Dr. Elliott received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Franklin and Marshall College and went on to do his Genetics Ph.D. training at Thomas Jefferson University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His thesis involved studying the role of CREB-binding protein in germline and stem cell development. Dr. Elliott conducted his postdoctoral training in the cancer stem cell department at the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomics in San Diego, CA., where he studied potential drug targets for chemotherapeutic resistance and identified the first mitochondrial ABC transporter implicated in cancer drug resistance.
Scientists
Phillip Gray, Ph.D.
Director of Genomic Services
Dr. Gray joined Ambry Genetics in 2007 and currently serves as Director of Genomic Services. Dr. Gray began working with next generation sequencing technologies over 5 years ago and has expertise on several sequencing platforms and sample preparation/enrichment technologies. As an early user of these new genomics technologies, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Ambry’s Genomic Services. Throughout his career, Dr. Gray has held positions at Invitrogen/Life Technologies, Booz Allen Hamilton and Abbott Molecular. Dr. Gray received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Georgia State University and received his Ph.D. in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Xiang Li, Ph.D.
Director of Bioinformatics Development
Dr. Li received a B.S. in Microbiology from Nankai University, and a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from University of Illinois at Chicago. He did his post-doctoral training on biological network and Systems Biology in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He has more than 10 years of experience and numerous publications in the machine learning and AI. Dr. Li's Ph.D. work used computational biophysics and supervised (machine) learning algorithm to distinguish native protein structures from non-native structures. Recently, his research has focused on the classification of functional variants versus non-functional variants in personal genomes. Dr. Li led a bioinformatics team helping Ambry Genetics launch the Clinical Diagnostic Exome™ sequencing, which marked the first time the exome sequencing had been made available on a clinical basis. He is now leading the Bioinformatics Department of Ambry Genetics to develop ground-breaking bioinformatics infrastructure and pipelines, which are transforming the landscape of the clinical genetics industry in the post-genomic era.
Hansook Chong, Ph.D.
R&D Scientist
Dr. Chong joined Ambry Genetics in July 2010 as an R&D scientist. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.S. in Biochemistry and received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of California, Irvine (UCI). As a recipient of the NIH Bioinformatics Training Grant and a student of the Institute of Genomics and Bioinformatics at UCI, Dr. Chong specialized in bioinformatics. Her research has focused on genome-wide analyses of nuclear receptor FXR and proteins regulating cholesterol and fatty acid synthesis. Dr. Chong has been active in molecular genetics research for more than six years and has published numerous scientific articles on the genetics of fatty acid and cholesterol regulation, as well as NextGen sequencing analysis methods.
Felicia Hernandez, Ph.D.
R&D Scientist
Dr. Hernandez received her undergraduate degree in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from the University of California, Los Angeles and went on to do her Ph.D. training in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Irvine. Her thesis involved the development of novel assays to elucidate the dynamic protein-protein interactions that occur during herpes simplex virus type 1 infection and to probe an important structural property of a key regulatory protein necessary for viral replication. Dr. Hernandez conducted her postdoctoral training in the Department of Immunology and Microbial Science at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, where she studied a new class of anti-viral drugs, which target a cellular host factor and are effective at inhibiting hepatitis C virus replication.
Hong Lu, Ph.D.
Bioinformatics Scientist
Dr. Lu graduated from Nankai University, Tianjin, China with B.S. in Microbiology and received his M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Iowa State University. As a bioinformatics scientist at Ambry, Dr. Lu specializes in analyzing next-generation sequencing data and designing and managing the database. His current research focuses on the pipeline generation for detecting potentially heritable disease-related DNA variants. Dr. Lu completed his training in the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). Prior to Ambry, he served as a research assistant at PLEXdb.org and PlantGDB.org
Hsiao-Mei Lu, Ph.D.
Bioinformatics Scientist
Dr. Lu received a B.A. from National Chiao Tung University, and a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a bioinformatics scientist at Ambry Genetics with a focus on the research and development of Ambry’s bioinformatics pipeline for next generation sequencing for clinical diagnostics. Dr. Lu did her post-doctoral training in the Department of Mathematics and Center for Complex Biological Systems at the University of California, Irvine. She has worked in diverse research areas, including allosteric protein communication, protein folding and drug design and has more than 10 years of experience in developing algorithms for scientific computing with mathematical modeling, machine learning, data mining and parallel computing techniques.