Dr. Hui-Qi Qu is a Principal Scientist at the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He received his clinical training in internal medicine in China. From 2003 to 2010, he worked on the genetics of type 1 diabetes and neonatal diabetes at McGill University, Canada. His research resulted in the identification of novel type 1 diabetes (T1D) loci, a novel gene critical for pancreas development, and the elucidation of molecular mechanisms of diabetes. He worked as an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, from 2010 to 2016, where his studies provided significant insights into insulin resistance-related disorders in the Mexican American population. Dr. Hui-Qi Qu’s research interests include the genetics of common human diseases, diabetes, precision medicine, and translational research.
Dr. Hakon Hakonarson is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is a physician–scientist and director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Applied Genomics (CAG), a high throughput, highly automated genotyping facility founded to identify the genetic causes of complex medical disorders in children, such as autism and cancer, to develop new therapies. Dr. Hakonarson completed his Ph.D. and M.D. degrees at the University of Iceland School of Medicine in Reykjavík. He has served previously in several senior posts in the biopharmaceutical industry, including as the director of Inflammatory and Pharmacogenomics Research, the vice president of Clinical Sciences and Development at deCODE Genetics, and chief scientific officer of its subsidiary, Encode. Dr. Hakonarson has also been the principal and co-principal investigator on several NIH-sponsored grants, and he has published numerous high-impact papers on genomic discoveries and their translations. With over 10 years of experience in pioneering genomics research and genome-wide mapping and association studies, Dr. Hakonarson has intimate knowledge of the complexities of large-scale genomics projects and has put together the necessary infrastructure and workflow processes to unravel these complexities.
