Dr. Hayes received undergraduate, master’s and medical degrees from Indiana University, followed by a residency in internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School/Health Science Center/Parkland Memorial Hospital and a fellowship in medical oncology at Harvard’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He has led the breast cancer programs at DFCI (1991-1996), Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center (1996-2001), and the University of Michigan from 2001-2016. Dr. Hayes’ research interests are in the field of experimental therapeutics and cancer biomarkers, especially in breast cancer. His work has been particularly focused on development and validation of cancer biomarker tests, such as HER-2, CA15-3, circulating tumor cells and pharmacogenomic markers. He has been instrumental in establishing international guidelines for the use of tumor biomarker tests, including criteria for their clinical utility. He has served as chair of the SWOG Breast Cancer Translational Medicine Committee, and he was an inaugural member and chaired the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Tumor Marker Guidelines Committee. He has been instrumental in the joint ad hoc committees between ASCO and the College of American Pathologists. Dr. Hayes served on the ASCO Board of Directors, and served a 3 year term as President of ASCO from 2016-2018. He is a Fellow of ASCO, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a past Komen Scholar, and a member of the Association of American Physicians and of the American Clinical and Climatologic Association. He has been the recipient of the ASCO Gianni Bonadonna Award in breast cancer and the Allen Lichter Visionary Leadership Award in 2021 as well as the Susan G. Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Clinical Research in 2023, and has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Indiana University Medical School (2024).

Ian Papautsky is the Richard and Loan Hill Professor in the biomedical engineering department. His lab focuses on using microfluidics to innovate blood analysis. Papautsky was one of the pioneers of the inertial microfluidics technology for label-free isolation and analysis of rare cells. His recent work has focused on applying this approach to the fractionation of blood, as well as capture and subsequent molecular profile analysis of circulating tumor cells for liquid biopsy. Papautsky is also co-director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Design and Manufacturing of Integrated Microfluidics, an industry-university collaborative research center that fosters interactions between academics and businesses in the areas of medical devices, pharmacology, and precision agriculture. Papautsky joined the University of Illinois Chicago in 2016. He has been recognized with many awards and honors, including Ohio Bioscience 30 in Their 30s. He is fellow of the AIMBE and the RSC.

Dr. Sunitha Nagrath is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at University of Michigan. Dr. Nagrath received her Ph.D. in 2004 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in Mechanical Engineering. She did her postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical/Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, under the mentorship of Dr. Toner. Dr. Nagrath is the leading scientist who designed the MEMS based technology, “CTC-Chip” for the sensitive isolation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood of cancer patients. She joined the University of Michigan in 2010 as a tenure track faculty, where she established her laboratory focused on engineering innovative microfluidic devices and nanomaterials for implementing personalized precision medicine via liquid biopsy. Dr. Nagrath’s major focus of research is on understanding cell trafficking in cancer through the isolation, characterization, and study of circulating cells and extracellular vesicles in the peripheral blood of cancer patients. She is a co-director of the Liquid Biopsy Shared Resource at UMICH Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she oversees the services of isolation and characterization of biomarkers and their implementation in clinical studies. She is an elected fellow of AIMBE and received several accolades including, Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award, and NIH Director’s New innovator award. Dr. Nagrath is the co-founder and the board member of Labyrinth Biotech, a biotechnology company commercializing some of the technologies that are developed in her lab.