Dr. Alba Diz-Muñoz

European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit

Dr. Alba Diz-Muñoz is Group Leader at the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. She completed her PhD in 2011 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, in the laboratories of Ewa Paluch and Carl-Phillip Heisenberg. There, Alba investigated the differential role of blebs and lamellipodia for cell migration during zebrafish gastrulation. In 2012, Alba moved to San Francisco, USA, to be a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Orion Weiner at UCSF and Dan Fletcher at UCBerkeley. There, she identified a signalling cascade that is activated by changes in membrane tension and demonstrated its role for polarity, motility, and membrane tension homeostasis. In 2016, Alba started her own research group in the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg. The Diz-Muñoz group studies the crosstalk between mechanical properties and cellular signalling cascades that drive morphogenesis and fate specification in immune cells, embryonic stem cells and zebrafish embryos.

Dr Albert Cardona

HHMI Janelia

Albert Cardona graduated in Biology from the University of Barcelona in 2000, and completed his PhD in Developmental Biology at the same University in 2005. After a brief stint as a software engineer at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich, Cardona joined the lab of Volker Hartenstein at UCLA as a postdoc, where he started his work on anatomy of Drosophila larval brains. In 2008 he returned to the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich as a group leader, while simultaneously being a visiting scientist at HHMI Janelia. During this time he imaged imaged with serial transmission electron microscopy a chunk of the larval nerve cord and reconstructed its circuits with his software TrakEM2, and initiated the development of the CATMAID software for the collaborative reconstruction and analysis of neural circuits. In 2012 he joined HHMI Janelia as a group leader and worked towards the collaborative mapping of the complete central nervous system of the fly larva. His lab work focused on many areas, with emphasis on olfactory processing and learning and memory.

EMBO Keynote Lecture

Dr Anthony Hyman

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics

Prof. Dr. Anthony Hyman is Director and Group Leader at the MPI-CBG. He was born May 27, 1962 in Haifa, Israel and is a citizen of the UK. In 1984, he received his BSc first class in Zoology from UCL, where he worked as research Assistant in 1981. From 1985-1987 he wrote his PhD on “The establishment of division axes in early C.elegans embryos” under the supervision of Dr. John White at MRC in Cambridge. From 1988-1992 he carried out his postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof. Tim Mitchison at UCSF, investigating the mechanism of chromosome movement with in vitro approaches. As a postdoc, he was a Lucille P. Markey Senior Fellow (1991-1992). In 1993, he became a Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, before he moved to Dresden in 1999 as one of the founding directors of the MPI-CBG, where he was Managing Director from 2010-2013. He has been a member of ASCB since 1996 and EMBO since 2000. In 2002, he was named honorary Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the Technical University Dresden. He was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal in 2003, and he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007. In 2011, Dr. Hyman was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and the Schleiden Medal from the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2017.

Dr Charles Pence

Université Catholique de Louvain

Charles Pence is Chargé de cours and Director of the Centre de philosophie des sciences et sociétés at the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. His work focuses on the philosophy and history of evolutionary biology, as well as the ethics of contemporary technology. His group is also a leader in the application of digital humanities tools to the study of the life sciences. His current work explores the past, present, and future of the concept of chance and the tools of statistics in biology.

EMBO Young Investigator Lecture

Dr Christophe Dessimoz

University of Lausanne

Christophe obtained his Master in Biology (2003) and PhD in Computer Science (2009) from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After a postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge (UK), he joined University College London as lecturer (2013), then Reader (2015). In 2015, he joined the University of Lausanne as SNSF professor, retaining an appointment at UCL, where part of his lab remains active. Since 2016, Christophe is also a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. At the interface between biology and computer science, Christophe’s lab seeks to better understand evolutionary and functional relationships between genes, genomes, and species.

