Invited speakers 2010

 

Ralf Sommer, MPI Tubingen

Ralf Sommer is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany. After obtaining a PhD from LMU in Munich, Germany, he received an EMBO fellowship during which he worked at California Institute of Technology with Paul Sternberg. His research focuses unravelling the mechanistic changes in development that give rise to evolutionary alterations and novelty. For this to be achieved well-selected model organisms with a sophisticated analytical toolkit for functional investigations have to be developed. Somme Lab studies free-living nematodes and have established Pristionchus pacificus as a model system in evolutionary biology with genetic, genomic and transgenic tools. The second major research aim of the group is to better connect evo-devo with other areas of evolutionary biology. Specifically, synthesis with population genetics can reveal how phenotypic evolution is initiated at the micro-evolutionary level and synthesis with evolutionary ecology can add an ecological perspective to these evolutionary processes. P. pacificus has a well-defined association with scarab beetles and more than 160 strains of P. pacificus from around the world have been isolated providing the necessary material for studies of natural variation and population genetics.

Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

 

Sebastian Bonhoeffer, ETH Zurich

Sebastian Bonhoeffer has been Full Professor of Theoretical Biology at the ETH Zurich since July 2005.

Prof. Bonhoeffer was born in Tübingen, Germany, in October 1965. After studying Music in Basel, he studied Physics in Munich and Vienna and then moved to Oxford, where he did his PhD with Martin Nowak and Robert May at the Department of Zoology. After his PhD he stayed in Oxford as a Research Fellow of Wolfson College and worked as a visiting scientist with David Ho at the Rockefeller University, New York. Prior to his appointment as SNF Research Professor at the ETH in 2001, he was junior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institut in Basel.

His research focuses on using population biological models to understand fundamental biological processes. He has worked extensively on mathematical models describing the population dynamics of virus infections within infected individuals. Such models have provided important insights into the pathogenesis of viral infections and HIV infection in particular.

Theoretical Biology

 

Andreas Wagner, Uni Zurich

Andreas Wagner is professor in the department of biochemistry at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. His main research interest is the evolution of biological systems, from genes to complex biological networks with thousands of components. Wagner is the author of the book Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems (Princeton University Press, 2005). He received his Ph.D in 1995 at Yale University, where his research won the J.S. Nicholas prize for best dissertation in his field. He has held research fellowships at several institutions, such as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Germany, and the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. He is an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, and also holds a faculty position at the University of New Mexico.

Author of more than 80 scientific publications, he has lectured widely in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He is a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Bioessays, Advances in Complex Systems, and Molecular and Developmental Evolution. An Austrian-born U.S. citizen, he lives with his wife and their son in Zurich, Switzerland.

Andreas Wagner Laboratory

 

Uwe Sauer, ETH Zurich

Uwe Sauer is Professor of Systems Biology at the ETH Zurich. His research interests focus on complex metabolic and regulation networks in bacteria and yeast. For this purpose, his group develops methods for 13C-flux analysis and metabolomics, both for quantitative and high throughput analyses. Different types of mathematical models are then used to quantitatively relate metabolomics, expression and proteomics data to the functional network output in terms of fluxes.

Sauer Group

 

Mark Isalan, CRG Barcelona

Mark Isalan is a group leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. After receiving his PhD from University of Cambridge in 2000, he held postdoctoral research positions at Gendaq Ltd., UK and at the EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany. His current research focuses on engineering synthetic gene networks to control gene expression in cells and to construct self-organizing patterns, analogous to those used by organisms in morphogenesis and development. By building artificial gene networks, the Isalan lab aims to find the 'design principles' underlying why certain networks form particular structures or functions.

Isalan Group

 

Luca Cardelli, Microsoft Research

Luca Cardelli was born near Montecatini Terme, Italy, studied at the University of Pisa, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh. He worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, and at Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, before assuming a position at Microsoft Research, in Cambridge UK, where he is currently Principal Researcher and head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups.

