Dr Jason Chin, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, Speaker and Organiser
Jason Chin is a Group Leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), and a fellow in the Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. Jason was an undergraduate at Oxford, obtained his PhD as a Fulbright grantee from Yale, and was a Damon Ruyon Fellow at Scripps. From July 2003 to early 2007 he was a tenure-track group leader at MRC-LMB. He became an EMBO Young Investigator in 2005 and a tenured group leader in 2007. His laboratory's work spans chemical biology and synthetic biology. He created the first method to systematically expand the eukaryotic genetic code. He created and applied the first method to introduce photochemical probes into proteins in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and map protein interactions in vivo. His lab has evolved and reprogrammed the ribosome, long thought un-evolvable, invented new forms of gene regulation, provided insight into ribosome function, and created new genetic codes. His lab continues to apply the tools they have constructed to provide insight into biological processes.
Dr John Glass, J. Craig Venter Institute, Speaker
John Glass is a Senior Scientist in the Synthetic Biology Group at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. He is a member of the team working to build synthetic bacterial cells. Glass earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in viral genetics. He did postdoctoral fellowships, and was later research track faculty in the Microbiology and Immunology Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham working on recombinant polio virus, and mycoplasma pathogenesis and genomics. From 1998 to 2003 he was a Research Scientist in the Infectious Diseases Research Division of the pharmaceutical Eli Lilly &Company. He joined the Venter Institute in 2003 where in addition to his synthetic biology efforts he has been involved in environmental metagenomics, bacterial pathogenesis, and viral genomics.
Professor Martin Fussenegger, Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering Zurich, Speaker
Martin Fussenegger is professor of biotechnology and bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the ETH Zurich. In 1992 he graduated in molecular biology and genetics with Werner Arber at the Biocenter in Basel, joined the Max Planck Institute of Biology for his Ph.D. thesis in medical microbiology (1993-1994) and continued his studies on host-pathogen interactions at the Max Planck Institute of Infection Biology as a postdoctoral fellow (1995). In 1996, Martin Fussenegger joined the research unit of James E. Bailey at the ETH Institute of Biotechnology as an independent group leader where he refocused his research on mammalian cell engineering, a topic for which he received his habilitation in 2000.
In 2002 Martin Fussenegger became Swiss National Science Foundation professor of molecular biotechnology at the ETH Institute of Biotechnology prior to being awarded a chair in biotechnology and bioengineering at the ETH Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering (2004). Since 2006, Martin Fussenegger is director of studies of the ETH biotechnology curriculum and director of the ETH Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering. Martin Fussenegger has published over 165 refereed research papers, is coinventor of several patents, Vice-Chairman of the European Society for Animal Cell Technology (ESACT), editor of the Journal of Biotechnology, editorial board member of Cell Engineering and Biotechnology & Bioengineering and cofounder of the biotechnology startup companies Cistronics Cell Technology GmbH and Cistronics Antiinfectives AG.
For his contributions to drug discovery and cell engineering Martin Fussenegger received the de Vigier and the Elmar Gaden Awards in 2003, became a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2007 and became the first non-US recipient of the Merck Award in Cell Engineering in 2008.
Dr Farren Isaacs, Harvard Medical School, Speaker
Farren Isaacs is a research fellow in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School working on advanced genome engineering technologies. He received a B.S.E degree in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Biomedical Engineering Department and Bioinformatics Program at Boston University. He has studied dynamic expression of gene regulatory circuits through the construction of synthetic gene networks and pioneered the design and construction of synthetic RNA components capable of probing and programming cellular function. With George Church, he is currently developing efficient and scalable genome engineering technologies through integrated methods of DNA synthesis and recombination. He develops enabling cellular engineering technologies with the ultimate goal of providing insight into biological systems and applying these insights to address global challenges in medicine, energy and the environment. He was recently selected as a "rising young star of science" by Genome Technology Magazine.
Dr Mark Isalan, EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Unit Barcelona, Speaker
Dr Mark Isalan received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2000. His PhD thesis was supervised by Prof. Sir Aaron Klug, OM, FRS, and was titled "Selection of zinc fingers with novel DNA-binding specificities". This involved combinatorial approaches to protein engineering and structure-based design of molecular interactions. He held a postdoctoral position at Gendaq Ltd, UK (now owned by Sangamo Biosciences, Richmond CA), engineering zinc fingers. In 2002 Dr. Isalan was awarded a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship to carry out research on engineering artificial gene networks in Prof. Serrano's group at the EMBL Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2006, he has been a group leader at the EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Unit in Barcelona.
