Terry Riss
Promega Corporation (Lead Instructor)

Dr. Terry Riss started the Cell Biology program at Promega Corporation in 1990 and held several R&D and Project Management positions since. Dr. Riss managed development of cell viability, cytotoxicity, apoptosis, and protease assay systems and also lead efforts to identify and promote multiplexing of cell-based assays to determine the mechanism of cell death. Dr. Riss now serves as Senior Product Specialist, Cell Health involved in outreach educational training activities. Dr. Riss regularly participates in NIH study sections reviewing HTS grants and is co-editor of the cell culture assays section of the Assay Guidance Manual hosted by NIH.

Lisa Minor
In Vitro Strategies, LLC

Lisa Minor is President of In Vitro Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm involved in assay development and screening strategy, technology evaluation and development, and product marketability assessment. Prior to this position, she was a long term employee of J&J. She is experienced in drug discovery including target validation, assay development, high throughput and safety profiling. At J&J, she participated in several technology development and evaluation opportunities resulting in marketed products. Among these are the Seahorse Metabolic profiling instrument, Quantigene mRNA detection and collaborated with MDS Sciex and Corning to validate their cell-based label-free impedance systems for GPCRs. She is a past member of the board for the Society for Biomolecular Sciences (SBS now SLAS) is a Scientific Advisor for many meetings and is on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Toxicology Program. She is well recognized in the field of HTS especially for cell-based assays and has published the book Handbook of Assay Development for Drug Discovery.

Geoffrey Bartholomeusz
UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Geoffrey Bartholomeusz (Ph.D.) is an associate professor and Director of the Target Identification and Validation Core in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics at the UT M.D.Anderson cancer center, Houston Texas. M.D.Anderson is a premier cancer center, which is also very accomplished in both basic and translational research focused on enhancing our understanding on the molecular mechanisms of cancer as well as developing novel therapies to treat cancer. Dr. Bartholomeusz research is currently focused on developing 3D models for target identification and validation. Using these models he has identified a potential target that could sensitize tumors to radiation by altering tumor architecture. In addition, as Director of the target identification and validation core he has been responsible to building a very effective standard operational procedure that has resulted in the completion of 80 primary screens over a three year period. This SOP has also been adopted by a few other screening services. Dr. Bartholomeusz's team is now focused on developing 3D cell culture and co-culture models for high throughput siRNA screens with a goal to improve our ability to identify novel targets for the development of effective therapies for cancer. Dr. Bartholomeusz joined M.D.Anderson as a postdoctoral fellow and during his career at this institution has published many papers.

Eric Johnson
WuXi AppTec

Eric Johnson is the Director of Cellular Pharmacology, In Vitro Biology at WuXi AppTec where he is helping to build a laboratory in New Jersey and establish a small team of scientists to develop cellular assays for compound screening and profiling. He acts as the lead biologist on a number of different projects advising both external clients and internal staff regarding design and execution of compound profiling experiments. Eric began his career in industry at GlaxoSmithKline where he developed a series of assays for GPCRs and other target classes for compound profiling. From there, he was recruited to Merck & Co. where he spent more than 8 years developing assays for small molecule and siRNA screens and rose through the ranks to Director of Small Molecule Screening where he led a team of ~25 scientists responsible for all assay development for ultra high-throughput screening campaigns including primary screening assays, counter screens, dose-titration assays and some mechanism of action studies.

Eric has co-authored more than 20 publications in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. In addition to teaching the Establishing Cell-Based Assays for Screening at SLAS, Eric has led tutorials describing the use of various technologies including Enzyme-Fragment Complementation (EFC), Fluorescent Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), and the GloSensor technology.