Interdisciplinary approaches to dynamics in biology

Hernan G Garcia is an assistant professor in the Departments of Molecular & Cell Biology and of Physics at UC Berkeley. As a Physical Biologist, his research aims to uncover the quantitative and predictive principles dictating biological phenomena, with particular emphasis on embryonic development. To make this discourse between theory and experiment possible, Hernan has pioneered several technologies to measure and control transcription and translation in single cells of living fruit fly embryos. Hernan is a co-author of the textbook Physical Biology of the Cell and a co-director of the equally named course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.

Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo obtained his PhD in statistical physics at the University of Barcelona in 1995. He did postdoctoral work at the Georgia Tech in Atlanta in 1996, working on laser dynamics, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1998 as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, studying noise effects in excitable media. In 2003 he was Visiting Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, at which time he began working in the field of systems biology. In 2008 he became Full Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, where he had been teaching applied physics since 1991. He is Visiting Research Associate in Biology at Caltech since 2006, and joined the Universitat Pompeu Fabra as Full Professor in October 2012, where he leads the laboratory of Dynamical Systems Biology. His lab uses dynamical phenomena to identify the mechanisms underlying biological processes such as cellular decision-making and spatial self-organisation.

Gioele La Manno was appointed in November 2018 as the first ELISIR Fellow at the School of Life Sciences of EPFL, giving him the privilege to start his own independent research group directly after defending my PhD. Dr La Manno earned his PhD at Karolinska Instituet and he is proud alumnus of the Linnarsson Lab. Dr La Manno’s original training is in Biotechnology (BSc @UNIPA) and Biomedicine (MSc @KI) but nowadays he will probably turn around if somebody is calling out for a Molecular Biologist, Computational Biologist or Bioinformatician.

Dr La Manno’s research focuses on understanding brain development. He is particularly interested in describing the sequence of states that embryonic stem cells go through during their differentiation towards mature neurons. He has been tackling this question using machine-learning tools on the wealth of data provided by single cell RNA sequencing, a technique he has been working with and developing since its early times.

James graduated from the University of Warwick (2000) in Physics, before completing Maths Part III at Cambridge (2001). James then studied for a joint PhD in Biology and Theoretical Physics at the University of Warwick. He conducted his postdoctoral work in the lab of Professor Michael Elowitz at the California Institute of Technology. He applied single cell time-lapse microscopy, modelling, and synthetic biology techniques to understand how cells amplify small molecule differences (noise) into alternative transcriptional states. 

Since 2012 James has been a group leader at the Sainsbury laboratory at the University of Cambridge. His group is using movies to examine gene expression at the single-cell level in bacteria, cyanobacteria and plants.

Originally Portuguese, Silvia Santos left sunny Portugal to study Molecular and Cell Biology in the UK. Silvia did her PhD at the EMBL in Heidelberg where she worked as a Marie Curie E-Star fellow. She moved to Stanford University for her post-doctoral training with Jim Ferrell and Tobias Meyer where she worked initially as an EMBO fellow, and, later as HFSP fellow. Silvia started her independent research at the MRC-LMS in Imperial College London in 2014 as an MRC career development awardee (MRC-CDA). She is joining the Francis Crick Institute in December 2017 as a group leader to establish the Quantitative Cell Biology lab.

Since her PhD Silvia combines experimental and theoretical approaches to understand decision-making during transitions. In this context, her lab studies cell division and cellular differentiation in early development, using human embryonic stem (hES) cells as a model system.

Naomi Moris is a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. She is particularly interested in understanding how cell fate decisions are coordinated during development. To explore this question, she makes use of three-dimensional in vitro model systems, such as ‘gastruloids’, to explore self-organisation principles using embryonic stem cells. In particular, she is interested in understanding how developmental programmes are organised in both space and time, to generate coordinated patterns as a result of underlying gene regulatory networks.

