Interdisciplinary approaches to dynamics in biology

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.

James DiFrisco is a philosopher of biology interested in the role of dynamical models in developmental biology, homology and character identity, the evolution of biological individuality, and the origin and nature of levels of organisation. He obtained a PhD in philosophy from Leuven, Belgium in 2015, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria from 2015 – 2018. Currently he is working on a research project at Leuven entitled “Hierarchical Evolution of Dynamical Systems”. During the spring 2020 semester he is a laboratory associate in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.

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.

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. 

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.

Nancy Papalopulu did her PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research, London with Dr Robb Krumlauf and a post-doc at the Salk Institute for Biomedical Research, US with Dr Chris Kintner.  She was a Group Leader at the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, UK and moved to the University of Manchester to take up a Professorship in Developmental Neuroscience in 2006. She is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, an elected member of EMBO and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Nancy’s work combines experimentation, in particular quantitative and dynamic approaches, with theoretical modeling to understand how oscillatory transcription factor expression dynamics control fundamental cell state transitions during the development of the vertebrate central nervous system.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew Oates received his PhD at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the University of Melbourne. His postdoctoral time was at Princeton University and the University of Chicago in the lab of Robert Ho, where his studies on the segmentation clock in zebrafish began in 1998. In 2003 he moved to Germany and started his group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. In 2012 he accepted a position at University College London as Professor of vertebrate developmental genetics and moved his group to the MRC-National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill in London. From April 2015, he became a member of the Francis Crick Institute in London. In September 2016, he joined École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland as a Professor, where he is the head of the Timing, Oscillation, Patterns Laboratory and the Director of the Institute of Bioengineering. The Oates group is composed of biologists, engineers, and physicists using molecular genetics, quantitative imaging, and theoretical analysis to study a population of coupled genetic oscillators in the vertebrate embryo termed the segmentation clock. This system drives the rhythmic, sequential, and precise formation of embryonic body segments, exhibiting rich spatial and temporal phenomena spanning from molecular to tissue scales. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Megan Davey undertook her BSc Hons in Anatomy and Developmental Biology at UCL 1994 – 1997 and her PhD at The University of Dundee 2000 – 2003, specialising in understanding the development and patterning of the limb, using chicken developmental mutants. Starting as a postdoc at The Roslin Institute in 2004 and becoming a BBSRC Fellow there in 2007, Megan has continued to explore the function of causative mutations which lead to variations in phenotype using comparative anatomy, genomics and embryonic manipulation of avian species, including chickens, quails, ducks and emus. As well as practical applications for human developmental differences, Megan’s group are interested in understanding how differences in developmental tempo are controlled genetically and how these contribute to pattern formation in the embryo. Megan is also Academic Lead for Public Engagement at the Roslin Institute and Secretary of the British Society for Developmental Biology.