Hosts

• Dr. Dominik Otto, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (host)
• Dr. Zahar Barth-Manzoori, Director, DWIH San Francisco (host)

Dr. Anukram Adhikary

Dr. Anukram Adhikary is an environmental economist who received his Ph.D. in Forestry and Environmental Resources from North Carolina State University, where his dissertation examined institutional performance, leadership, and economic viability in community forest governance across the Himalaya. His work applies advanced econometric methods to understand how forest-dependent communities withstand economic shocks, drawing on fieldwork with hundreds of households across Nepal’s community forest user groups. Before returning to research, he held technical and consulting roles with organizations including the FAO, WWF, and the World Resources Institute, focusing on forest policy, climate adaptation, and natural resource governance. He is now a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at North Carolina State University, working with the USDA Forest Service to evaluate the economic impacts of Hurricane Helene on the Southern forest sector.

Dr. Jitendrapuri Gosai

Dr. Jitendrapuri Gosai is a microbiologist who received his Ph.D. from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India, where he studied quorum sensing, the chemical communication strategy bacteria use to coordinate group behavior, in strains isolated from pigeon pea root nodules. Along the way, he also spent time as a Visiting EMBO Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, using microfluidics and live imaging to study early plant-microbe interactions, and worked in industry as a study director in genetic toxicology. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, where he investigates how gliding bacteria coordinate their movement and self-organize into multicellular structures, work that combines computational biophysics, microbial genetics, and advanced imaging.

Dr. Lisa Harling

Dr. Lisa Harling is a physician-scientist who received her medical doctorate (“Dr. med.”) from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. During her medical training, she completed a research exchange in gastroenterology and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and gained hands-on clinical experience ranging from cardiology telemetry to COVID-19 emergency triage. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Aortic Institute at Yale University, working under Prof. Dr. John A. Elefteriades on aortic disease research, supported by a Walter-Benjamin Scholarship from the DFG.

Dr. Jonas Henske

Dr. Jonas Henske is an evolutionary biologist who received his doctorate from Ruhr University Bochum, where he studied chemical communication and mate choice, focusing on the ecology and evolution of orchid bees under the advisement of Dr. Thomas Eltz. His research combines chemical and behavioral ecology with experimental biology, examining how these bees develop and use scent-based signals for communication and reproduction. He is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Ramírez Lab at the University of California, Davis, continuing his work on the chemical ecology of orchid bees.

Dr. Aparajita Mazumdar

Dr. Aparajita Mazumdar is an experimental physicist, who received her Ph.D. from the Homi Bhabha National Institute, India. For her Ph.D., she worked on developing cryogenic particle detectors operating at 10 mK at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She then joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher to work on neutrino physics and dark matter experiments. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, primarily working on fundamental questions about the nature and mass of neutrinos.

Dr. Dennis Noll

When he was young, he loved playing with LEGO, assembling granular building blocks into something much bigger and more complex. That fascination never left him – he just swapped those bricks for something far smaller: elementary particles. His path took him from a PhD at RWTH Aachen to Berkeley Lab, and now to Stanford University, where he trains AI to hunt for those particles in the massive datasets of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The catch? His algorithms don’t just look for what we expect – they uncover structures in the data that nobody ever imagined. From plastic bricks to the building blocks of the universe, please welcome Dennis Noll to the GAIN Science Slam 2026!

Dr. Verima Pereira

Dr. Verima Pereira is a Spatial Biology and Translational Oncology Scientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the San Francisco VA Health Care System. Her research leverages spatial transcriptomics, single-cell genomics, and multi-omics approaches to uncover mechanisms of tumor heterogeneity, therapeutic resistance, and biomarker discovery in hepatocellular and prostate cancers. She develops patient-derived organoid models and immunotherapy platforms to advance precision oncology and translate molecular insights into clinically relevant therapeutic strategies. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the UCSF CCMBM Junior Development Award and the Cancer Cell Map Initiative Fellowship.

Dr. Pedro Pessoa

Pedro Pessoa is a postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Center for Single Molecule Biophysics. He holds a PhD in Physics, where his research focused on mathematical physics and Bose–Einstein condensation. As a postdoctoral researcher, he develops probabilistic and AI-based methods to uncover complex biological dynamics from noisy experimental data. His research spans gene and protein kinetics, quantitative microbiology, and time-series forecasting. Today, he will present his work on cellular memory.