Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis earned her MD and PhD degrees from Ural State Medical Academy, Russia. She completed her postdoctoral training and fellowship sponsored by the Lymphoma Research Foundation, at the University of Minnesota, USA. By integrating state-of-the-art techniques such as next-generation sequencing, she made numerous biomedical discoveries studying normal and pathological conditions at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels. Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis served as an Assistant Professor at the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Medicine. Her laboratory research focused on the identification of biomarkers of immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome in HIV/AIDS patients after initiation of antiretroviral therapy. She collaborated with the Division of Hematology-Oncology and Transplantation, on complications of immune reconstitution in cancer patients after various conditioning therapies and hematopoietic stem cell-transplantation regimens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis led genomic sequencing and surveillance of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the State of Nevada. She was awarded a COVID-19 Associate grant by the Association of Public Health Laboratories and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis serves as a genomics specialist at the Newborn Molecular Analysis Unit, providing expertise to public health newborn screening genomic program.
Daniel Fang earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry, with a
concentration in biochemistry, from Willamette University, USA. Over the course
of his degree, he conducted organic synthesis research for the clinical
treatment of retinitis pigmentosa. Since graduating, he has worked in various
clinical roles, such as a medical scribe and medical volunteer, with future
goals to pursue a degree in medicine. Mr. Fang has a specific interest in clinical
genetics and genomics, anesthesiology, and emergency medicine as potential
specialties. In 2022, Mr. Fang secured a highly competitive, laboratory
research fellowship, funded by Ronald H. Laessig and organized by the Association of
Public Health Laboratories and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (APHL/CDC).
Through the program, Mr. Fang has provided proteomic services to the newborn
screening department at the Alabama State Public Health Laboratory. In
addition, he will continue to validate newly developed screening assays to
expand the laboratory’s capabilities to screen for congenital metabolic and
lysosomal storage disorders.
Dr. Hesham Mohei earned his MD degree from the Zagazig Faculty of Medicine, Egypt. He is an early-stage research investigator with a broad background in biomedical research and specific expertise in multiomics of immune suppression. He joined the University of Minnesota, Department of Medicine (USA) in 2018. He worked on transcriptomic biomarker pathways associated with mortality in HIV-infected patients with cryptococcal meningitis and identified 12 molecular pathways that were dysregulated during the disease course. In collaboration with physicians from Moffitt Cancer Center, he assessed the immune responses toward viral antigens in bone marrow recipients, with the goal of diagnosing post-transplantation immune recovery complications. Dr. Mohei accepted a postdoctoral research associate position at the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in 2020. He used mass cytometry proteomics to identify the leukemic stem cells self-renewal-associated signaling program in a murine model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Currently, Dr. Mohei conducts state-of-the-art experimentation studying solid tumor microenvironment with a specific focus on tumor-associated B cell immunity and mitochondrial DNA mutations. He works on the identification of tumor-associated mitochondria antigens (TAMA) as a precision drug target for dendritic cell-based immunization using pure mitochondria lysates to control tumor growth.