EMBO Science Policy Lecture

Dr Françoise Baylis

Dalhousie University

Françoise Baylis, PhD is University Research Professor at Dalhousie University. She is a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Baylis was one of the organizers of, and a key participant in, the 2015 International Summit on Human Gene Editing. She is a member of the WHO expert advisory committee on Developing global standards for governance and oversight of Human Genome editing. Her forthcoming book is Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing (Harvard University Press, 2019)

Dr James Briscoe

The Francis Crick Institute

James Briscoe is a senior group leader at The Francis Crick Institute. He obtained a B.Sc. in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick, UK. Following a PhD in Ian Kerr’s laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London (now part of The Francis Crick Institute), he undertook postdoctoral training at Columbia University, New York, USA, with Thomas Jessell. In 2000 he moved to the MRC-National Institute for Medical Research (now part of The Francis Crick Institute) to establish his own research group and in 2001 he was elected an EMBO Young Investigator. He was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal in 2008 and elected to EMBO in 2009. In 2012 he was appointed Head of Division in Developmental Biology. He serves on several editorial boards and is Editor-in-Chief of Development. His research interests include the molecular and cellular mechanisms of graded signalling by morphogens and the specification of cell fate in the vertebrate neural tube. To address these questions his lab uses a range of experimental and computational techniques and model systems that include mouse and chick embryos and embryonic stem cells.

Dr Jannie Borst

Leiden University Medical School

Jannie Borst has a Master degree in Biology with Chemistry and a PhD degree in Medicine (1985) from Leiden University. She did her PhD work at Harvard Medical School and continued her career at the Netherlands Cancer Institute where has been group leader since 1987 and department head from 2002 to 2019. She is professor in Experimental Oncology at the University of Amsterdam and professor in Immunology at Leiden University. In 2019, she has become the head of the Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion at Leiden University Medical School. Her research focus is on costimulatory receptors and their associated gene expression programs that regulate T cell function. She also works in the field of cell death and immunity. In collaboration with dr. Hans van Eenennaam of Aduro Biotech Europe, she has helped to develop a new immunotherapeutic drug against cancer that is now in clinical testing.

Dr Jenny Molloy

University of Cambridge

Dr Jenny Molloy is a Shuttleworth Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying the role and impact of open approaches to intellectual property for a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy. In particular she researches the potential for local, distributed manufacturing of enzymes to improve access and build capacity for biological research. This work combines technical development using synthetic biology-based platform technologies with qualitative research on challenges faces by molecular biologists globally through interviews and case studies. In addition to her research, Jenny is a founding Director of Biomakespace, a community laboratory for engineering with biology, and she co-organises the international Gathering for Open Science Hardware.

Dr Madan Babu

MRC, UK

M. Madan Babu heads the Regulatory Genomics and Systems Biology group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. His group uses data science approach to investigate how regulation is achieved at multiple levels of complexity in cellular systems with an emphasis on intrinsically disordered proteins and G protein coupled receptors. The work from his group has been recognized by several awards from various learned societies. Most recently, he received the Francis Crick Medal (2015) from the Royal Society, the inaugural Blavatnik Life Sciences Laureate (2018) and the EMBO Gold Medal (2019). He is an elected member of EMBO (2016) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2017).

Dr Mark Post

Maastricht University, MosaMeat

Prof. Mark Post is MD, PhD and chair of Physiology at Maastricht University, after positions at Utrecht, Harvard, Dartmouth and TU/e. He engineers tissues for medicine and for food. He presented the world’s first hamburger from cultured beef in August 2013. He is CSO of MosaMeat, Qorium and CEO of Cell2Tissue, companies that commercialize animal and human products from stem cells.

Dr Michael Zimmermann

EMBL Heidelberg

Michael Zimmermann is a group leader at EMBL in Heidelberg. Michael received a Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Basel University and a Master’s degree in Biotechnology from the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologie in Strasbourg. He performed his Ph.D. work with Uwe Sauer at ETH Zurich, where he developed metabolomics and Systems Biology approaches to study microbial metabolism in the context of host-pathogen interactions. For his postdoctoral training, Michael joined Andrew Goodman’s group at Yale University to study the molecular mechanisms of host-microbiome interactions. Michael’s most recent research investigates how the human gut microbiome contributes to drug metabolism, which can result in interpersonal variation of patients’ drug response and toxicity. His group employs bacterial genetics, metabolomics, gnotobiotic mouse work, and mathematical modeling to systematically map microbial drug transformations and to quantitatively separate microbial and host drug metabolism in vivo.

Dr Petra Schwille

Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry

Petra Schwille obtained her PhD in 1996 in the group of Manfred Eigen at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. After a postdoctoral stay at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) she established a research group at the MPI Göttingen in 1999 and accepted a professorship and chair of biophysics at the BIOTEC of the TU Dresden in 2002. In 2011, she was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the MPI of Biochemistry, Martinsried. Her research interests range from single‐molecule biophysics to bottom‐up synthetic biology of artificial cells.

