Plenary sessions

ADLM is proud to announce the following plenary sessions. These thought-provoking lectures, held each day, Sunday to Thursday, are delivered by world-renowned experts and cover timely topics spanning the breadth of laboratory medicine.

• Sunday, July 27: Global strategies to advance genomic medicine
  Heidi L. Rehm, PhD, FACMG
  2025 Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Awardee
• Monday, July 28: Artificial intelligence in real world clinical settings
  Judy Wawira Gichoya, MD, MS, FSIIM
• Tuesday, July 29: Infodemic! Is misinformation killing us?
  Timothy Caulfield, CM, LLM, FRSC, FCAHS
• Wednesday, July 30: Precision microbiome medicine: Identifying diagnostics and treatments
  Jack Gilbert, PhD
• Thursday, July 31: The urgent threat of plastics to human health, and what we can do about it
  Leonardo Trasande, MD, MPP

Sunday, July 27

Global strategies to advance genomic medicine
2024 Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Awardee

Heidi L. Rehm, PhD, FACMG
Director, Genomic Medicine Unit, Center for Genomic Medicine, MGH
Chief Genomics Officer, Department of Medicine, MGH
Co-Director, Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute
Medical and Clinical Lab Director, Broad Clinical Labs
Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School
Cambridge, MA, USA

Supporting genomics in research and medicine requires infrastructure, including standards, knowledgebases and global data sharing, as well as a rich interface between research and clinical care as new discoveries are made. This plenary session will present strategies to identify novel causes of rare disease including the application of new technologies and analysis methods as well as building innovative approaches to global data sharing and novel approaches to support genetics and genomics in medical practice.

Biography: Heidi Rehm is an investigator in the Center for Genomic Medicine and Chief Genomics Officer at Massachusetts General Hospital, working to integrate genomics into medical practice. She is a board-certified laboratory geneticist and Chief Medical Officer of Broad Clinical Labs guiding genomic testing in medical practice. She is a principal investigator of ClinGen, providing free resources to support the interpretation of genes and variants. Rehm also co-leads the Broad Center for Mendelian Genomics focused on discovering novel rare disease genes. She is a strong advocate and pioneer of open science and data sharing, working to extend these approaches through her role as Chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Rehm is also a principal investigator of the Broad-LMM-Color All of Us Genome Center supporting the sequencing and return of results to one million individuals in the US and co-leading gnomAD, the Genome Aggregation Database.

Monday, July 28

Artificial intelligence in real world clinical settings

Judy Wawira Gichoya, MD, MS , FSIIM
Associate Professor, Interventional Radiology & Informatics
Department of Radiology & Imaging Sciences
Emory University
Atlanta, GA, USA

Despite over 950 FDA-approved algorithms, 100 of which were in 2024, there remains limited deployment of algorithms in real-world settings. Advancements in technology are increasingly enabling development of more frontier models that can do multiple tasks and theoretically should generalize to wider clinical settings. However, despite this enthusiasm there continues to be limited value of AI, with minimal benefit of AI on productivity and efficiency for radiologists; yet there continues to be big optimism on the promise of AI to reduce “pajama time” and clinician burnout. Additionally, some algorithms deployed in real world settings have been retracted as is the case of the Epic sepsis model. This plenary session will review lessons of real-world evaluation of algorithmic models used for patient care, focusing on new challenges including shortcuts, limits of generalizability, and automation bias.

Biography: Dr. Gichoya is an associate professor at Emory university in Interventional Radiology and Informatics leading the HITI (Healthcare AI Innovation and Translational Informatics) lab . Her work is centered around using data science to study health equity. Her group works in 4 areas - building diverse datasets for machine learning (for example the Emory Breast dataset); evaluating AI for bias and fairness; validating AI in the real world setting and training the next generation of data scientists (both clinical and technical students) through hive learning and village mentoring. She serves as the program director for radiology:AI trainee editorial board and the medical students machine learning elective. She has mentored over 60 students across the world (now successful faculty, post doc, PHD and industry employees) from several institutions around the world. She has received several awards including the most influential radiology researcher in 2022, and is a 2023 Emerging Scholar in the National Academy of Medicine.

Tuesday, July 29

Infodemic! Is misinformation killing us?