His main interests are in type theory and operational semantics (for applications to language design, semantics, and implementation), and in concurrency theory (for applications to computer networks and to modeling biological systems). He implemented the first compiler for ML (one of the most popular typed functional language, whose recent incarnations are Caml and F#) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors. He was a member of the Modula-3 design committee, and has designed a few experimental languages, including Obliq: a distributed higher-order scripting language (voted most influential POPL'95 paper 10 years later), and Polyphonic C#, a distributed extension of C#. His more protracted research activity has been in establishing the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented languages, resulting in the 1996 book "A Theory of Objects" with Martin Abadi. More recently he has focused on modeling global and mobile computation, via the Ambient Calculus and Spatial Logics, which indirectly led to a current interest in Systems Biology and stochastic systems.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, an ACM Fellow, an Elected Member of the Academia Europaea, an Elected Member of AITO, and a long-standing member of EATCS.

Luca Cardelli

 

Michael Stumpf, Imperial College London

Michael Stumpf holds the Chair of Theoretical Systems Biology, and works on a range of topics in Theoretical Systems Biology, Evolutionary Theory and Statistical Bioinformatics. He originally studied theoretical physics in Tübingen, Göttingen and Oxford, completed his DPhil in Statistical Physics in Oxford in 1999 and moved straight into Biology. Michael spent three years as a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellow in Mathematical Biology  in the Department of Zoology in Oxford. In 2002 he took up a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship and moved to the Department of Biology at UCL in London. Since October 2003 he has been in the Centre for Bioinformatics at Imperial College London.

The research in the Theoretical Systems Biology Group uses mathematical, statistical and computational methods to explore functional, evolutionary and statistical problems in systems biology. The methods we use can be applied widely in evolutionary biology, systems biology and bioinformatics, and beyond.

Theoretical Systems Biology Group

 

Judy Armitage, University of Oxford

Judy Armitage is director of the Oxford Centre for Integrative Systems Biology (http://www.sysbio.ox.ac.uk/). She has pioneered the application of systems biology methods to complex chemosensory pathways focussing on Rhodobacter sphaeroides as a model organism. Techniques used in her laboratory range from mathematical modelling through to cutting edge microscopic imaging.

Centre for Integrative Systems Biology

 

Andrew Millar, University of Edinburgh

Andrew Millar holds a Chair of Systems Biology at the University of Edinburgh, where he directs the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh (CSBE). He has also been involved in the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) and GARNet, the UK's Arabidopsis research network.

His research aims to understand how the circadian clock is constructed and adjusted, how it affects plant life and why the clock mechanisms are so complex. Most of his research focuses on Arabidopsis, which is a small plant with a big following.

The Millar Research Group

 

Laurence Hurst, University of Bath

Laurence D. Hurst is the Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at The University of Bath, U.K.. Employing bioinformatic, comparative genomic and systems biological tools, his research interests concern how genes and genomes evolve. In particular, his work focuses on understanding gene order evolution, why most genes appear to be dispensable and why synonymous mutations are under selection.

Laurence Hurst

 

Susan Rosser, University of Glasgow

Susan is a lecturer in biotechnology in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Glasgow. Previously she conducted Post Doctoral research at the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Cambridge. She has diverse research interests including how bacteria evolve their genomes and exchange genetic material via mobile DNA elements and horizontal gene transfer, the formation, stability and evolution of microbial community structure and how it relates to function particularly under novel selective pressures e.g. pollutant contamination.

Areas of interest include bioremediation; biosensors e.g. engineering bacteria to detect high explosives; genetically modifying plants to clean up pollutant contaminated land and groundwater; and the development of plants resistant to abiotic stresses. Recently she has become very involved in the emerging field of synthetic biology which takes an engineering approach to biology to design and construct new predictable biological parts, devices and systems for useful applications. The application of mathematical models to biological systems is central to work in this area.

Susan co-led a successful synthetic biology team consisting of molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, modellers, engineers and statisticians that won the 2007 international genetically engineered machine (iGEM) environment prize. She has a number of existing collaborations with bioinformaticians, mathematical modellers, statisticians and control engineers relating to modelling and optimisation of commercially important metabolic pathways, control of gene expression and directed evolution of commercially interesting enzymes.