Professor Alexander J. Ninfa, University of Michigan, Speaker
Alexander J. Ninfa was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1955, and spent his early years in New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the east coast of the US. He attended Villanova University and obtained the BS in 1977. He conducted graduate studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey under the direction of Morad A. Abou-Sabe, and presented a thesis on the mechanism and regulation of the utilization of ribose by E. coli in 1983. He conducted postdoctoral studies with Boris Magasanik at MIT from 1983-1987, focusing on signal transduction mechanisms controlling nitrogen assimilation. He served as a visiting scientist at Princeton University from 1987-1989, where he collaborated with Austin Newton, Jeff Stock, and Tom Silhavy on projects ranging from characterization of Caulobacter crescentus transcriptional apparatus and cell division cycle control to the regulation of E. coli chemotaxis and response to osmotic stress. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan in 1989, and moved to the University of Michigan Medical School as an Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry in 1993. He attained the full professorship in 1999. His recent work is focused on transcriptional control mechanisms and signal transduction mechanisms in bacteria and in synthetic biology.
Professor Pamela Silver, Harvard Medical School, Speaker
Pamela Silver received her BS in Chemistry and PhD in Biochemistry from the Universities of California where she was an NIH Pre-doctoral Fellow. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in the Dept of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology where she was a Fellow of the American Cancer Society and The Medical Foundation. Subsequently, she was an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Molecular Biology at Princeton University where she was an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, a Research Scholar of the March of Dimes and was awarded an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.
She moved to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute where she was a Professor in the Dept of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. She was named a Claudia Adams Barr Investigator and awarded the Mentoring Award for the PhD Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. In 2004, she became one of the early members of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and the first Director of the Harvard University PhD Program in Systems Biology.
Her research interests range from the mechanisms of RNA movement and genome organization to the use of genomics, chemical genetics and cell-based screens in the study of diseases and drug action. She has developed an interest in the emerging field of Synthetic Biology where she is building cell-based machines and developing protein-based logic for design of novel therapeutics and engineering cells as sources of bio-energy. Some of her recent work includes the design and implementation of a cell-based memory device and the elucidation of the ribosome code.'
Her work was recognized by an Innovation Award at BIO2007 and has been funded by grants from the NIH, DOD, NSF, Novartis, Merck and The Keck Foundation. She currently holds an NIH MERIT award.
Dr Danielle Tullman-Ercek, University of California San Francisco, Speaker
Danielle Tullman-Ercek received her B.S. in chemical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2000. Following that, she studied under George Georgiou at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 2006. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Christopher Voigt at the University of California San Francisco. Her research interests include utilizing protein engineering and synthetic biology approaches to solve problems in bioenergy, biomaterials, and heterologous protein production.
Professor Hans V. Westerhoff, Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre , Speaker
Hans V. Westerhoff is a European Systems Biologist, with one research base in the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and another one in the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology in Amsterdam. He directs the Manchester Doctoral Training Centre for Systems Biology from Molecules to Life.
Hans Westerhoff is active in the field of Systems or Integrative Biology. This stems from a long study of phenomena in which the integrative actions of macromolecules produced effects that are essential for biological function, such as in free-energy transduction, DNA supercoiling, and yeast glycolysis.
Westerhoff has been promoting this field in combined experimental and theoretical research. His research groups have developed various methods for quantitative analysis and engineering of biological systems. These included a Mechanistic form of Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics, kinetic and stochastic methods for the analysis of metabolite channelling and non-equilibrium co-operativity, Hierarchical Control Analysis (extending the Metabolic Control Analysis of Kacser and Heinrich beyond metabolic pathways to gene expression and signal transduction), and Hierarchical Regulation Analysis. These developments were characterized by an integration of the theoretical aspects (including the derivation of mathematical theorems) with experimental results obtained in the Westerhoff laboratories.
In recent years, the research focus has been on the control, regulation and dynamics of yeast carbon and energy metabolism, on the control analysis of E. coli and mammalian signal transduction, on network-based drug design in T. brucei, on dynamic intermitochondrial communication in cardiomyocytes, and on mitochondrial involvement in type-2 diabetes.
Dr Lingchong You, duke University, Speaker
Lingchong You is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University. He obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002. He then did postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology before moving to Duke University in 2004. Using a combination of mathematical modeling and experiments, his laboratory explores design features of natural biological networks and builds synthetic gene circuits for applications in computation and medicine. He received a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in 2006.