Speakers

Becca Asquith | The “stemness” of immune memory

Bio: I use a novel combination of experimental, mathematical and bioinformatic techniques to investigate cell-mediated immunity. My aim is to develop a predictive mathematical model of the human in vivo CD8+ T cell response in order to prevent and alleviate viral infection. My initial training was in theoretical physics. I have a BSc in Physics (1st class hons. University College London), an MSc in Mathematics (distinction, Imperial College London) and a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics (title: "Non Commutative Geometry", University of Durham). I then worked as a mathematical modeller for the UK government for 2 years before crossing disciplines to Mathematical Immunology. I held a Wellcome Trust Fellowship at Imperial College London and then a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship at the University of Oxford before returning to Imperial as a lecturer.

Patrick Kemmeren | Understanding regulatory systems and mechanisms of genetic interactions by exploiting expression profiles of large scale gene deletions

Bio: Patrick Kemmeren obtained his PhD in 2005 from Utrecht University for his work on analyzing and integrating genome-scale data. A postdoctoral fellowship obtained through EMBO and the Netherlands Genomics Initiative (NGI) allowed him to work at the University of California, San Francisco. Under the supervision of Dr. Nevan Krogan, he worked on the definition of an accurate and comprehensive map of stable protein-protein interactions. After returning to University Medical Center Utrecht (UMC Utrecht), he obtained a VENI grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) in 2007. After starting his own research group, Patrick received an NWO VIDI award in 2012 to investigate further the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic interactions. In 2013, Patrick became an Assistant Professor at the Center for Molecular Medicine, UMC Utrecht. In addition to these research activities, Patrick has been the coordinator of the High-Performance Computing facility for Life Sciences at Utrecht Science Park between 2012 and 2017, executive committee member of the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center since 2014 and board member of the Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology research school since 2017. Patrick joined the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology as a group leader in 2016.

Andela Šarić | How to build a biological nanomachine

Bio: Andela received her PhD from Columbia University in New York in 2013, after which she moved onto a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a Research Fellow of Emmanuel College. She is currently a Junior Group Leader in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL. Andela uses computer simulations to study biological assembly. She is interested in how proteins assemble “on-demand” into nanososcale structures that generate the molecular machinery of life. She is also devoted to understanding uncontrolled protein aggregation in the context of neurodegenerative diseases.

Dora Tang | Bottom up synthetic cellularity

Bio: T-Y Dora Tang received her PhD from Imperial College London, UK, in 2010 in the area of membrane biophysics. After 1 year as an EPSRC knowledge transfer secondee at Diamond Light Source, Oxfordshire, UK she undertook a post-doc at the University of Bristol, UK, in the areas of origin of life and then synthetic biology. In 2016 she started her independent lab at the MPI-CBG, Dresden as part of the MaxSynBio consortium. Her research lies between biophysics, synthetic biology and materials chemistry with the goal of building minimal synthetic cellular systems as physical models for biological phenomena specifically those related to compartmentalisation. These minimal systems aim to address questions in origin of life and in modern biology such as “what are the conditions required to drive molecular organisation from disorder?”

Boyan Yordanov | Linking Structure and Function of Biological Programs through Automated Reasoning

Bio: Boyan Yordanov is a Senior Scientist at Microsoft Research. He received BAs in Biochemistry and Computer Science from Clark University in 2005 and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University in 2011. He joined Microsoft’s Biological Computation Group as a post-doctoral researcher and became a Microsoft Research scientist in 2014. His research is focused on accelerating the design and construction of biochemical circuits and improving the understanding of biological computation through methods for the analysis, verification and synthesis of dynamical systems.