2025 QSP Symposium

Presentation title: PRiSM—Personalized Radiotherapy with Integrated Scientific Modeling

Dr. Heiko Enderling is a professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology, director of Computational Modeling in Radiation Oncology and co-leader in Computational Modeling for Precision Medicine/Institute for Data Science in Oncology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. His research is focused on developing and applying data science approaches and mechanistic mathematical modeling techniques to decipher tumor growth and treatment response dynamics to individualize cancer therapy. Dr. Enderling develops clinically motivated quantitative models that are informable with patient-specific data for personalized treatment recommendations – quantitative personalized oncology. 

Presentation title: Pharmacogenomics: Ready for Primetime or Hype?

Dr. Teri Klein has revolutionized the fields of personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics. She co-founded the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, the prestigious forum for publishing informatics in medicine and biology papers now in its 31st year and was a founding board member of the International Society of Computational Biology. Dr. Klein is the co-founder/MPI of the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase (PharmGKB), the premiere online resource dedicated to the impact of human genetic variation on drug responses, the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) which develops clinical dosing guidelines, the Pharmacogenomics Clinical Annotation Tool (PharmCAT) which annotates clinical genomes for pharmacogenomics and is PI of the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen). Dr. Klein is the director of the Stanford Department of Biomedical Data Science’s Precision health and Pharmacogenomics Center of Excellence. Her work has revolutionized the field – from publishing the first paper on a methodology to predict phenotypes from genotype to creating and maintaining the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB), the resource for researchers and clinicians trying to understand gene-drug interactions. She has been recognized as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, and the American Association of Advancement of Science. Dr. Klein received her Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from UCSF. Following 13 years as a faculty member in the renowned UCSF Computer Graphics Lab, she moved to Stanford in 2000. Her research interests extend over the broad spectrum of pharmacogenomics, genomic and personalized medicine and bioinformatics. 

Presentation title: Machine Learning-empowered PBPK and QSAR Models to Predict Pharmacokinetics of Drugs and Nanoparticles

Dr. Zhoumeng Lin is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Global Health at the College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida (UF). He is a member of the Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology (CEHT) and the Center for Pharmacometrics and Systems Pharmacology (CPSP) at UF. He received a B.Med. in Preventive Medicine from Southern Medical University in China in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Georgia in 2013. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Institute of Computational Comparative Medicine at Kansas State University in 2016. He was an assistant professor from 2016 to 2021 and then an associate professor from March to May 2021 at Kansas State University (K-State), prior to joining UF as an associate professor in May 2021. Dr. Lin’s research is focused on the development and application of computational technologies, especially physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling, quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence approaches, to study nanomedicine, food safety, nanoparticle and chemical risk assessment. He is a co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. He teaches two graduate level courses entitled “Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Modeling in Toxicology and Risk Assessment” and “Artificial Intelligence in Environmental and Global Health” at UF. He is a co-editor and a co-author of five chapters of the textbook entitled “Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic (PBPK) Modeling: Methods and Applications in Toxicology and Risk Assessment”.

Presentation title: Whole-patient and Spatial Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Models for Immuno-Oncology

Dr. Aleksander S. Popel is a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also holds appointments as a professor of oncology and medicine and a member of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. His areas of expertise are systems biology, quantitative systems pharmacology, immuno-oncology, and development of therapeutic peptides. He has published over 350 scientific papers in these areas. He served as a visiting professor at MIT, Harvard University, and Imperial College. He received the Eugene M. Landis Award from the Microcirculatory Society. He delivered keynote addresses for The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) European Union Physiome Project, and Next-Generation Integrated Simulation of Living Matter Project in Japan; he was C. Forbes Dewey Distinguished Lecturer in Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered A.C. Suhren Lecture at Tulane University, Robert M. and Mary Haythornthwaite Distinguished Lecturer at Temple University, and Kawasaki Medical Society Lecturer in Japan. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, American Heart Association, American Physiological Society, and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and an Inaugural Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society. He mentored over 80 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, many of whom are leaders in the field of bioengineering and systems biology in academia and pharmaceutical industry. He has served in an advisory role to biotech and pharmaceutical companies. He serves on the Steering Committee, International Society of Pharmacometrics (ISoP) Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) Special Interest Group (SIG).

Presentation title: Current Progress and Future Opportunities for Innovation in Virtual Population Simulations for QSP

Dr. Blerta Shtylla is senior eirector at Pfizer. She serves as group lead for the Quantitative Systems Pharmacology team supporting the oncology portfolio within the Pharmacometrics and Systems Pharmacology department. Prior to Pfizer, Dr. Shtylla held multiple academic appointments, the most recent being associate professor of mathematics. Her academic research focused on development and analysis of mathematical models applied to cancer therapies, autoimmune disease, bio-mechanical circuits involved in cell division, as well as control mechanisms involved in early development/morphogenesis. Her areas of expertise also include development of mathematical techniques for model uncertainty quantification and data assimilation applied to mechanistic differential equation models. She is author of several publications in quantitative systems pharmacology, mathematical biology, as well as editor of two books focused on mathematical modeling of complex biological processes.

Presentation title: Modeling Individual Variability and the Impact of Immune Diversity in Respiratory Infections

Dr. Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She earned her B.S. from the Colorado School of Mines and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Following her doctoral studies, she completed postdoctoral training at Los Alamos National Laboratory and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital before establishing her own laboratory. Dr. Smith’s research focuses on host-pathogen interactions during respiratory infections and multi-pathogen coinfections. Her lab employs an integrated approach that combines data-driven mathematical modeling, clinical data analysis, and model-driven experiments to explore disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses. By developing and calibrating mathematical models, virtual patient cohorts, and immune digital twins, her team aims to uncover fundamental biological insights and improve treatment strategies.

Presentation title: Modeling Perturbations to Immune Activity in the Solid Tumor Microenvironment

Dr. Anne Talkington is an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Dr. Talkington works at the intersection of mathematical modeling, immunology, oncology, and pharmacology. She received her B.S. in Mathematics and B.A. in Biology from Duke University, and her M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Ph.D. in Computational Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia in Systems Immunology. Dr. Talkington recently completed a National Research Council Fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she developed a multiscale modeling framework for tumor-immune interactions. Since joining UB in early 2025, her emerging research group has focused on understanding spatiotemporal immune activity in the tumor microenvironment and optimization of therapeutic strategies for immune checkpoint inhibition. The Talkington Lab integrates computational models and experimental data to answer questions of optimization in drug activity and delivery strategies.