Marisa Azad, University of Ottawa

Marisa completed a combined MD/PhD in Biochemistry and a residency in Internal Medicine at McMaster University in 2019. She completed a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the University of Ottawa and followed up with an advanced fellowship in Orthopedic Infectious Diseases at the Mayo Clinic in 2022. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at The Ottawa Hospital, an Associate Clinical Scientist and a Mayo Clinic Research Collaborator at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. Her research focuses on exploiting the molecular and microbial mechanisms of periprosthetic joint infections to develop novel rapid diagnostics and therapeutics.

Brendan Bohannan, University of Oregon

Brendan is the Alec and Kay Keith Professor at the University of Oregon and the director of the university’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution. He is a contributor to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2019, he was awarded a $7.6 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to investigate the potential health benefits of bacteria. His research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of microbial biodiversity. With his research group, he examines the fundamental drivers of biodiversity, the effects of environmental change on microbial communities, and how microbial diversity changes in human-dominated environments—including those within the human body and other host organisms.

Trevor Graham, Institute of Cancer Research

Trevor Graham joined the Institute of Cancer Research as Director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer in 2022 and is a group leader of the Genomics and Evolutionary Dynamics laboratory. For the previous 8.5 years Trevor led the Evolution and Cancer laboratory at the Cancer Research UK Barts Cancer Institute within Queen Mary University of London. Trevor’s laboratory was the first mathematical theory-led laboratory in the Institute. He co-led the development of computational biology as core research theme at Barts, culminating in the establishment of the Centre for Genomics and Computational Biology in 2019, where Trevor was deputy lead. Trevor’s research is focused on understanding the evolutionary dynamics of cancer development and translating this knowledge to improve clinical management of disease. His laboratory combines expertise in evolutionary theory, mathematical modelling and bioinformatics, together with cutting-edge wet-lab analyses foremost in genomics, single cell sequencing and molecular pathology.

Lynnette Leidy Sievert, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Lynnette has studied variation in age at menopause and symptoms at midlife for more than 30 years.  In collaboration with local researchers, she carried out studies of menopause in western Massachusetts; Hilo, Hawaii; the Selška Valley, Slovenia; Asunción and Mbaracayu, Paraguay; Puebla and Campeche, Mexico; Sylhet, Bangladesh; and London, UK, as well as pilot studies in Odisha, India, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.  Lynnette also studies and writes about the evolution of menopause and post-reproductive life.  Of late, she has been disentangling the experience of hot flashes from the heat and humidity of Campeche, Mexico, and planning to study hot flashes in the winter cold of Mongolia.  Her current study is on hot flashes in relation to estimates of brown adipose tissue.  Lynnette is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, served on the Board of Trustees of the North American Menopause Society, and was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Human Biology, the journal of the Human Biology Association.