Invited Speakers

Daniel Beard (US)
Biotechnology and Bioengineering Centre, Medical College of Wisconsin

Research in Dr Beard's laboratory is focused on systems engineering approaches to understanding the operation of physiological systems in health and disease. A recent major effort in his group has been on theoretical and experimental characterization of the thermodynamics, kinetics, and electrophysiology of cardiac mitochondria. They have elucidated and tested the novel and controversial hypothesis that mitochondrial metabolism in the heart is controlled primarily through inorganic phosphate levels and demonstrated how this feedback mechanism breaks down in heart failure. Additional research interests include non-equilibrium thermodynamics in biochemical networks, mass transport and microvascular exchange in physiological systems, and drug metabolism and physiologically-based pharmacokinetics. All of these efforts involve a multi-disciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists. Key concepts invoked in our approach biological systems modeling and analysis are outlined in a textbook, Chemical Biophysics, co-authored with Hong Qian.

Malcolm Bennett (UK)
Director Biology, Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB), University of Nottingham

Malcolm Bennett originally studied biochemistry and obtained a PhD at the University of Warwick. In 1991, he obtained a NATO fellowship to work in the US laboratory that pioneered gene tagging in Arabidopsis. Since returning to the UK in 1992 as a lecturer at Warwick, and then as the Chair in Plant Science at the University of Nottingham in 1998, his laboratory has studied hormone-regulated root growth and developmental processes such as gravitropism and lateral root formation. During this period his group has described a number of regulatory genes, signals and mechanisms that control Arabidopsis root growth and development in over 60 papers which have attracted 4000 citations to date. This included the identification of AUX1, the first auxin transport protein to be described in plants. In the last 5 years, his laboratory has embraced an integrative systems biological approach as an invaluable tool for generating new predictions about auxin transport that can be tested experimentally. This resulted in the first integrative biology study which attempted to model, test and validate a multiscale auxin transport model in plants (Swarup et al, 2005 Nature Cell Biology 7:1057-1065). This pioneering work led to the creation of the flagship BBSRC/EPSRC Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB) at the University of Nottingham in 2007, which aims to create a virtual root as an exemplar for using Integrative Systems Biology to model multi-cellular systems. In 2009 he was awarded a BBSRC Professorial Research Fellowship to translate his research findings from model plants to crops to reengineer root architecture in a predictive manner.
 

Roel van Driel (NL)
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).

Hidde de Jong (FR)
IBIS, INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes, Saint Ismier

Hidde de Jong obtained MSc degrees in Computer Science, Philosophy of Science, and Management Science from the University of Twente (the Netherlands) and completed a PhD thesis in Computer Science at the same university. He joined INRIA in 1998 and is currently a senior research scientist at INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes and head of the IBIS group. His research focuses on the analysis of bacterial regulatory networks by means of experimental and modelling approaches. He has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Mathematical Biology and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

Colja Laane (NL)
Netherlands Genomics Initiative (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.

Hans Lehrach (DE)
Vertebrate Genomics, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin

Hans Lehrach studied Chemistry at the University of Vienna and accomplished his Ph.D. in 1974 at the MPI for Experimental Medicine and at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. He was a research fellow at Harvard University, Boston. After his return to Europe he took up position as the head of a research group at the EMBL, Heidelberg, and later on as head of the Department of Genome Analysis at the ICRF, London. In 1994, Hans Lehrach took up the post of Director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and heads the Department of Vertebrate Genomics. At the same time he holds a Professorship at the faculty of Biochemistry at the Free University.
Hans Lehrach was a speaker of the German Human Genome Project and is currently a member of the project committee of the National Genome Research Network (NGFN). Moreover, he is e.g. a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and of the scientific advisory board of the Austrian Genome Research Project (GENAu), as well as of Editorial boards of several scientific journals.
In 1993 Hans Lehrach was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he received the Ján Jessenius SAS Medal of Honour for outstanding achievements in medical sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (2003, Bratislava) and the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award for achievements in genome research (2004, Munich).

Matthias Reuss (DE)
NCSB-KC Visiting Scientist, Centre for Systems Biology, University of Stuttgart

Matthias Reuss is Acting Director of the Centre Systems Biology at the University of Stuttgart. In 2009 he retired from his position as the Director of the Institute of Biochemical Engineering at the same university. Prior to this position, he was an associate professor of Biochemical Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. Dr Reuss received his Diploma in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. from the Technical University of Berlin. His research interest includes Systems Biology and Metabolic Engineering with applications in Industrial Biotechnology and Computational Biomedicine. A special emphasis within his various modelling activities is given to the field of multiscale modelling and simulation. Dr Reuss is Fellow of the International Institute of Biotechnology, London (UK). He received the research award of the State Baden-Württemberg in Germany in 1992, and a Doctor Honoris Causa of the Technical University Delft in 2006. Since 2010 he is an NGI Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation (KC) and the Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology (NCSB) with the scientific focus on multiscale systems biology.