James Briscoe is a senior group leader at the Francis Crick Institute. He obtained a BSc in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick, UK. Following his PhD research in Ian Kerr's laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London, he undertook postdoctoral training at Columbia University, New York, USA, with Thomas Jessell, first as a Human Frontiers Science Program Fellow then as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow.

In 2000 he moved to the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research 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 2018 he became Editor in Chief of Development, a journal published by the Company of Biologists, a not-for-profit scientific publisher.

His current research interests include the molecular and cellular mechanisms of graded signalling by morphogens and the role of transcriptional networks in the specification of cell fate. To address these questions his lab uses a range of experimental and computational techniques with model systems that include mouse and chick embryos and embryonic stem cells.

Ben began his studies in Developmental Biology as a PhD student with Roberto Mayor at UCL in 2004. After graduating in 2008, he moved to KCL to work with Andrea Streit. Subsequently he moved to the lab of Jean-Francois Nicolas and  Estelle Hirsinger at the Institut Pasteur, Paris. There, he began to work with zebrafish embryos to further the understanding of the tissue deformations that lead to the elongation of the embryonic body axis. To develop imaging and analytical techniques to study this process at the cellular and molecular levels, he was awarded a Marie-Curie fellowship to work with Scott Fraser (University of California, USA) and Alfonso Martinez-Arias (University of Cambridge). With his Sir Henry Dale fellowship, he is now applying these techniques to investigate how cell fate decisions are orchestrated in space and time during axis patterning in zebrafish embryos.

Francis Corson is a theoretical biophysicist and CNRS research scientist at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Following a PhD in physics at ENS, devoted to plant morphogenesis, and a postdoc in the group of Eric Siggia at the Rockefeller University, where he developed new modeling approaches to fate specification, he has held CNRS positions at the Pasteur Institute then at ENS. Drawing on his background in nonlinear physics, and on close collaborations with experimentalists, his research aims to develop simple models to illuminate the dynamics of developmental patterning and morphogenesis, with a particular interest for self-organization, explored in such systems as the Drosophila peripheral nervous system and the early amniote embryo. 

Miki Ebisuya did her undergraduate and PhD research at Kyoto University, Japan. After getting her PhD in 2008, she became a group leader at Kyoto University in 2009. Her lab moved to RIKEN in 2013, and then moved again to EMBL Barcelona, Spain, in 2018. The research interest of her group is reconstituting developmental mechanisms in cell culture. 

Stefano received his PhD from The Rockefeller University where he worked on the mechanisms of cell size control in budding yeast. As a postdoc in Princeton University, he initiated a new research line on the mechanisms of cell cycle regulation during Drosophila embryonic development. He established his lab in the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University, where he works on physical principles of spatiotemporal organisation in early Drosophila embryos. Recently, the lab has also initiated a new research direction to understand how tissue growth is controlled during zebrafish regeneration. 

Dr Alan Hastings is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. He has published over 300 papers on aspects of theoretical ecology including many focusing socio-ecological systems and especially on the theory behind the design and function of marine protected areas. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Society for Mathematical Biology. He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theoretical Ecology and co-edited the Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology.

Erik Clark is a developmental systems biologist interested in patterning, gene regulation, and evolution. He is currently working in the DePace lab in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, on an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship. He is also a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He did his PhD with Michael Akam at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 2017. He also has a BA in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology from Imperial College London. He studies anterior-posterior patterning processes in arthropod embryos, focusing in particular on the regulation and function of the “pair-rule” genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Susanne Ditlevsen graduated in 1999 with a MSc in mathematics from Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, Spain and a MSc in statistics in 2000 from University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She got a PhD in 2005 from Department of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen. She is now Professor in Statistics and Stochastic Models in Biology at Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. She has published more than 60 papers, and was elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2016. She is elected member of the board of the European Society of Mathematical and Theoretical Biology, and was awarded the Teacher of the Year at SCIENCE, University of Copenhagen in 2017. Her major fields of research are statistical inference for stochastic processes, computational neuroscience, mathematical modeling of physiological dynamics and marine mammals behaviour.