Chris Hoffman, PhD, IT and Operational Director
Chris comes to the Forum from Research IT at UC Berkeley, where he served as Associate Director, leading a set of research computing services and projects designed to facilitate research across the Berkeley campus. Most recently, these efforts have focused on the complex challenges related to research involving highly sensitive data. Chris was program director for the campus-wide Research Data Management Program, a partnership with the university library that helps researchers with their data management challenges across the research lifecycle. Chris also led the Informatics Services Program which develops and manages software for campus museums and research projects. Earlier, he served as Director of Information Systems in Berkeley’s Graduate Division, overseeing a complex portfolio of graduate student information systems. Chris continues to lead work around visualization environments and services for UC Berkeley. Chris received a PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley performing archaeological research on the social and technical dimensions of metallurgy in prehistoric Spain.
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Margot Yann, PhD, Lead Data Scientist
Margot Yann, Ph.D. is Senior Computational and Data Science Research Specialist at the Forum. Margot did her initial training in Beijing China in Computer Science & Engineering, and completed her doctorate and post-doctorate in Toronto Canada, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Margot has extensive experience in research and applications using Deep Neural Networks, Bayesian Networks, Multiagent Learning, and Game Theory—among other areas and processes at the forefront of artificial intelligence. She has worked with Academic and Federal institutions in the UK, Canada and US acting as Principal investigator (PI) & Co-PI on projects focused on healthcare. Over the last ten years, Margot has worked with top tier healthcare providers with extensive industry experience in the US. She served as a director of Data Science in a Fortune 500 company and health-tech start-up. Margot has hands-on big-data experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Electronic Health Records (EHR) both in industry and in academia. She had also taught Computer Science courses at the University of Toronto. She has been a member of Women in Engineering in IEEE, and professional committees of distinguished computer conferences such as IJCAI and AAAI. Margot brings a wide background and expertise in AI & ML in healthcare and is striving to help our community reach its goals of better health outcomes.
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Alicia Jellinek, Program Financial Analyst
Alicia Jellinek is the Program Financial Analyst at the Forum for Collaborative Research. Alicia served as purchasing coordinator for six yearsfor the ERSO Department, a central administrative hub for the College of Engineering, College of Environmental Design, Computing, Data Science and Society, and various other large research Institutes and Centers at UC Berkeley. She also worked at UC Berkeley Student Affairs as a Buyer 2 for three years. In this role, Alicia provided full scope of procurement. Alicia has also worked for Chevron as an Administrative Assistant working in ITC procurement, ITNW, procurement operations and as part of the contracting team. Alicia has extensive experience in training, instructing and advising clients on University, Federal and State policies and procedures.
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Christopher Berry, Senior Events and Operations Manager
Christopher Berry is the Senior Events and Operations Manager at the Forum for Collaborative Research. Christopher has worked in the events industry for almost 11 years and specifically in the public health arena for the last three years, working for the National Institutes of Health, Center for Scientific Review, and the National Alliance of State and Territorial Aids Directors he has found his niche in the events world. Christopher studied Business Administration at Capella University and is now looking to complete his Certified Meeting Professional Program while diversifying his event knowledge to a global view. Christopher brings a wide array of expertise to this position, from working in the social market to corporate and working in some of the most notable venues in the DC market he is known to streamline the meeting planning process to make it more palatable for colleagues, vendors, and attendees; all while wearing a smile. He looks forward to the future of the Forum for Collaborative Research events program and his future with the University of Berkeley School of Public Health.
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Donnice Butler, Senior Administrative Assistant
Donnice is the Senior Administrative Assistant at the Forum for Collaborative Research. She brings a comprehensive background in higher education operations, business administration, and global program management. Donnice spent several years overseeing faculty operations for Howard University School of Law, where she supported the law faculty, led exam administration, and oversaw the study abroad program to Cape Town, South Africa. During this time, she introduced many innovative solutions to improve day to day operations and grew recruitment efforts for the study abroad program. Seeing the impact international education had on students, Donnice developed an interest in creating learning opportunities abroad and pursued a Master of International Business from Florida International University where she studied global operations and foreign stakeholder relations. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Trinity University (DC).
