Vikram Pattanayak has been studying the off-target activity of gene editors since 2005 and has published on the specificity of homing endonucleases, zinc finger nucleases, TALENs, and Cas9. He has developed comprehensive in vitro methods for off-target nomination, including ONE-seq, and he has used rational protein engineering to design gene editor variants with improved specificity. He is currently an Assistant in Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School. In addition to his basic research interests, he is a board-certified clinical pathologist and medical director of the Histocompatibility (HLA) Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a PhD.in Chemistry from Harvard University in 2011 and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 2013. He completed residency training in clinical pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2017 and completed an intercalated fellowship in molecular genetic pathology at Harvard Medical School in 2016.

Martin Aryee develops bioinformatics analysis methods and computational tools for genomic assays. He is an Associate Professor in Department of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), and Director of Hematologic Malignancies, Biostatistics and Computational Biology at DFCI. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute and holds a secondary appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he teaches a graduate course in statistical genetics. He has developed widely used bioinformatics tools for diverse applications including genome-wide profiling of DNA methylation, 3D genome structure and gene editing activity. He also collaborates closely with the lab of Keith Joung on computational methods for the study of CRISPR editor off-targets, including work on analysis pipelines for the GUIDE-seq and ONE-seq assays. He earned an M.Eng. in electronic engineering at Imperial College London, an M.Sc. in Neuroscience at King’s College London, and his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. John Iafrate is the Deputy Chair of Pathology at Mass General Hospital and Professor of Pathology at Harvard University. He has been a leader in developing and implementing diagnostic technologies in the fields of genomics and transcriptomics. As a post-doctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital he discovered germline copy number variation utilizing DNA microarrays. As a principal investigator at MGH, his laboratory helped usher in the era of multiplexed genotyping, culminating with the development of Anchored Multiplex PCR for targeted DNA and RNA sequencing. He collaborated with Dr. Joung in the application of the technology to CRISPR off-target assessment (GUIDE-seq). He has been integrally involved in the development of personalized medicine in cancer, including for ALK and ROS1-positive lung cancers. John is a serial entrepreneur who founded ArcherDx (acquired by Enzymatics), Boston Lighthouse (a cancer genomic software platform company acquired by Oncoclincas Brasil), and Hunter Biodiscovery.

J. Keith Joung is a leading innovator in the fields of gene and epigenetic editing. He is currently the Robert B. Colvin, M.D. Endowed Chair in Pathology, and a Pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and a Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. He is also a member of the Center for Cancer Research and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at MGH. Joung has been a pioneer in the development of important technologies for targeted gene editing and epigenetic editing of human cells and his group has led the field in the development of gene editor off-target assays such as GUIDE-seq and ONE-seq. He has received numerous awards including the 2022 Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Medicine, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Project R01 Award, the MGH Research Scholar Award, an NIH R35 MIRA (Maximizing Investigators Research Award), election into the American Association of University Pathologists and designation as a “Highly Cited Researcher” for six consecutive years (2016-2021) by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics. Joung has co-founded and advised multiple biotechnology companies, including Beam Therapeutics, Chroma Medicine, Editas Medicine, Nvelop Therapeutics, Pairwise Plants, and Verve Therapeutics. He holds a Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.