ACHRI Research Retreat
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Stephen Gilman
Dr. Stephen E. Gilman, ScD, is a Senior Investigator in the Intramural Research Program of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, where he serves as Chief of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Branch of the Division of Intramural Population Health Research; he is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Gilman investigates the emergence and persistence of socioeconomic and race/ethnic inequalities in common mental disorders over the life course. Dr. Gilman’s work demonstrates the importance of the childhood environment for neurodevelopment and the subsequent onset and recurrence of psychiatric illness in adults.
Dr. Gilman’s current studies address the development origins of inequalities as early as the prenatal period including the role of stress-related physiology during pregnancy in children’s neurodevelopment as well as the developmental origins of suicide mortality. Dr. Gilman has investigated long-term outcomes of depression including social inequalities in anti-depressant treatment outcomes and the physical health consequences of depression including mortality. Dr. Gilman is co-investigator of the New England Family Study, a three-generation cohort of individuals born in the early 1960’s, their parents, and their children. Dr. Gilman received his Doctor of Science degree in Health and Social Behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health and post-doctoral training in Behavioral Medicine from Brown Medical School.
Dr. Jeremy Reiter
Dr. Jeremy Reiter, MD, PhD, is professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Reiter’s lab aims to reveal how cellular antenna interprets the signals required for normal development and homeostasis, and how malfunctions in the antenna contribute to cancer and other important human diseases. Dr. Reiter’s team illuminates how the lipid and protein composition of the cilium is generated to allow it to function as a specialized signaling organelle, and some of the ways in which altering ciliary function causes diseases as diverse as neural tube defects, inherited forms of obesity and polycystic kidney disease.
For his thesis work with Dr. Didier Stainier, Dr. Reiter identified genetic regulators of heart and gut development. During a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Bill Skarnes at UC Berkeley, Dr. Reiter developed gene editing technology to explore mammalian development. The work from his independent lab has helped reveal that primary cilia, small antennae-like structures present on almost all human cell types, are sensors of diverse intercellular cues. Their work has also shown that cancer cells can be ciliated and addicted to their cilia for uncontrolled proliferation. Dr. Jeremy Reiter, earned his MD and PhD at University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Sandy Davidge
Dr. Sandy Davidge, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute and a professor at the University of Alberta. Dr. Davidge is also the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Maternal and Perinatal Cardiovascular Health, a Fellow in the Canadian Academy of Health Science and the incoming Chair for the Maternal, Infant, Child, Youth Research Network. Dr. Davidge’s research program studies cardiovascular function as it relates to complications in pregnancy (preeclampsia and maternal aging) and developmental origins of adult cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Davidge serves on many national and international grant panels and is currently on the editorial board for the Biology of Sex Differences and American Journal of Physiology. Dr. Sandy Davidge, PhD, received her PhD from the University of Vermont and completed her postdoctoral fellowship training at the Magee-Womens Research Institute in Pittsburgh.