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Robin Schaefer, Post Doctoral Scholar
Robin Schaefer, Post Doctoral Scholar
Robin Schaefer is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Forum for Collaborative Research. Robin has experience in both policy and research and has worked on a range of global health issues, including sexual and reproductive health and malnutrition. Prior to joining the Forum, Robin worked with the Global HIV, Hepatitis, and STIs Programmes of the World Health Organization. In that position, he supported to the development and adoption of global guidance for HIV prevention, particularly for service delivery and new biomedical prevention products. He also previously worked at Action Against Hunger UK where he led a priority setting process for global child malnutrition research. He received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases from Imperial College London. For his PhD, he conducted a range of stakeholder consultations and data analyses to develop a framework for HIV prevention interventions and monitoring. Additionally, completed a Master in Research (MRes) and Master of Public Health (MPH) at Imperial College London and undergraduate studies in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford. Robin is keen to use his experience towards translating research into policy to improve lives for all.
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Azza Karrar, MSc, PhD, Senior Research Associate
Azza Karrar is a Senior Research Associate with the Forum for collaborative Research. Azza Has extensive experience working on immunopathology of liver disease. Before joining the Forum, Azza worked at Inova Health Systems, Beatty Liver Research Program as a Research Scientist/PI for 9 years. She led the translational efforts focusing on immunopathogenesis, biomarkers and therapeutic targets of NASH related-liver fibrosis. She laid the groundwork for the proposed research by developing the immunology lab, hypotheses, rationale, goals and budgets of projects. She orchestrated all the communication internally and externally with collaborators/clients and stakeholders. She then joined the FDA, CDRH as Biologist to provide regulatory consultation on premarket approval application, product development protocols and post market applications. Azza has a Doctor of Medical Science (PhD) from the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden focusing on immunopathogenic mechanisms of autoimmune liver diseases (Autoimmune Hepatitis, Primary Biliary Cholangitis, and Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis). She studied liver peripheral tolerance, liver allograft rejection and mechanisms of endothelial/epithelial cells death during liver disease. She then focused her postdoctoral fellowship studying mechanisms of injury of biliary epithelial cells in PSC. She started her career earlier by focusing on the Public Health of infectious diseases at the Tropical Medicine Research Institute, Sudan, Africa. She will help the Forum in their mission to lead and foster collaborations, scientific innovation, and new drug development.
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Mitchell Leus, MPH, Research Associate
Mitchell is a Research Associate at the Forum for Collaborative Research, where he manages the HBV Forum and Policy Series project on the role of adult vaccination in U.S. hepatitis B elimination. He is a double UC Berkeley School of Public Health alum, earning his BA in Public Health and MPH in Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology through the accelerated 4+1 BA/MPH program. He was a Graduate Student Instructor for the Forum's regulatory science and drug development course, in addition to teaching courses in biostatistics, health policy, and introductory neuroscience. He has experience in the community health of infectious diseases, having interned at the Asian Liver Center, Stanford University conducting hepatitis B health education among the Asian American community and previously worked as a PrEP Navigator at a community health center in San Francisco. Since joining the team, he has embraced the HBV Forum's mission of facilitating collaborative research to support development of curative hepatitis B therapies to benefit patients, families, and communities worldwide.
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Zach Rooney, MSCS, Research Associate
Zach is a Research Associate at the Forum. He has a bachelor's degree in physiology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a master's degree in computer science from Northeastern University. He has gained knowledge of several programming languages, computer systems, and computer networking building a diverse portfolio with data structures, algorithms, and computer systems examples. He brings experience in Java, Python, C, Swift, and MIPS as well. Zach interned with Pancreum, a biomedical device start up, where he developed a front-end app for iOS and Android in order to demonstrate how a new type of insulin pump would work. For several years he also served as a physical therapy aid. While at Northeastern he was lead TA creating lesson plans and overseeing both student and grade management. Zach enjoys helping people whether it is helping a coworker or working on global health issues that will improve the quality of life for someone.
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Logan Donaldson, MPH, Research Associate
Logan is a Research Associate with the HIV Forum. He completed his Master of Public Health in Epidemiology at Ohio State’s College of Public Health in 2022 and his B.S. in Public Health Sociology there in 2020. As an undergraduate Logan volunteered as an Ohio State wellness ambassador, working with students to find resources related to tobacco and other drug addiction/reliance. In graduate school, Logan interned for Jackson County Health Department in Jackson, Ohio, working on COVID-19 data visualization and mosquito surveillance. Logan is interested in a career in disease modeling and has previously studied PrEP related risk compensation among men who have sex with men.
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Sehyr Khan, BA, Research Associate
Sehyr is a Research Associate with the Liver Forum, PSC Forum, and Ocular Diseases Forum. She has a bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Wellesley College. During her undergraduate career, she interned for the Gabrieli Lab at MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research where she worked projects centered on learning in students who experience trouble reading. She then interned for the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachussetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, where she worked on social determinants of substance use. She conducted statistical analyses of population patterns linking adolescent risk-taking and substance use in RStudio, which inspired her to pursue public health. Sehyr is interested in a career in clinical research, biostatistics, and healthcare consulting. She is driven by collaborating with motivated, intelligent, and passionate people.
