Fortina Research

Adam Ertel, PhD
Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology
Project Manager for Bioinformatics
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Dr. Ertel is responsible for analyzing high-throughput molecular profiling data for microarray and next-generation sequencing platforms, including whole transcriptome, whole-exome, and pathway-based approaches in cancer. He also manages of the shared resource bioinformatics routine operations.

Melanie Kelly, BS, MBA
Laboratory Manager
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Ms Kelly is responsible for maintaining the shared resource daily operations including scientific and administrative tasks such as equipment maintenance, training new users, laboratory billing, budgetary issue, and data management.

Kevin McKormick, PhD
Bioinformatics Specialist
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Dr. McCormick is responsible for the analysis of NGS data and differential gene expression analysis for RNA-Seq transcriptome data as well as variant calling for WES or WGS data. He is involved also with gene set enrichment analysis, copy number variation and LOH detection as well as in gene fusion prediction.

Sankar Addya, PhD
Cancer Genomics Specialist
Technical Manager
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Dr. Addya has extensive experience in microarray analysis using the Affymetrix technology. He supervises all genome-wide association studies, microarray-based mRNA/miRNA expression profiling using the Affymetrix GeneChip System as well as DMET- and Oncoscan-based studies using the Affymterix DX2 platform. He is responsible in follow-up analyses to define expressed and differentially expressed genes as well as CNV and LOH.

Joan Kupper, BS
Research Associate
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Ms. Kupper has worked in the SKCC for more than 15 years and has experience in technical, financial and organizational phases of shared resource operation. She is integral to Illumina sequencing platforms and is proficient in library construction for Chip Seq, WES, RNA sequencing and targeted re-sequencing panels.

Rebecca A. Adams, BS
Research Associate
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Ms. Adams is proficient in NGS technologies, in library construction, and operation of our Illumina sequencers.  She also shares responsibility for operation of nucleic acids extraction, capillary electrophoresis DNA sequence analysis, real-time quantitative PCR gene expression analysis and TaqMan genotyping assays.

Carmela Paolillo, PhD
Post-doctoral Fellow
233 South 10th Street, BLSB-1009
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Dr. Paolillo has been working in different research projects involving circulating tumor cells using CellSearch, DEParray and Celsee platforms.