Joellen M. Schildkraut, Ph.D., MPH, is a
professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public
Health. Dr. Schildkraut is a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control
Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia. Schildkraut received both her MPH and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her
doctoral dissertation and early publications focused on the genetic overlap
between breast and ovarian cancer through an examination of family history.
This work indirectly contributed to the discovery of BRCA1 and BRCA2, the two
highly penetrant genes associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian
cancers. Schildkraut has studied for much of her career the genetic
epidemiology of ovarian, breast, and brain tumors, for which she has utilized
innovative technologies and data science approaches to reconsider the biology
and epidemiology of these diseases.
Siddhartha P. Kar studied medicine at the
Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Government Medical College and trained at the Sassoon
General Hospitals in Pune, India. He holds an MPH degree from the University of
Texas at Houston in the US and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in the
UK, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar between 2012 and 2015. His
scientific training has also included research stints at the MD Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston, Texas (2010–2012) and as a Junior Research Fellow at
Homerton College, Cambridge (2015–2019). Siddhartha was awarded a Future
Leaders Fellowship by UKRI in 2020 which enabled him to establish his
independent research group within the Medical Research Council (MRC)
Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol. He returned to
Cambridge as a Group Leader at the Early Cancer Institute in the Department of
Oncology in March 2023. The Kar group primarily studies inherited or germline
genetic variation and leverages this variation to investigate the causes,
consequences, and correlates of key somatic or tumor genomic aberrations
responsible for driving cancer development and progression.
