James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy
Research Day
The annual James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy Research Day will take place on Monday, October 12th, 2026. This event highlights research occurring at the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center in all areas related to pharmaceutical science. This year’s event has three keynote speakers scheduled that include
David Gius, MD, PhD, the newly appointed Director of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center. Dr. Guis was appointed the Director of the Cancer Center after a nationwide search and has come to UC from the University of Texas San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center where he was a transformative figure with regards to their research productivity and prestige in the field.
The second keynote speaker for this year’s event is Rui Chen, PhD, who is a professor of Ophthalmology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. He is a leading investigator in genomics, single-cell multi-omics, and computational systems biology, with a strong focus on vision science and retinal disease whose work integrates large-scale single-cell transcriptomic and epigenomic datasets to construct detailed cellular and regulatory atlases of the human retina, spanning development, aging, and disease states.
The third keynote speaker is Kun-Hsing Yu, MD, PhD, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory specializes in integrating multi-omics profiles with quantitative pathology patterns to predict clinical phenotypes in cancer patients and his AI-based methods have been independently validated by over 200 research laboratories worldwide.
Lastly, a celebration and seminar, of the research contributions of Dr. Randall Wickett, a prominent pharmaceutical sciences researcher, who career contributed greatly to the area of Cosmetic Sciences, will take place at the annual Research Day!
This year’s annual Research Day will again have a Student/Trainee poster session that will cover any and all areas of research related to pharmaceutical science. The Trainee poster sessions include monetary prizes for winners of included poster competition. Refreshments and lunch are included with registration.
Keynote Speakers
The keynote speakers of the Data Science and Healthcare AI Conference bring together leading expertise at the intersection of cancer biology, genomics, and artificial intelligence in medicine.
David Gius (UC Cancer Center) is a physician-scientist whose work in mitochondrial metabolism and cancer redox biology has shaped modern understanding of therapy resistance and metabolic regulation in oncology.
Rui Chen (UC Irvine School of Medicine) is a leader in single-cell genomics and retinal systems biology, contributing foundational insights through large-scale cellular atlases and multi-omics integration in vision science.
Kun-Hsing Yu (Harvard Medical School) is an expert in AI-driven computational pathology, pioneering deep learning and foundation-model approaches for cancer diagnosis and prognosis from histopathology imaging. Together, their work exemplifies the transformative impact of data science and AI in advancing precision medicine and translational healthcare.
David Gius
Mays Cancer Center, UT Health San Antonio
David Gius, is the Director of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center. Dr. Gius has come to UC from the University of Texas San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center where he was a transformative figure whose research focused on mitochondrial metabolism, cancer redox biology, and radiation oncology.
His work has significantly advanced understanding of how oxidative stress responses, mitochondrial function, and sirtuin signaling regulate tumor progression, metabolic adaptation, and therapeutic resistance. Dr. Gius has helped define mechanistic links between cellular metabolism and cancer vulnerability, particularly in the context of radiotherapy and stress response pathways. His research has been published in leading journals including Science, Cancer Cell, Molecular Cell, and Nature Communications, and has broadly influenced the fields of cancer metabolism and translational radiation biology.
Rui Chen
UC Irvine School of Medicine
Rui Chen is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine and a leading investigator in genomics, single-cell multi-omics, and computational systems biology, with a strong focus on vision science and retinal disease.
His work integrates large-scale single-cell transcriptomic and epigenomic datasets to construct detailed cellular and regulatory atlases of the human retina, spanning development, aging, and disease states. Dr. Chen has contributed significantly to the Human Cell Atlas initiative and to advancing systems-level frameworks that connect computational biology with ophthalmic disease mechanisms and precision medicine. His research has been published in leading journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, and Cell Genomics, providing foundational insights into retinal biology and translational ophthalmology.
Kun-Hsing Yu
Harvard Medical School
Kun-Hsing Yu is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and a leading researcher in artificial intelligence for computational pathology and precision oncology.
His work focuses on developing deep learning and foundation-model approaches for digital histopathology, enabling automated extraction of clinically meaningful biomarkers from whole-slide images for cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment stratification. Dr. Yu’s research has advanced the interpretability and clinical translation of AI systems in pathology, bridging computational innovation with real-world oncology applications. His work has been published in leading journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, and Nature Biomedical Engineering, and has helped establish new paradigms for scalable and clinically deployable medical AI.