Speakers

Born on September 6, 1963 in Bucharest (Romania). Studies in Biology at the Technical University Munich (1982-1985) and in Molecular Biology at Princeton University (1985-1990); PhD with Jeff Stock on the mechanism of signal transduction in bacterial chemotaxis (1991). Postdoctoral fellow with Andreas Plückthun at the Gene Center of the University, Munich (1992-1993), working on antibody engineering. Research assistant with Wolfgang Baumeister at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry, Martinsried (1993-1997), working on the development and application of sequence analysis tools, and on the structure and function of the proteasome. Senior Computational Biologist, later Assistant Director of Bioinformatics, at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals, Collegeville, USA (1997-2001), working on the development of antibiotics. Since 2001, director of the Department of Protein Evolution at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biology, Tübingen.

"Taking Studies of Protein Evolution from Basic Science to Applications in Biotechnology and Medicine"

Dr. Chueh Loo POH is an Associate Professor with the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at National University of Singapore (NUS). He is Director of NUS Biofoundry and a Principal Investigator at NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI). He is a Team PI in the recently established National Centre for Engineering Biology, Singapore. He is also deputy director of SINERGY, Singapore consortium for Synthetic Biology. His research interests in Synthetic Biology focuses on microbial biosensors, computational modelling, optogenetics, and DNA data storage. His group has been reprogramming microbes for health and sustainability biotechnology applications. He also leads the award-winning NUS iGEM teams. He is currently vice-chair of the Global Biofoundry Alliance (GBA) steering committee and the co-Editor-in-Chief of Wiley/IET Engineering Biology journal.

"Genetically Encoded Biosensors for Sustainable Biomanufacturing and Beyond"

Dr. Newman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on elucidating mechanisms of bacterial energy conservation and survival when oxygen is scarce, with an emphasis on how redox-active extracellular electron shuttles sustain metabolically attenuated biofilms. Her training combines molecular microbiology and environmental science, giving her a keen appreciation for the importance of accurately characterizing the microenvironments that surround microbial populations and communities to understand the activities of cells within them. Dr. Newman started her independent career at Caltech in 2000 and is currently the Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology. Her honors include the National Academy of Science’s Award in Molecular Biology and a MacArthur Fellowship, but she is most proud of her trainees, who have gone on to lead successful scientific careers in academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector. Dr. Newman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Currently, she is leading the Ecology and Biosphere Engineering Initiative for Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute and serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

"Phenazines Facilitate an Extremely Low Power Maintenance Metabolism on Life’s Metabolic Edge"

Prof. Irina Borodina directs a research group on Yeast Metabolic Engineering at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Her research focuses on creating engineered yeasts for different applications and advancing metabolic engineering methodologies. Dr. Borodina has authored 96 peer-reviewed articles, which have been cited 7,800 times, and she is co-inventor of 22 patent families. She is also co-founder of a start-up biotech company BioPhero that produces insect pheromones for environmentally friendly pest control (www.biophero.com), now acquired by FMC Corp.  She received 2016 Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering, 2019 Equinor Prize, and was selected as a 2019 EU Women Innovator.

"Engineering Yeast Cell Factories for More Sustainable Food Production"

Keith Pardee is the Canada Research Chair in Synthetic Biology and Human Health and is an Associate Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.  His training began in the fields of botany (BSc, University of Alberta) and Natural Products Chemistry (MSc, University of British Columbia), and transitioned to protein structure and function during his PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.  His postdoctoral studies at the Wyss Institute (Harvard University), served to translate this fundamental training into his current focus in applied biology.

 His lab works in the field of synthetic biology, with a focus on pioneering in vitro devices to improve access to health care through the development of low-burden biotechnologies.  Using freeze-dried, cell-free enzyme systems, the lab builds low-burden molecular diagnostics (e.g. dengue) and platforms for portable biomanufacturing.  These efforts have led to the co-founding of three trainee-led ventures (LSK Technologies, Liberum Biotech, En Carta Diagnostics).

