Prof. Jirong Long
Vanderbilt University, USA
Dr. Jirong Long is a Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Her research centers on identifying novel genetic, epigenetic, and microbiota biomarkers for cancer risk, deepening insights into cancer development mechanisms. She currently leads five major NIH-funded studies: three focused on breast cancer—a transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS, R01CA235553), a proteome-wide association study (PWAS, R01CA293996), and a methylation-wide association study (MeWAS, R01CA247987)—and two targeting lung cancer: a combined MeWAS/TWAS study (R01CA249863) and a social epigenomics study (R01MD015396). Dr. Long has authored over 300 papers, many published in high-impact journals. She is a frequent invited speaker at national and international academic conferences. She has mentored more than 30 trainees and faculty members, significantly shaping their careers. Dr. Long plays a pivotal role in the molecular and genetic epidemiology programs at the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.
Prof. Jiang Gui
Dartmouth College, USA
My research program sits at the intersection of biostatistics, computational biology, and machine learning. I am interested in understanding the role of genomic variation and environmental context in disease susceptibility. Success in this important public health endeavor will depend critically on the amount of non- linearity in the mapping of genotype to phenotype and our ability to address it. I have developed several novel non-parametric machine learning algorithms to detect and characterize gene-gene and gene- environment interactions in the absence of statistically significant main effects. Those methods have been applied to several large population based genetic association studies and identified a few gene-gene interaction models that would be missed by regular regression methods.