Susan is unusual in that her research is not strictly limited to one organism crossing the prokaryotic – eukaryotic divide her work having utilised a range of organisms including a wide variety of bacterial strains, yeast, plants and mammalian cells to investigate how cells respond to stress at a fundamental level and how such responses can be harnessed for applied purposes.

Susan Rosser

 

David Rand, University of Warwick

David Rand is Professor of Mathematics and directs the Warwick Systems Biology Centre (WSB). He is also an Associate Director of the Warwick BBSRC/EPSRC Systems Biology Doctoral Training Centre. Until August 2005 he was Chair of Warwick's Mathematics Institute. He currently holds an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship.

Currently, his main research interest is Systems Biology, particularly understanding the design principles of regulatory and signalling systems in cells, but he also still publishes in Dynamical Systems.

Warwick Systems Biology Centre

 

Peter Swain, University of Edinburgh

Peter Swain is a Professor of Systems Biology at the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh. After obtaining a PhD in Mathematics from the Imperial College London, he held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute in Golm, at the Tel Aviv University and the Rockefeller University. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, he was a faculty member McGill University in Canada.

Swain lab aims to develop a framework for understanding cellular decision making, with an ultimate, long-term goal of using that framework to produce quantitative, predictive models of eukaryotic cells. This task has several components: to develop mathematical models of signalling and genetic networks; to develop imaging techniques in live cells to provide quantitative data to both test model predictions and to fit model parameters; to understand how biochemical networks are `designed'; and to develop software for constructing and simulating network models.

The Swain Lab

 

Martin Howard, John Innes Centre

The Howard group mathematically models biological systems at a variety of scales ranging from subcellular up to the level of embryonic development. Their core interest is in uncovering complex dynamics even in systems with few components and apparently simple interactions. They are especially interested in systems exhibiting pattern-forming and/or stochastic effects. Recent topics studied include protein localisation inside bacteria, fluctuations in morphogen gradients, mechanisms of robust signal transduction and epigenetic dynamics. Their approach is highly interdisciplinary, and relies heavily on the techniques of statistical physics, as well as on close collaboration with experimental groups.

The Howard Group

 

Mark Goulian, University of Pennsylvania

Research in the Goulian lab is focused on the regulatory circuits that bacteria use to sense and respond to the environment. At present, most of the efforts in the lab explore aspects of two-component signalling in E. coli. Two-component systems make up a large family of regulatory circuits that mediate responses to diverse environmental signals and play a central role in bacterial physiology.

Mark Goulian

 

Kevin Foster, Harvard University

Kevin Foster is a Bauer Fellow at the Centre for Systems Biology, Harvard University. After a PhD degree at the University of Sheffield he held research positions at the Rice University at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and at University of Helsinki. His research focuses on evolution and genetics of social behaviour, particularly in microorganisms.

The Foster Lab

 

Michael Savageau, UC Davis

Michael Savageu is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California Davis. He holds degrees from The University of Minnesota (B.S.), The University of Iowa (M.S.), and Stanford University (Ph.D.) and was a postdoctoral fellow at both UCLA and Stanford University prior to joining the faculty at The University of Michigan. Dr. Savageau initiated Michigan’s interdisciplinary training program in Cellular Biotechnology and its interdisciplinary Bioinformatics Program. He also chaired the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 1992-2002 and was named the Nicolas Rashevsky Distinguished University Professor in 2002.After moving to the University of California Davis in 2003 he chaired the Department of Biomedical Engineering from 2003 to 2005.

His honors include Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Senior Research Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, Foundation for Microbiology Lecturer, American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques Award, Moore Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Member of the National Academies of Science Institute of Medicine, 79th Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer for the American Mathematical Society, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, and Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar Award from the Center for Non-Linear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Michael was also Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Biosciences from 1995 to 2005, and serves on advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Keck Foundation, and the National Academies of Science. He lectures extensively in the US and abroad on his research, which is focused on mathematical methods for the comparative analysis of function, design and evolution of gene circuitry. 

Savageu Lab