Azra Raza, MD, is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the Edward P. Evans Foundation MDS Center at Columbia University. A practicing oncologist seeing 30-40 cancer patients weekly, she also directs a cancer research lab. The recipient of three serial endowed chairs, Raza has collected >60,000 longitudinally drawn blood and marrow samples from thousands of her patients with preleukemia and acute myeloid leukemia. She met with President Biden to plan the Cancer Moonshot and with President Bill Clinton for 3-day Breakthroughs in Science and Technology Retreat. Describing her groundbreaking ideas in the highly acclaimed bestselling book, THE FIRST CELL: And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last, Raza is bent upon shifting the treatment focus from trying to kill every last cancer cell to finding the first and preventing cancer from developing altogether. Raza is the Founder and Director of the Scientific Advisory Board of The First Cell Therapeutics Inc (TFCTx). The owner of thousands of books in Urdu and English, she co-authored GHALIB: Epistemologies of Elegance, dedicated to translation and interpretation of poetry.
Dr. Christopher Bartley is an early career Principal Investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) where he serves as the Chief of the Translational Immunopsychiatry Unit (TIU) and a member of the editorial board of Biological Psychiatry.
Dr. Bartley received his PhD with distinction from Yale University and subsequently graduated cum laude from Yale School of Medicine, where he was awarded the Selma and Karl Folkers Prize for excellence in biomedical research. During his residency in Adult Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), he was awarded the Outstanding Resident Award by the NIMH. Upon completion of his residency training, he was awarded the Edwin F. Alston Award for Leadership in Psychiatry by the UCSF Department of Psychiatry.
He continued at UCSF as a research fellow in behavioral immunology supported by a Hanna H. Gray Fellowship (Howard Hughes Medical Institute). During his research fellowship, he was an inaugural recipient of the Deeda Blair Research Initiative for Disorders of the Brain Award (Foundation of the National Institute of Health) to support the development of his immunopsychiatry research program.
In 2022, he joined NIMH and founded the TIU, a reverse translational research program that employs basic, translational, clinical, and bioinformatic approaches to identify molecules, cells, and circuits implicated in neuropsychiatric illness.
Psychiatric illnesses appear to arise from distributed network dysfunction rather than focal lesions of the brain. Accordingly, one focus of the TIU is antibody repertoire profiling, as antibodies are capable of inducing precise yet distributed neural lesions. By integrating antigen identity with single-cell, anatomic, and circuit expression data, the TIU is working to uncover and model the neurophysiological processes that underlie neuropsychiatric illness—starting with psychotic spectrum disorders.
John H. Sampson, MD, PhD, MHSc, MBA
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Dean, School of Medicine
TIME | EVENT | LOCATION |
9:30 AM – 12:30 PM | Registration | Atrium |
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM | Lunch Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sampson | Elevation Ballroom |
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Oral Presentations: Immunology & Microbiology General Medicine & Physiology | Elevation Ballroom Blue Spruce/Aspen |
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM | Coffee Break | Atrium |
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM | Disability in Medicine: Dr. Meeks Bioethics: Dr. Boyd (Session A) | Disability in Medicine: Elevation Ballroom Bioethics: Blue Spruce/Aspen |
4:45 PM – 5:45 PM | PSTP Panel (Session A) | Elevation Ballroom |
5:45 PM – 7:15 PM | Dinner Keynote Speaker: Dr. Bartley | Elevation Ballroom |
7:15 PM – 7:30 PM | Poster set up | Forest/Atrium |
7:30 PM – 9:00 PM | Poster Session I & Happy Hour Sponsored by FAER | Forest/Atrium |
TIME | EVENT | LOCATION |
7:30 AM – 8:30 AM | Breakfast | Elevation Ballroom |
8:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Funday Activities | Various |
11:30 PM – 1:00 PM | Lunch PSTP Networking | Elevation Ballroom |
1:00 PM – 1:45 PM | PSTP Panel (Session B) | Elevation Ballroom Blue Spruce/Aspen |
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Keynote: Dr. Mentzer | Elevation Ballroom |
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM | ASPA Presentation | Elevation Ballroom |
3:30 PM – 4:00 PM | Coffee Break | Atrium |
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Disability in Medicine: Dr. Meeks Bioethics: Dr. Boyd (Session B) | Disability in Medicine: Blue Spruce/Aspen Bioethics: Elevation Ballroom |
5:15 PM – 6:45 PM | Poster Session II & Happy Hour | Forest/Atrium |
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM | Dinner Keynote Speaker: Dr. Raza | Elevation Ballroom |
TIME | EVENT | LOCATION |
8:30 AM – 9:30 AM | Breakfast | Elevation Ballroom |
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM | Oral Presentations: Bioengineering & Medical Imaging Cancer Biology | Blue Spruce/Aspen Elevation Ballroom |
10:45 AM – 11:45 AM | Oral Presentations: Neuroscience Molecular Biology & Pharmacology | Blue Spruce/Aspen Elevation Ballroom |
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM | Lunch & Closing Remarks | Elevation Ballroom |