The 2026 Genetics Student Retreat will be held at the Coralville Public Library on October 7^th and 8^th. There will be a public presentation by our keynote speaker, Dr. Christine Beck. Doors will open at 10:00am, presentation will begin at 11:00 am. Lunch will follow.

Alumnus Speaker: Jacob Schillo

Jacob Schillo, PhD. is Principal Scientist at Encapsulate, a biotechnology company developing microfluidic platforms for functional precision oncology. He received his doctorate in Genetics from the University of Iowa in 2022, where he trained under the mentorship of Dr. Adam Dupuy and focused on identifying co-occurring mutations that drive therapeutic resistance in melanoma. He subsequently completed postdoctoral training at Yale University in the laboratories of Dr. Katerina Politi and Dr. Don Nguyen, investigating epigenetic mechanisms underlying lung cancer progression and metastasis. Prior to his scientific career, Dr. Schillo served in the United States Air Force as a Nuclear Weapons Specialist, supporting Department of Defense and Department of Energy missions.
At Encapsulate, Dr. Schillo leads the development of patient-derived organoid and tumor-on-a-chip platforms designed to predict individual therapeutic response and advance precision oncology. His experiences in both military service and biomedical research have shaped his interest in building technologies that translate complex biological data into actionable decisions. His work also extends beyond Earth through a NASA-supported Metastasis-on-a-Chip program being evaluated aboard the International Space Station to investigate how microgravity influences cancer biology and metastatic progression.

Alumnus Speaker: Yann Vanrobaeys

Yann Vanrobaeys, PhD. is a Bioinformatics Research Scientist at the MIT BioMicro Center and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, where he collaborates with research groups across MIT on computational analyses spanning cancer biology, neuroscience, and genomics. He earned his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Iowa in 2024, where he worked in Ted Abel's laboratory developing cutting-edge single-cell and spatial transcriptomic approaches to map activity-dependent gene expression in the brain, resulting in multiple first-author publications in Nature Communications. Prior to Iowa, he completed graduate training in biochemistry at the Université de Sherbrooke and holds undergraduate degrees in biotechnology from the University of South Brittany, France. At MIT, Yann develops and applies computational frameworks for bulk and single-cell RNA seq, spatial transcriptomics, and Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing, with an emphasis on reproducible, containerized workflows and publication-ready analyses. His work has contributed to submitted manuscripts from the Gehrke, Straehla, and Anderson laboratories, spanning Zika virus neuropathogenesis, blood-brain-tumor barrier biology, and cancer immunotherapy. He is also an active contributor to the Breakthrough Cancer program, where he applies long-read sequencing and epigenomic analyses to glioblastoma research.