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
Since 2022
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/IAA agreements with new GEP institutions.
Katie M. Sandlin, M.S.
Director of Communications
Since 2019
As a first-generation college student, Katie graduated with Honors and summa cum laude from The University of Alabama. She was a McNair Scholar and has research experience in microbiology and evolutionary biology. Katie has nearly 10 years of teaching experience ranging from middle school to college-level courses. Katie is an inclusive curriculum developer, web designer, and accessible media creator. As webmaster of the GEP website, Katie is passionately leading efforts to meet the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG 2.0 AA.
Wilson Leung
Director of IT
Since 2006
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
Since 2019
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 skill set to analyze data for the Pathways Project publications.