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Shilpa Mitra, MPH, Research Associate
Shilpa is a Research Associate with the COVID-19 Project and TAVI Forum. She has a Bachelor of Science in Marine Biology from Rutgers University—New Brunswick and a Master of Public Health degree from the George Washington University. During her graduate education, she interned at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, where she developed an outreach plan to support the Myeloma Link program in providing financial assistance and healthcare information to the underserved, underinsured Black/African American population in DC with myeloma. She also provided recreational therapy assistance to children with special needs and long-term illnesses at the Children’s Specialized Hospital. Her graduate thesis detailed a health promotion program plan, aiming to increase vaccination rates to combat childhood pneumonia among the rural population of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Shilpa is interested in a career in infectious disease epidemiology, global health, and program development.
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Interns and Graduate Student Researchers (GSRs)
Alessi Ayvaz, Student Intern
Alessi Ayvaz is a Public Health undergraduate student at UC Berkeley interested in epidemiology and biostatistics as well as health policy and regulatory science. She has worked as a writing tutor for UC Berkeley’s Student Learning Center, a youth representative to Congressman Harley Rouda of the 48th Congressional District, and in various positions for the Daily Californian’s night editing department. She has also fully designed and taught a summer course for high school students, and she currently volunteers as a Crisis Counselor for Crisis Text Line. She is passionate about health equity and information accessibility along with the interplay between public policy decisions and public health outcomes.
Jeffrey Murray, MD, MPH, Program Advisor
Jeffrey S. Murray, MD, MPH is a Program Advisor at the Forum for Collaborative Research and the 1st recipient of the John G. Bartlett Award for "Catalyzing Clinical Research to Improve Global Health" sponsored by the Forum for Collaborative Research. He served as Deputy Director of the Division of Antiviral Products at the US Food and Drug Administration. Being with the agency for over twenty-nine years, he made significant contributions on three major areas of innovation that revolutionized treatment and prevention for infectious diseases: viral load as an endpoint for antiretroviral trials; historical controls for hepatitis C direct-acting antiviral agents’ trials; and most recently - exploring the use of a counterfactual estimate of HIV incidence for use as a control in HIV prevention trials. He helped guide the Division throughout his years of service, applying the lessons learned from HIV to subsequent viral illnesses, most recently, COVID-19.
He has co-authored many publications and FDA guidance documents for HIV drug development, HIV fixed-dose combinations for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the development of drugs for the treatment of Influenza and Chronic Hepatitis C.
Dr. Murray, a longtime collaborator and friend of the Forum for Collaborative Research, has been instrumental in the HIV, HCV, HBV and TAVI Forum initiatives, including meta-analysis of CMV DNAemia as a surrogate marker in transplantation patients, standardization of HCV response nomenclature, innovation in HIV clinical trial design to accommodate new drug resistance information, and monitoring for safety in long-term treatment.
John Sninsky, PhD, Program Advisor
John Sninsky, PhD is a Program Advisor at the Forum and a Visiting Professor in the Division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology at the Berkeley School of Public Health. John is also a Translational Science and Medicine consultant with a comprehensive and deep understanding of the development and application of pioneering molecular procedures to the translation of research-grade biomarker assays into clinical-grade clinically adopted diagnostic tests. Following a faculty appointment at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, John joined the team at Cetus that developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and applied the powerful technology to clinical virology diagnostics, notably HIV. He has held senior management positions at Roche, Celera, Quest Diagnostics and CareDx.
John is the author of more than 110 scientific papers including advanced methods in molecular biology, application of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to virology and cancer, and genome-wide genetic association studies for multiple common, complex diseases. John advises commercial translation efforts at Stanford University (SPARK) and University of California, San Francisco (CATALYST) and lectures in Diagnostic Regulatory Science at University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of Coronavirus Standards Working Group, an organization focused on developing molecular standards for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). John also serves as a technical advisor for Stop the Spread, with a focus on diagnostics.
Consulting Partners
Dara Padwo-Audick, MA, CRC, Creative Strategies Media LLC, President
David Williams, MBA, MedPharma Partners, www.mppllc.com
INTERNSHIPS AND FELLOWSHIPS
The Forum offers undergraduate and graduate internships as well as post-graduate fellowships to trainees interested in careers in public health and clinical science. For more information on the Forum internship and fellowship programs, please click here.
The Forum can not provide individual advice or counseling. For urgent questions and information on HIV, a list of statewide information and counseling phone numbers is available at http://www.thebody.com/index/hotlines/state.html
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