Speakers

Dr. Vivek Kapur is a professor of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases and Huck Distinguished Chair in Global Health at the Pennsylvania State University. Additionally, he is the Associate Director for Strategic Initiatives at the Huck Institutes of Life Sciences at Penn State also serves as an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology in Tanzania.

Dr. Kapur received his veterinary training at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore; PhD from Pennsylvania State University; and Postdoctoral training from Baylor College of Medicine. He served as a professor at the University of Minnesota until he moved to his current position. Dr. Kapur’s lab continues to research public health issues, pathogenic microbes, and the human-animal disease transmission interface. His particular interests and in global health and the mitigation of risk of major animal and zoonotic diseases, including tuberculosis. He has led the USDA’s Johne’s Disease Integrated Program and Mycobacterial Diseases in Animals consortia for more than two decades. Additionally, his group leads multiple international collaborations on animal health and zoonotic diseases in India, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia with funding from the NIH, US Dept. of Defense, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Danika Bannasch is a veterinary geneticist who specializes in canine and equine genetics.  She obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University and her DVM from the University of California at Davis.  She has been a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California-Davis since 2001.  She was appointed the Maxine Adler Endowed Chair in Genetics in 2013. In 2019 Dr. Bannasch was awarded the International Canine Health Award for her research accomplishments in canine genetics.  Dr. Bannasch has published over a hundred peer reviewed manuscripts and her laboratory has identified the causative variant for 16 inherited diseases in dogs and horses and collaborated on the identification of 8 more. Her research goals are to improve the lives of dogs through understanding the relationship between their genetic variation and the resulting phenotypes. 

Dr. Molly McCue runs an equine-genetics laboratory and serves as the associate dean of research at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Dr. McCue graduated from Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine and went on to do an internship in large animal medicine at the University of Georgia before returning to Kansas State in 2001 to pursue a master’s and complete a residency in equine internal medicine. In 2007, Dr. McCue moved to Minnesota to pursue doctoral and postdoctoral research, taking a position at the College of Veterinary Medicine as an assistant professor in 2008.

Dr. McCue’s research focuses on how the horse can be leveraged as a biomedical model. To do that, her lab spends about one-third of its time building the tools it needs to conduct what’s called network biology (understanding a cell’s functional organization), which can be applied across species. In 2014, Dr. McCue was named one of six University of Minnesota Informatics Institute Transdisciplinary Faculty Fellows. In 2019, Dr. McCue was nominated and chosen by her colleagues as the recipient of the Zoetis Award for Veterinary Research Excellence, the highest honor the college bestows on our research faculty. She has received the University of Minnesota Inventor Recognition Award three times.