Invited Speakers

Professor Matilde Cescon

Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the Medical School of the University of Padova.

Principal Investigator of the joint Functional Genomics Research Unit of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Padova.

Expert in the generation and characterization of in vivo and in vitro models of diseases, she developed a deep interest in critical aspects impacting on the development and regeneration of the neuromuscular system. 

Trained as a Molecular Biologist at the University of Padova, during her PhD, she focused on the pathomolecular mechanisms underlying Collagen VI-related muscular diseases, with a major focus on autophagy regulation in skeletal muscle, while during her post-doc experience she revealed the role of Collagen VI also in other tissues with a particular focus on the nervous system and the neuromuscular junction. 

Her currently funded projects are focused on the role of autophagy in myelinating glial cells, with relevance for their homeostasis and response to injury. With this aim, she developed transgenic mouse lines for the study of the contribution of defective autophagy in Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes to neuropathies and neurodegeneration. 

Professor Simone Di Giovanni

Professor of Neuroscience at Imperial College, London.

Chair in Restorative Neuroscience.

He leads a research group that investigates mechanisms and treatment for injuries and disorders that affect the peripheral nerves and the spinal cord and for pain conditions in the nervous system. Professor Di Giovanni holds a honorary post within the NHS as a consultant in Neurology. His research and clinical work have broad implications for conditions spanning from traumatic, vascular, inflammatory, degenerative and metabolic (such as diabetes) damage to the spinal cord, spinal roots and peripheral nerves and for pain syndromes in the nervous system. He is also involved in developing novel neurorehabilitation strategies. Previously, since 2006, he worked at the University of Tuebingen, Germany as a Research Group Leader, where he was also a consultant clinician in Stroke and General Neurology. He did his post-doctoral training in Neuroscience studying gene expression regulation after spinal cord injury at Georgetown University, Washington DC, 2001-2004 where he became research Instructor (2004-2006). He studied Medicine at La Sapienza University and did his Neurology training at Catholic University, Rome, Italy.

Professor Silvestro Micera

Professor of Bioelectronics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) and at the EPFL (Lausanne). 

He received the University degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pisa, in 1996, and the Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in 2000. From 2000 to 2009, he was Assistant Professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. In 2007, he was at MIT with a Fulbright Scholarship. From 2008 to 2011 he was Group Leader at ETH Zurich. He was the recipient of “Early Career Achievement Award” and of the “Technical Achievement Award” of IEEE EMBS in 2009 and 2021.

Professor James Phillips

UCL Centre for Nerve Engineering, Department of Pharmacology, UCL School of Pharmacy,

University College London, WC1N 1AX, United Kingdom.

He is Professor of Regenerative Medicine and Vice-Dean (Innovation and Enterprise) in the Faculty of Life Sciences at University College London in the United Kingdom. He is also co-director of the UCL Centre for Nerve Engineering, Chief Scientific Officer of the UCL spinout company Glialign Ltd, and President of the European Society for the Study of Peripheral Nerve Repair and Regeneration. His research focus on translational neuroscience includes construction of living artificial tissues for regenerative medicine; developing novel cell, drug, gene, and biomaterial therapies for neural repair and protection; advanced 3D co-culture models; and the development of clinical outcome measures. Applications include treating and modelling neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic injury to peripheral nerves, the spinal cord, and the brain. His multi-disciplinary research group is based in the Department of Pharmacology at the UCL School of Pharmacy, and uses in silico, in vitro, in vivo, and clinical approaches. 

Professor Ipsita Roy

Professor of Biomaterials, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield.

She is an expert in microbial biotechnology, natural biobased materials, and their biomedical and environmental applications. Professor Roy was awarded the prestigious Inlaks Scholarship to study for her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, UK. At Cambridge, she was awarded scholarships including the Churchill College Scholarship and the Cambridge University Philosophical Society Fellowship Award. Her postdoctoral work was at the University of Minnesota, USA. She has published over 100 papers in high ‘Impact Factor’ journals such as Biomaterials, ACS Applied Materials Interfaces, with an H index of 47. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). Her group is focussed on the production of novel natural and sustainable polymers such as Polyhydroxyalkanoates, Bacterial cellulose, Alginate and their biomedical and environmental applications. She is an editor of Scientific Reports and Biomedical Materials. Her total grant portfolio is more than 14 million pounds. She has many patents, and she is in the process of spinning out a company called PHAsT, focused on the production of biobased materials for biomedical applications.

Dr. Tamara Weiss, PhD

Postdoc and team lead at the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery, Medical University of Vienna.

She studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna and worked as a visiting scientist in Mark Kotter’s lab at the University of Cambridge where she analyzed the multi-step process of oligodendrocyte precursor cell differentiation. She obtained her PhD from the Medical University of Vienna, investigating the role of stromal Schwann cells in peripheral neuroblastic tumors under the mentorship of Peter and Inge Ambros at the Children’s Cancer Research Institute in Vienna. During that time, her research focused on the culture of primary human Schwann cells and the characterization of their functional competences in response to nerve injury. She pursued her research as a postdoctoral fellow in Christine Radtke’s lab at the Medical University of Vienna and further explored human Schwann cell plasticity in tumor development and nerve regeneration. Her most significant scientific contribution was the uncovering of a repair-like cellular state of stromal Schwann cells within peripheral neuroblastic tumors that revised the plastic potential of adult Schwann cells. As a principal investigator she now aims to identify the neuroblastic tumor cell derived factors responsible for the sustained activation of a repair-like cellular state in stromal Schwann cells to counteract the decline of their repair phenotype in chronically denervated human peripheral nerves.