About Our Staff
In conjunction with Committee Leadership, the GEP’s staff manages day-to-day operations of our nationwide collaborative. While our staff may be small, they are certainly mighty, and each person on our staff is committed to providing excellent support to our faculty and their students. The diversity of our staff’s backgrounds allows each of them to learn from one another and contribute their unique strengths in all facets of our organization.
Sarah Crocker-Buta, M.S.
Program Assistant
Sarah is a new addition to the GEP Staff taking over the former roles of Amy Smith. Sarah plays an integral role in coordinating logistical and administrative tasks for the GEP. She helps to organize collaborative meetings, both virtual and in-person, including making travel arrangements for participants and coordinating payments to vendors. Sarah registers GEP members and students for conferences and facilitates securing IRB agreements with new GEP institutions.
Katie Sandlin, M.S.
Director of Communications
As a graduate student, Katie experienced firsthand how impactful the GEP curriculum is for biology education and was eager to join the staff in October 2019. Her main roles include designing and maintaining the GEP website, managing @GEP_CURE on Twitter and the GEP YouTube Channel, developing and updating curriculum, facilitating and/or conducting training, recruiting new members, copy-editing of manuscripts, conference presentations/posters, etc., and creating digital content. Her research interests include evolution of the insulin signaling pathway across metazoans, and she is particularly intrigued by the significant variation in the number of insulin genes, receptors, and substrates across species.
Wilson Leung
Director of IT / Resident Genius
Wilson maintains the GEP servers and develops the annotation tools used by GEP faculty and students (e.g., GEP UCSC Genome Browser, Gene Model Checker, Gene Record Finder). He creates the Genome Browsers and the evidence tracks for the GEP annotation projects. He also assists with curriculum development and provides technical and pedagogical support to GEP faculty and students. His research interests are in chromatin packaging and in the evolution of the Drosophila Muller F element. Wilson is a Senior Scientist on the F Element Project.
Chinmay P. Rele
IT Technical Specialist
Chinmay graduated from Rutgers with Honors in Genetics, Evolutionary Anthropology, and Computational Genomics. Since joining the GEP staff in August 2019, Chinmay has focused on building the microPublication pipeline, reconciling gene models, training student reconcilers for the Pathways Project, and working closely with the GEP virtual TAs. He is developing his skillset to analyze data for the Pathways Project publications.