Dr Silvia Marchesan

University of Trieste

Silvia Marchesan completed her PhD on the bio-orthogonal modification of glycoproteins at The University of Edinburgh (2008). Until 2010 she worked as Academy of Finland research fellow on integrin-mediated cell adhesion pathways. Until 2012 she worked on biomaterials, as joint fellow between Australia’s science agency (CSIRO) and Monash University. After maternity leave, she joined the University of Trieste (Italy) as Assistant (2015), then Associate (2018) Professor of chemistry. In 2017 she obtained the Erspamer Medal for her research on self-assembling peptides. In 2018 Nature Index listed her amongst the top-eleven Rising Stars in the natural sciences worldwide for the multidisciplinary research. She leads the Superstructures Labs where nanotechnology is used to develop biomaterials and new solutions at the interface between chemistry, biology, and materials science.

EMBO Women in Science Lecture

Dr Tempest van Schaik

Microsoft, London

Dr Tempest van Schaik is a multi-disciplinary engineer & inventor who’s developed creative solutions to problems in fields as diverse as healthcare, ocean science and agriculture. She has led the end-to-end development of new technology: from scientific research at the lab bench to user-centred products; from ultra-low cost sensors to hi-tech implantables, wearables and apps. She currently works as a machine learning engineer at Microsoft, London, focusing on healthcare & biosciences. She has a PhD in Bioengineering from Imperial College London with a lab placement at MIT, has spoken at TEDx and SXSW, is a grant recipient from Innovate UK and the US National Academies, and a Microsoft Ambassador for Diversity & Inclusion.

Dr Tobias Erb

Max Plack Institute for terrestrial microbiology

Tobias J. Erb is a microbial biochemist and Director at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. His research centers on the discovery, the function and the design of novel CO2 converting enzymes from microorganisms, algae and plants and their use in engineered and artificial photosynthesis as well as synthetic chloroplasts and cells. Tobi studied Chemistry and Biology and did his PhD at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and the Ohio State University. After a postdoc at the University of Illinois, he headed a Junior Group at ETH Zürich (Switzerland) before he became a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg, where he was promoted to Director in 2017. Tobi’s work received numerous awards, among them the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize in 2016, the VAAM research award in 2017, and the Otto Bayer Award in 2018. He was named as one of 12 up- and coming scientists by C&EN of the American Chemical Society in 2015 and elected to the Young Academy at the National Academy of Science in 2013.

Dr Tony Wood

GlaxoSmithKline

Tony Wood is Senior Vice President and Head of Medicinal Science and Technology at GlaxoSmithKline. He has a BSc in chemistry and a PhD in organic synthesis from Newcastle University. After a postdoc at Imperial College, he spent 25 years with Pfizer in the UK and the US, before moving to his current role at GSK in 2017. He is one of the world’s pre-eminent medicinal chemists, and has the rare distinction of inventing a licensed medicine, the HIV antiviral maraviroc (Celsentri/Selzentry). This was the first mammalian host protein-targeted anti-HIV drug to reach the market. As well as being a pioneer of structure-based drug design to overcome problems of resistance, he has striven to advance strategies in medicinal chemistry design, including ligand efficiency and lipophilic efficiency, structural-property relationships for toxicity, and the use of chemoinformatics to inform molecule and library design. Dr Wood has received several awards for maraviroc, including the PhRMA Discoverers Award, the Prix Galien USA and the ACS Heroes of Chemistry Award. He was also the recipient of the 2005 Malcolm Campbell Award for Medicinal Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the 2010 UCB Ehrlich Award for Medicinal Chemistry from the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry.

Dr Upinder Bhalla

National Centre for Biological Sciences

I trained in Physics, but found biological computation fascinating and joined Caltech for my PhD, just when they had begun their pioneering computational neuroscience programme. I've done both experiments and modelling throughout my career. I became interested in the computational capabilities of cellular signaling pathways, and worked on this for my postdoc at Mount Sinai in New York. I started my lab in the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, in 1996 and have been there ever since. I continue to investigate how subcellular signaling, both electrical and chemical, contribute to neural computation. Current interests include stimulus sequence recognition, novelty detection, and memory.