsels, and treats patients with inherited cardiovascular disorders and their families.

Presenter: Sukirth Ganesan, DDS, PhD, MPH

Associate Professor and Director of the Advanced Education Program in Periodontics

Current Positions

• Associate Professor of Periodontics
• Director, Advanced Education Program in Periodontology and Visiting Scholar Program in Periodontology, Periodontics
• Guest Researcher, Oral Immunobiology Unit

Presenter: Jake Michaelson, PhD

Current Positions

• Professor of Psychiatry
• Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering (BME)
• Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Roy J Carver Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
• Division Director, Computational and Molecular Psychiatry

Dr. Jake Michaelson is a Roy J. Carver professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and director of the division of computational and molecular psychiatry at the University of Iowa. His lab studies the effect of genetic variations on the development of the brain, with specific applications in autism and language impairment. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in biological engineering at Utah State University before earning his PhD in computational biology at the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany in 2010. After his time in Germany, he joined the lab of psychiatric geneticist Jonathan Sebat at UC San Diego, where he completed his postdoctoral training and published several of the earliest papers dealing with whole genome sequencing in autism. In 2013 he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, and his research is supported by NIMH, NIDCD, NICHD, NHGRI, the Simons Foundation, the Roy J. Carver Trust, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.