Speakers

Roel van Driel
NCSB Director and Professor in Biochemistry, University of Amsterdam

Roel van Driel studied chemistry and got his Ph.D. at the University of Groningen. Following this he has worked as a postdoc at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and at the Max-Planck Instituut für Biochemie in Martinsried near Munich. In 1980 he came to the University of Amsterdam, where he was appointed professor of Biochemistry in 1992. He is responsible for a research group that wants to unravel how 2 meters of human DNA are folded inside the cell nucleus, which has a diameter of about 1/100 millimetre. DNA folding is a key element in the use of genetic information by the cell. He has published over 100 papers about this topic. During six years Roel van Driel has been scientific director of one of the research institutes of the University of Amsterdam. Since 2007 he is the founding director of the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology (NISB) in which biologists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians cooperate. In 2008 he became director of the Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology (NCSB).

Colja Laane
NGI Director

Dr. Colja Laane (1952) has extensive experience in the life sciences sector, both in the area of academic research and the corporate world. He is Director of the Netherlands Genomics Initiative since April 2008.
Having first obtained his doctorate in biochemistry at Wageningen University, Laane embarks on a scientific career that includes tenures at the University of Berkeley (US) and Wageningen University. In 1986, he opted for the business world: first at Unilever Research in Vlaardingen, followed by a position as Director of Bioscience Research at Quest International in Naarden in 1990. After a five year period, he returned to the academic world, holding a position as professor of biochemistry at Wageningen University from 1995 to 2000. Laane combined this position with entrepreneurship in his capacity as director of T&E Product Development. In 2000, he took up the positions of Science Director at DSM Food Specialties in Delft and Corporate White Biotechnology Scientist for DSM as a whole.

Denis Noble
Professor Emeritus and Director of Computational Physiology, University of Oxford

An eminent British biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University from 1984-2004 and is now Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. His research focuses on using computer models of biological organs and organ systems to interpret function from the molecular level to the whole organism. Together with international collaborators, his team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart. As Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences 1993-2001, he played a major role in launching the Physiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret the genome and he was elected President of the IUPS at its world congress in Kyoto in 2009. He is also a leading philosopher of biology, and his internationally acclaimed book The Music of Life challenges the foundations of current biological sciences, questions the central dogma, its unidirectional view of information flow, and its imposition of a bottom-up methodology for research in the life sciences.

Douglas Kell
BBSRC Chief Executive

Douglas Kell was appointed Chief Executive of BBSRC on 1 October 2008. He was Top Scholar at Bradfield College, Berkshire (1966-71), and read Biochemistry at Oxford University (1971-1975), where he also gained a Distinction in Chemical Pharmacology. He took his D.Phil. (1978) at the same institution, where he was a Senior Scholar of St John’s College, focussing on the development and exploitation of novel methods for the study of (mainly microbial) bioenergetics. He was an SRC Postdoctoral Fellow and an SERC Advanced Fellow at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), where he was appointed ‘New Blood’ Lecturer in 1983. He was promoted to Reader in 1988 and to a Personal Chair in 1992. From 1997-2002 he was Director of Research of the Institute of Biological Sciences in Aberystwyth. In 2002 he took an RSC/EPSRC-funded Chair in Bioanalytical Sciences at UMIST, which merged with the Victoria University of Manchester in 2004 to form The University of Manchester, from which he is presently seconded. From 2005-2008 he was Director of the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology.
His scientific achievements include the development and exploitation of many novel, analytical methods. He has been a pioneer in a variety of areas of computational biology and experimental metabolomics, including in the use of evolutionary, closed-loop methods for optimisation.

Béla Novák
Professor of Biochemistry, University of Oxford

The living cell is a dynamical system of molecular interactions. Most of the physiological properties of the cell (movement, growth and division etc.) are determined by molecular networks rather than by a single molecule. These molecular networks are intrinsically dynamic and they determine how a cell changes in space and time. The understanding of the physiological consequences of these regulatory molecular networks requires computational methods. Our group uses mathematical modelling to build links between cell physiology and the wiring diagram of regulatory networks. The main focus of our research is the eukaryotic cell cycle control system. The regulatory network controlling eukaryotic cell cycle progression centers around cyclin dependent protein-kinases (Cdk’s) and their regulatory subunits (cyclins). The activity of Cdk/cyclin complexes is regulated in general, by availability of cyclin subunits, phosphorylation of the Cdk subunit and by binding of a stoichiometric inhibitor. Using nonlinear ordinary differential equations, we have built successful computer models for cell cycle control network of budding and fission yeasts, frog and fruit fly embryos, and human cells. These models accurately reproduce the physiological properties of normal cell division, and the bizarre properties of mutant cells that have been studied. The models also predict phenotypes of novel mutants and unintuitive properties (bistability, hysteresis etc.) of the cell cycle machinery. The models also explain how checkpoint mechanisms block the control system when completion of certain cell cycle events (e.g. DNA replication, mitosis) is compromised. Recently we became also interested in how cell cycle controls gets modified during the meiotic cycle when DNA replication is followed by two nuclear divisions.

Hub Zwart
Professor in Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, CSG Scientific Director

Hub Zwart (1960) studied philosophy (cum laude) and psychology (cum laude) at Radboud University Nijmegen. He worked as research associate at the Centre for Bioethics (Maastricht, 1988-1992) and defended his thesis on consensus formation in a pluralistic society in 1993 (cum laude). He was appointed as research director of the Centre for Ethics (Nijmegen, 1992-2000) and acted as editor-in-chief of the Dutch Journal Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde en Ethiek. In 2000 he became full professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Science. He was European lead of the EU Canada exchange program Coastal Values (1999-2003). In 2004 he became director of the Centre for Society&Genomics, funded by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative and established at his department. The focus of his research is on epistemological and ethical issues in the life sciences: biomedicine (1988-1996), research with animals (1996-2003), environmental research (1998-2003) and genomics (2003-present). His current research concerns: the epistemological profile of genomics; philosophical implications of the Human Genome Project; epistemological profile of ecogenomics; challenges of macro-ethics (the ethics of bio-information); scientific authorship and comparative epistemology (literary imagination as a research tool). Hub Zwart teaches Introduction to philosophy and ethics of life sciences; Introduction to philosophy and ethics of science; Visible Scientists; and Science and literature.