Course Director

Dr. Joseph Bressler is a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute. He is also an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Bressler received his bachelor's of science degree in biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1973 and his doctoral degree in physiology from Rutgers University in 1978. His post-doctoral training at UCLA was in neurosciences, where he studied the involvement of glial cells in response to toxic agents. After his post-doctoral training, Dr. Bressler continued his studies on glial cells at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Dr. Bressler has been a research scientist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute since 1988.

Guest Lecturers and Lab Instructors

	Jonathan Coulter, Ph.D, MHS Dr. Coulter is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He studied mechanisms of DNA demethylation resulting from exposures to environmental toxicants and cellular stress while completing his doctoral training. His interest in the Ten-eleven translocation methylcytosine dioxygenase enzymes and their roles in cellular responses to DNA damage led him to pursue postdoctoral training in radiobiology and radiation oncology.
	Zachary A. Kaminsky, PhD Dr. Kaminsky is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry. He developed a research program using genome-wide DNA methylation microarrays to study CNS and peripheral samples in PPD, suicide, and PTSD, generating some of the first and most widely replicating epigenetic biomarkers in psychiatry. His lab studies aim to understand the molecular epigenetic underpinnings of psychiatric phenotypes and to enable the generation of true “bench to bedside” translational findings.
	Richard Lee, Ph.D. Dr. Lee is a Johns Hopkins University "lifer." He received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry, and his main research interest is in elucidating the epigenetic mechanisms of the HPA axis and neuroendocrine hormones in the context of psychiatric disorders.
	Wayne Wei Yu, Ph.D. Dr. Yu is the research associate at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center and manager of Experimental and Computational Genomics Core at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He has 13-year experience on analyses of large-set data generated from microarrays and bioinformatics. He previously worked at Gene Logic Inc. as senior scientist for 5 years.
	Hernando Lopez-Bertoni, Ph.D. Dr. Lopez-Bertoni believes personalized medicine and molecular therapies are the future of medicine. His current focus is brain tumor biology and innovations in brain cancer treatment, studying the genetic and epigenetic (e.g. miRNAs and DNA methylation events) mechanisms involved in establishing and promoting brain tumor formation and understanding the contribution of stem-like cells to this process. The goal is to use this knowledge to develop new approaches that will ultimately impact diagnosis and treatment of brain cancer.