Dr. Cortes earned her PhD (’06) in Developmental Biology in Yimin Zou’s lab at the University of Chicago. After an academic postdoc in the lab of Nancy Schwartz, UChicago Department of Pediatrics, Leslie moved to industry as a postdoc at New England Biolabs where she worked in the Gene Expression Division in the lab of Christopher Taron. After completing her post-doc she joined Sanofi Genzyme where she spent four years establishing an iPSC platform to model rare neuronopathic diseases. In 2018, Leslie joined Scholar Rock, where she is a team lead guiding multiple programs from early discovery to clinical development.  In her role, she manages and mentors a team of scientists working crossfunctionally to develop antibody based therapies for diseases with unmet clinical needs.

Dr. Stolzenburg received her Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Genetics from the University of Rochester in 2012. She went on to pursue a PhD in the Driskill Graduate Program at Northwestern University, where she performed research in Ann Harris’ lab to identify and characterize genetic modifiers of cystic fibrosis lung disease severity. After graduating in 2017, she went on to join Alexander Ruthenburg’s lab at the University of Chicago as a Postdoctoral Scholar. Here, she studied the mechanistic role of a non-coding RNA in regulating expression of the MYC oncogene, and actively participated in the myCHOICE program and the BSD Postdoc Seminar Committee. In 2019, Lindsay moved to her current role as a Postdoctoral Scientist at AbbVie. She works within the Genomics Research Center (and in collaboration with Neuroscience Discovery groups) to test the functional impact of human genetic variants identified from GWAS/PheWAS in iPSC-based models of neurodegenerative disease.

Dr. Vo earned a Bachelor’s degree in cell and molecular biology from the University of Michigan and a doctorate in developmental biology at the University of Chicago. During his doctoral training in Elizabeth McNally’s lab, he investigated genetic modifiers relating to muscle and heart by integrating large genomic datasets and various computational methods. He is currently obtaining his postdoctoral training at AbbVie where he is focused on the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods together with bioinformatics and cheminformatics to evaluate drug toxicity. He has presented his research findings at multiple scientific conferences and has published over 20 peer reviewed manuscripts.