Virginia Burns
DTRI Project Leader, Cell Therapies Core

See Virgina's bio on the Cell and Tissue Therapies Core page for more information.

Cynthia Chavious
DTRI Project Leader Assistant

Cynthia Chavious joins the DTRI group as a project and staff assistant. She will be available to assist new DTRI members in the future. Ms. Chavious started her career with Duke 30 years ago and has worked with 8 departments. She most recently worked with the DCRI in GI/Hepatology Research. There, she provided faculty, research staff, and project support for clinical research and Duke's second largest biorepository project.

Ms. Chavious can be reached at 919-668-8546.

N. Rebecca Haley, M.D.
Program Director, Cell Therapy Core - DTRI
Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Cellular Therapy, DUMC

See the Cell and Tissue Therapies Core for more information.

Melissa Hall
DTRI Project Leader, Project Office

Melissa Hall began her professional career utilizing an electronic engineering degree with Nortel, where she assumed increasing levels of responsibility as a technical writer, verification engineer, and software developer. Ms. Hall then decided to continue her education in UNC-Chapel Hill's Dental Hygiene program, where she was first introduced to clinical research. She subsequently worked as a clinical research coordinator at UNC-Chapel Hill, then accepted a position at Duke as a clinical research coordinator with the Rare Disease Network Consortium. From there, she joined the Project Office at the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) as a project coordinator.

Ms. Hall will work to maximize DTRI's use of the WebGrants software and to roll it out to other intramural funding opportunities at Duke. She will also take over coordination of some of the DTRI's operational reporting needs.

Ms. Hall can be reached at (919) 668-8154 or via e-mail at melissa.hall@duke.edu

Angelique Kosempa
DTRI Staff Assistant

Angelique Kosempa joined DTRI after 17 years of professional business experience in Executive Administration, Auditing, Human Resources, Client Support, Contracts Management, and numerous other division-level corporate roles.

Her primary responsibility is to provide administrative support to DTRI Project Leaders Lynn C. Sutton, MAEd, MS, Brian Reynolds, Ph.D. and N. Rebecca Haley, M.D.

Ms. Kosempa can be reached at (919) 668-4677 or via e-mail at angelique.kosempa@duke.edu

Brian Reynolds, Ph.D.
Project Leader Imaging Core - DTRI

See the Imaging Core for more information.

Lynn Sutton, PMP
DTRI Project Office Manager
DTRI Project Leader, Immune Monitoring and Vaccine Development Core

See the Immune Monitoring Website for more information.

Jessica Tenenbaum, PhD
Project Leader, Biomedical Informatics Core

See the Biomedical Informatics Core for more information.

Diane Uzarski, RN, MPH
DTRI Project Leader, Biorepository & '-Omics' Core

In her role as Project Leader at the DTMI, Ms. Uzarski provides facilitation and management of the ‘Omics’ core projects associated with the MURDOCK study on the NCRC in Kannapolis, NC. Two key areas of responsibility are driving the DTMI-LabCorp Biorepository partnership there and implementing research strategies essential to Horizons 1 and 1.5 of the MURDOCK study.

In addition to her role at DTMI, Ms. Uzarski developed and expanded infrastructure to support the generation of dozens of independent research projects resulting from a large HCV Biorepository with Dr. John McHutchison at the DCRI; including the Murdock Horizon 1 protocol, "Reclassifying Disease Due to HCV". She currently manages the administration of this research enterprise, which supports ten DCRI GI/Hepatology faculty. research fellows and staff.

Ms. Uzarski has a healthcare career spanning over 25 years; including business development and health services planning, legal consulting, childhood injury prevention policy planning, health services marketing, injury prevention policy planning, and emergency and critical care nursing. She served for six years on the San Francisco Tenderloin YMCA Board of Directors as the board vice-chair and annual campaign chair.

Ms. Uzarski received a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 where she was a Federal Nurse Traineeship Grant Recipient. She graduated from Ionia College with a BS in Health Care Administration and the Bridgeport Hospital School of Nursing.

Terry Walker, PhD
DTRI Director, Biomarker Sciences

As Director of Biomarker Sciences, Dr. Walker provides expertise in the science and technology of biomarkers and the management of biomarker programs. He works with DTMI and DTRI leadership to plan and lead the execution of scientific strategy, collaboration, and operations for the Biomarker Factory (BmF) on the North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC), provide technical expertise in commercial diagnostics, and contribute scientific perspective to the business development strategy of DTRI and the BmF.

Dr. Walker completed his PhD in Biophysical Chemistry at the University of Rochester in 1986 and studied sequence-dependent conformational transitions of DNA and DNA RNA hybrids using nuclease probing and thermodynamic mesurments in the lab of Prof Ignacio Tinoco, Jr. during his postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley. He brings twenty years of experience with drug target identification and the discovery, development and commercial launch of biomarkers and diagnostic assays for most disease areas using genomics, RNAi, genome sequencing, transgenics, histology, immunoassays, clinical chemistry, flow cytometry and specialized sample collection devices. Dr. Walker managed biomarker discovery programs and molecular diagnostic development at Becton Dickinson for oncology and infectious diseases. He also managed laboratories at GlaxoSmithKline dedicated to drug target identification, biomarker discovery, pre-clinical genomics, transgenic development, in vitro and in vivo RNAi, protein analysis, clinical biomarker testing and companion diagnostics for therapeutics.