Scientific Advisory Board
The governance of HudsonAlpha is carried out through the actions of two boards, the board of directors and the scientific advisory board. The HudsonAlpha Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) supports the institute’s founding mission by reviewing and advising on scientific and academic activities.
A team of uniquely skilled and internationally known investigators serves in this capacity to ensure a world-class standard. The president selects SAB members with guidance from the SAB, faculty, and members of the board of directors.
Dr. Siobhan Brady is a Professor in the Department of Plant Biology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Research Scholar. Brady received her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2005, and was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University from 2005 – 2008.
Dr. Scott Jackson is the Genetic Pipeline Design Lead at Bayer Crop Science. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed by a fellowship at the University of Minnesota. He has held faculty positions at Purdue University (2001-2011) and the University of Georgia where he was the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Plant Functional Genomics (2011-2019). He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Georgia. At the University of Georgia he led the Center for Applied Genetic Technologies and was involved in many campus-wide activities.
Dr. Todd Jones is a Distinguished Laureate and Pillar Leader for Ag Equity Initiatives at Corteva Agriscience™, located in Johnston, Iowa, USA. The Ag Equity Initiatives are collaborative projects, usually with external funding, that are directed at improving the lives and productivity of smallholder farmers. Dr. Jones joined Corteva (then DuPont Pioneer) in December 2010 after 7 years with BASF Plant Science in Research Triangle Park, NC, as the Tech Center Leader for Cell Biology. Prior to that, he was the Director of Forest Biotechnology at Weyerhaeuser Company in Federal Way, Washington. Dr. Jones began his career as a scientist at DuPont in 1989. He received his Ph.D. in Plant Developmental Biology from the University of California at Davis in 1988.
Dr. Sharon Plon is a board-certified medical geneticist and a longstanding researcher in the areas of cancer genetics, including the discovery of new cancer susceptibility genes and early implementation of genomic testing in medicine. At Texas Children’s Hospital, she founded the Cancer Genetics Clinic in 1995 and is Director of the Texas Children’s Cancer Genetics and Genomics Program.
Dr. Val Sheffield is the director of medical genetics for the University of Iowa and a faculty investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his bachelor of science degree in zoology from Brigham Young University and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sheffield completed a pediatric residency, a medical genetics fellowship and postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Richard Spritz is founder and Director of the Human Medical Genetics and Genomics Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his M.D. from Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Louisa Stark is a Professor of Human Genetics and director of the Genetic Science Learning Center. Her research interests focus on science and health education for students and educators from the K-12 level through graduate and medical education as well as patients and members of the lay public.
Jason Williams is Assistant Director, External Collaborations, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center, where he works to spread hands-on biology education internationally. Jason is also the founder of LifeSciTrainers.org – a global effort to promote a community of practice among professionals who develop short-format training for life scientists.
Dr. Barbara Wold is the Bren professor of molecular biology and director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech. She began working on genome structure and gene regulation during embryo development for her Ph.D. thesis at Caltech, and developed ways to assay cis-regulatory element function during postdoctoral work at Columbia.