Lab Members

David Fortner (PhD 1995): Dr. David M. Fortner is a patent attorney with an independent practice in La Jolla, CA. His practice focuses on patent litigation and prosecution in the areas of biotechnology and life sciences. Prior to receiving his JD degree at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Dave was a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Riverside. He was also an NIH postdoctoral fellow with Dan Gallie at UCR and Roy Parker at Univ. of Arizona.

http://www.themisipc.com/professionals

Dr. Michael W. Kaiser is Director, Research & Technology at Exact Sciences in Madison, WI, where he is developing new assays for the early detection of cancers. Previously, he was Senior Principle Scientist at Hologic, Inc. in San Diego, CA. Prior to that he was a Senior Scientist at Third Wave Technologies Inc. in Madison, WI, where he worked since 1996. Mike led the process validation for Third Wave’s human papilloma virus test, which was approved by the FDA as an in vitro diagnostic and contributed to the sale of Third Wave to Hologic in 2008 for $580 million.

Dr. Valerie L. Gerlach is Associate Director of Medical Writing at Astellas. Previously, she held similar positions at Bristol Myers Squibb, Celgene, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Schering Plough, and CuraGen. Val enjoys seeing information on all the different types of drugs that the company is developing and has gained an appreciation for the hard work that goes into getting a new medicine approved. Prior to becoming a medical writer, Val was an NIH postdoctoral fellow with Errol Friedberg at Univ. of Texas Southwest Medical Center and a Senior Research Scientist at CuraGen Corporation.

Dr. Zairong Li is an Adjunct Professor of Biology at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. He is the course coordinator for the majors’ biology course and also teaches the genetics course. Previously, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Robert Margolskee at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Dr. Regina M. Vidaver is the Section Chief of Chronic Disease Prevention and Cancer Control at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services in Madison, WI and a city Alder for District 5 of Madison, WI. Previously, Regina held managerial positions at the Wisconsin Research and Education Network (WREN) of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the National Lung Cancer Partnership (now Free to Breathe), and the Society for Women’s Health Research in Washington, DC. She also served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Engineering Fellow at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA.

https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district5/

Dr. Michael P. Martin is Associate Dean of Science, Health, and Math and Professor of Biology at John Carroll University, a Jesuit college in Cleveland, OH. Prior to accepting the leadership position, Mike taught Introductory Biology, Biotechnology Laboratory, and Molecular Cell Biology. Mike’s research interests include protein-DNA interactions in the process of transcription and classification of cyanobacteria according to rRNA secondary structure and the unprocessed rRNA precursor. He also developed an undergraduate laboratory exercise to determine human ABO blood type by PCR genotyping.

https://jcu.edu/profiles/michael-martin

Dr. Kwan is Associate Director of External Research Collaborations at GNF in La Jolla, CA. Previously, she held positions at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Life Technologies, City of Hope, and the Scripps Research Institute (SRI), where she worked at the interface of intellectual property, technology development, and business development. She was also an American Heart Association postdoctoral fellow in Jamie Williamson’s lab at SRI, where she studied protein-RNA interactions.

Dr. Panbehi is a board-certified pediatrician and a hospitalist at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, CA. Previously he was a Resident in Pediatrics at CHOC, after receiving his MD at UW-Madison in 2008.

https://www.choc.org/providers/hospitalist/bahman-panbehi-md/

Dr. McManus is a tenured Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Masters in Computational Biology Program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Joel uses yeast to study the evolution of translational regulation by ribosome profiling and other approaches. His current focus is on regulation of translation by upstream ORFs (uORFs), which are surprisingly abundant in the 5’-UTRs of mRNAs. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Brenton Graveley at the University of Connecticut Health Center, where he studied the evolution of alternative splicing in Drosophila.

https://www.cmu.edu/bio/people/faculty/mcmanus.html

Dr. Kuehner is a tenured Associate Professor of Biology at Emmanuel College in Boston, where he recently received a Faculty Excellence in Teaching award. Previously he was an NIH TEACRS postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Claire Moore at the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, MA. TEACRS (Training in Education And Critical Research Skills) provides teaching and career development skills in addition to lab research experience. As part of his TEACRS program, Jason taught genetics as an adjunct professor at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. Jason’s research focuses on the coordination of mRNA 3′-end processing with cellular stress responses.

https://www.emmanuel.edu/academics/our-faculty/jason-kuehner.html

Dr. Chen is a Research Scientist at GeneSeeq Technology, Inc., a precision oncology company based in Toronto, Canada. Previously, Xin was postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Xiaomin Bao at Northwestern University, where he studied the influence of intronic polyadenylation on epidermal stem cell maintenance and differentiation.

Dr. Sundling is an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UW-Madison. Kaitlin received her MD degree in 2013 and stayed at UW-Madison to do a residency in Pathology. She completed a fellowship in cytopathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2018. Her research interests included molecular diagnostics, image analysis, machine learning, digital pathology, and mathematical oncology.