Timothy Caulfield, CM, LLM, FRSC, FCAHS
Professor of Health Law and Science Policy
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada

Popular culture is filled with health myths, science hype, and pseudoscientific noise. Indeed, the spread of conspiracy theories and harmful health misinformation is a defining characteristic of our time. This shapes our perceptions about – and policies surrounding – health, wellbeing, and biomedical research issues. In this provocative plenary session, Professor Caulfield will look at some of the most pernicious falsehoods and explore the cultural forces driving the rise and spread of misinformation and twisted science, including celebrity culture, fearmongering, social media, science hype, and our cognitive biases. In addition, he will provide suggestions regarding concrete steps that can (and should) be taken by both individuals and organizations to both take a more critical approach to these topics and to fight the spread of misinformation.

Biography: Timothy Caulfield is a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. He has published nearly 400 academic articles on topics like stem cells, genetics, research ethics, the public representations of science, and public health policy and has won numerous academic, science communication, and writing awards. He is a Member of the Order of Canada, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He contributes frequently for the popular press and is the author of national bestsellers, including: The Cure for Everything, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?, and Relax: A Guide to Everyday Health Decisions with More Facts and Less Worry. He is also the co-founder of the science engagement initiative #ScienceUpFirst and has hosted and produced documentaries, including the award-winning A User’s Guide to Cheating Death.

Wednesday, July 30

Precision microbiome medicine: Identifying diagnostics and treatments

Jack Gilbert, PhD
Professor, Pediatrics & Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science, UC San Diego
Director, UCSD Microbiome and Metagenomics Center
La Jolla, CA, USA

The human microbiome is a high dimensional and dynamic part of our physiology that plays a key role in managing health and individualized responses to diet and medicine. The immune system controls our interaction with the microbial world, and the microbial communities in our bodies are central to modulating the immune response. Changes in the human microbiome and their metabolism have substantial influence on atopy, neurological disorders, metabolic disorders, and a range of complex conditions and disease states. Diet is incredibly important in shaping human health and the microbiome, altering both composition and metabolic activity, resulting in changes in immune, endocrine, and neurological systems. Microbiome-Wide Association Studies (MWAS) combined with novel quantitative multi-omic approaches are enabling us to use AI techniques to determine personalized responses to nutrition that drive diseases states and treatment efficacy. Through these innovations we are finally realizing the paradigm of precision medicine for facilitating patient care.

Biography: Jack A Gilbert is a Professor in Pediatrics and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego, as well as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science and Director of the Microbiome and Metagenomics Center. Dr. Gilbert uses molecular analysis to test fundamental hypotheses in microbial ecology. He cofounded the Earth Microbiome Project and American Gut Project. He has authored more than 450 peer reviewed publications and book chapters on microbial ecology. He is the founding Editor in Chief of mSystems journal. In 2017 he co-authored “Dirt is Good”, a popular science guide to the microbiome and children’s health. In 2018, he founded BiomeSense Inc to produce automated microbiome sensors. In 2021 Dr Gilbert became the UCSD PI for the National institutes of Health’s $175M Nutrition for Precision Medicine program. In 2023 he became President of Applied Microbiology International and won the 2023 IFF Microbiome Science Prize.

Thursday, July 31

The urgent threat of plastics to human health, and what we can do about it

Leonardo Trasande, MD, MPP
Jim G. Hendrick, M.D. Professor of Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics
Professor, Department of Population Health
NYU Grossman School of Medicine
New York, NY, USA

Since 1950, there appear to be only three deviations from an ongoing exponential growth in plastic production: the oil crisis of the 1970s, the financial crisis of 2008, and the COVID-19 pandemic. A further 30% increase is projected from 2025-2050. Much of the public concern about the impact of plastics has been focused on visible or microscopic plastic, but the gravest concerns about human health impacts of plastics relate to the release of monomers and additives that are widely detected in the general population, especially in communities located near production facilities. Exposures are amenable to reduction through behavioral and regulatory interventions. Increasing awareness has produced calls for clinical laboratory testing for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to guide clinical care and medical monitoring. This plenary session updates clinical laboratorians and healthcare providers about the science, which has largely emerged since many practitioners completed training but at the same requires a need for a paradigm shift in laboratory medicine and clinical care across the life course.

Biography: Leonardo Trasande, MD, MPP is an internationally renowned leader in environmental health. His research focuses on identifying the role of environmental exposures in childhood obesity and cardiovascular risks, and documenting the economic costs for policy makers of failing to prevent diseases of environmental origin in children proactively. He also holds appointments in the Wagner School of Public Service and NYU’s College of Global Public Health.