Lab website: https://www.pardeelab.org

"Pop-Up Biomanufacturing: Hardware and Cell-Free Systems for On-Demand Protein Production for Human Health"

Liang Huang is a Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Biochemistry/Biophysics at Oregon State University, as well as co-founder of Coderna.ai. He received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a computational linguist and computational biologist, working on algorithms and theory in those fields. His recognitions include ACL 2019 Keynote, ISMB 2021 iRNA Keynote, CVPR 2021 Invited Talk, ACL 2008 Best Paper Award, etc. His work on mRNA design (Nature 2023) has been covered by numerous media reports. Coincidentally, his first PhD student Ashish Vaswani later became the first author of Transformer, which laid the foundation for AI tools like ChatGPT. 

"Language AI for Viruses, Vaccines, and Drugs"

Neal K. Devaraj is a Professor and the Murray Goodman Endowed Chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He completed his undergraduate studies at MIT where he performed research in the laboratory of Prof. Moungi Bawendi. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry at Stanford University working under Profs. James Collman and Christopher Chidsey. Following a postdoctoral fellowship with Ralph Weissleder at the Harvard Medical School, he returned to Southern California to join the faculty at UCSD. His research group at UCSD has developed approaches for generating artificial cells, which are compartmentalized structures that mimic the structure and function of living systems. His lab has developed fully self-reproducing lipid-based compartments and artificial membranes that can remodel their chemical structure. His group also studies how the very first cellular compartments may have been formed at the origin of life on Earth. For his lab’s work, he has been recognized by the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, being named a Blavatnik National Laureate in Chemistry, the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. 

"De Novo Protocell Membrane Formation"

Neha Kamat is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University in the Biomedical Engineering Department in Evanston, Illinois. She was trained as a bioengineer with special emphasis in biophysical analysis of biological and synthetic membranes, and in the production and characterization of membrane proteins using cell-free protein expression systems. She received a BS in Bioengineering from Rice University, a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University/ Massachusetts General Hospital. At Northwestern University, the Kamat lab’s main research interests are to understand and harness biological membranes as a biomaterial for (i) fundamental biological studies related to membrane protein folding and function and (2) translational applications in diagnostics and disease. Neha is the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Research Office, an NSF CAREER Award, and the ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator Award.

"Harnessing Membrane-Protein Interactions to Engineer Synthetic and Cellular Lipid Membranes"

Volker F. Wendisch holds the Chair of Genetics of Prokaryotes at the Faculty of Biology at Bielefeld University, Germany. He served as Senator of Bielefeld University, Vice-Dean of Biology from 2014-2016, and Dean of Biology 2016-2018. From 2019-2024 he served as Deputy Scientific Director and since 2025 is the Scientific Director of the university’s Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec). 

 Volker F. Wendisch received his diploma in biology from Cologne University, Germany. After having completed his PhD at the Institute of Biotechnology 1 of the Forschungszentrum Jülich in 1997, he worked as postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. 

 In 2004, he received the venia legendi in microbiology from Düsseldorf University. From 2006 - 2009, he was Professor for Metabolic Engineering at the Münster University. His research interests concern genome-based metabolic engineering of industrially relevant microorganisms, systems and synthetic microbiology. 

"Metabolic Engineering for Sustainable Fermentative Production of Aromatics"

Prof. Yanyi Huang is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Peking University. He is the Principal Investigator in the Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center (BIOPIC), the Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences at Peking University, and the Institute of Chemical Biology at Shenzhen Bay Laboratory. He received his BS and ScD degrees from Peking University, conducted postdoc research at Caltech and Stanford University, and started his independent career in 2006 at Peking University. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is working on technology development for integrative biology research, especially the new methods for genomic sequencing and large-scale microfluidics.

"Spatially Resolved RNA Analysis: Profiling RNA in situ Through Sequencing and Hybridization"