About OBBR
OBBR Staff
Dr. Carolyn Compton is the Director of the Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research. She received her MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, respectively, and trained in both Anatomic Pathology and Clinical Pathology at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She came to the NCI from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec where she had been the Strathcona Professor and Chair of Pathology and the Pathologist-in-Chief of McGill University Health Center. Prior to this, she had been a Professor of Pathology at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she had been the Director of Gastrointestinal Pathology for many years. Currently, she is an adjunct Professor of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In addition to human biospecimen science, her research interests include translational studies in colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, and wound healing. Dr. Compton currently holds several national and international leadership positions in professional organizations such as the College of American Pathologists, the Cancer and Leukemia Group B, the American Joint Committee on Cancer, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. She is currently a member of the editorial boards of Cancer, Cell Preservation Technology and Clinical Proteomics. She has published more than 350 original scientific papers, reports, review articles, books and abstracts.
Dr. Nicole Lockhart joined OBBR in 2006 as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy fellow. She has since been hired as a Biospecimen Technology Program Specialist working on ethical issues and biospecimen resource evaluation. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Integrative Physiology from the University of Michigan and holds a B.S. in Biology from Brown University. Her dissertation research investigated contraction-induced skeletal muscle injury and the cellular processes necessary to reduce injury. Prior to joining OBBR, Nicole was a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellow at the National Academies of Science.
Dr. Helen Moore is the Biospecimen Research Network Program Manager in the Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research. Dr. Moore has a broad background in research and product development. Dr. Moore joined the NCI from Celera Genomics, where she led and managed cross-functional teams to develop bioinformatics products focused on Comparative Genomics and data visualization; developed new drug targets for complex diseases using multiple approaches including genetic analysis of disease association study data, biological pathways analysis, literature mining, and genomic analysis; and contributed to the assembly and annotation of the human genome. Dr. Moore’s postdoctoral work focused on signal transduction in the wingless/Wnt-1 family of proto-oncogenes. She earned her doctorate at Cornell University and her B.A. at Wellesley College. Her research experience includes work on human genomics and bioinformatics, fruit fly signaling, plant molecular biology, Alzheimer’s disease, and synthetic skin.
Dr. Jim Vaught is the Deputy Director in the Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research. Dr. Vaught has been working in the field of biorepository and biospecimen science for over 15 years. In 1999 he was one of the founding members of the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, ISBER, and was its second president. He participated in the development of ISBER’s Best Practices for Repositories. Since late 2005 Dr. Vaught has been working in the OBBR on the development of NCI’s Best Practices for Biospecimen Resources and the Office’s other strategic initiatives. Among other international biospecimen-related activities, Dr. Vaught has consulted with groups in Italy and Korea on the development of biobanking networks. Since 2005 he has served as NIH's representative to the Interagency Working Group on Scientific Collections, which was created by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is also currently serving as a member of the NIH Intramural Scientific Directors Biorepository Committee. In addition to ISBER, Dr. Vaught is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the Association for Laboratory Automation, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. He is Senior Editor for Biorepository and Biospecimen Science for the AACR journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, and a member of the editorial board of Cell Preservation Technology.
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