2024 Annual Conference

Speaker: Dr. Kevin Taylor, Assistant Professor of Teaching and Director of Religious Studies, Department of Philosophy, The University of Memphis

Dr. Kevin Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Philosophy and Director of Religious Studies. His specialties include Asian Philosophy (especially Zen Buddhism) and Data Ethics. He edited a special three-part series of Education and Culture: The Journal of the John Dewey Society with the theme of "Deweyan Approaches to Contemporary Issues at the Intersection of Data and Technology." His article, "Data and Growth in Education: A Deweyan Analysis," appears in Vol. 38 : Iss. 1. He has also published on the word mottainai as a Japanese philosophy of waste, Zen and graffiti, and Disruptive practices in Rinzai Zen. 

Speaker: Dr. Gang Wu, Associate Member, Center for Applied Bioinformatics, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Dr. Gang Wu is the founding Director of the Center for Applied Bioinformatics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He received his undergraduate training in ecology at Wuhan University in China. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in bioinformatics at the University of Maryland and pursued his postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before he joined St. Jude in 2010, he worked for the NCI to populate and maintain the TCGA data portal. Trained as a computational biologist, Gang’s passion lies in refining computational methods to decode the intricate dance of multi-omics data. Gang has authored approximately 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals. At St. Jude, he discovered recurrent somatic mutations in histone H3 and NTRK fusion genes in pediatric brain tumors. He developed a framework of rare variant analysis, called CoCoRV, to identify novel genes predisposing to human genetic disorders by leveraging publicly available genetics data for healthy individuals. He is a member of the CReATe consortium, aiming to find genetic modifiers associated with the age of onset and progression of various motor neuron diseases, including ALS, also known as “Lou Gehrig's disease,” which remains incurable as of today.