SpeakerS and CHAIRS

Graham studied Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham before completing a PhD in yeast pheromone signalling at Warwick. He continued to work at Warwick as a post-doc studying pro-hormone convertases before securing a 5-year independent fellowship funded through the NHS. This project enabled him to return to his interest of GPCRs.

He progressed through the ranks at Warwick become an Associate Professor before leaving in 2015 to join the Department of Pharmacology at Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of St John’s College. In 2020, he was promoted to a Readership in Receptor Pharmacology and was elected a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society.

His research group use a combination of pharmacological investigations and mathematical modelling to study factors that control agonist bias at GPCRs. These investigations have enabled him to foster strong collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry (GSK, Takeda and Firmenich) which have recently been enhanced though him being awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship to collaborate with AstraZeneca.

My research can be characterized as in-silico pharmacology, with the major aim to connect chemistry and pharmacology by computational simulations.

I strongly believe that a mechanistic understanding of receptor functionality could make drug design more efficient and goal-oriented. Two month ago, I started my own lab at the University of Münster (Germany).

Pierre Poulain is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at Université de Paris. He develops methods and tools for analysis and visualization of biological data, in particular from public databases.

Pierre is convinced that open science and especially open source is a way to improve reproducibility in bioinformatics. Pierre is a Software Heritage ambassador since January 2021.

Pierre has a PhD in Physics, expertise in biomolecular simulations (Monte-Carlo, all-atom MD, coarse-grain docking).

Jana Selent is an Associate Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University and a Group Leader at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. She is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms that drive the complex and wide functionalities of G protein-coupled receptors using molecular dynamics simulation.

In this line, her group coordinates a community-driven initiative that aims to uncover the dynamics of the entire 3D-GPCRome (www.gpcrmd.org).

Currently, she is also the vice-chair of the ERNEST cost action to promote interdisciplinary research and to establish the groundwork for a holistic map of signal transduction.

I am a PhD student at the Biophysics and Bioinformatics Laboratory of the Department of Cell Biology and Biophysics of the University of Athens under the supervision of Asst. Prof. Vassiliki Iconomidou.

My research is focused on using bioinformatics to explore various biological areas (membrane receptors, amyloids) and their impact on disease, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Biological networks are my primary tools to investigate the protein interactions that are the foundation for most biological processes.

I want to create tools that will allow us to make sense of the enormous amount of data available today, in the hope that we will be able to shed a bit more light on the mystery that is life.

In 2015, Mariona Torrens-Fontanals obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Barcelona. She then pursued a two-year-long Master in Bioinformatics for Health Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, 2015 - 2017).

In 2017 she started her PhD at Universitat Pompeu Fabra under the supervision of Dr. Jana Selent. She also performed a research stay in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York) in 2019.

Her research is focused on the design and development of online resources for the study of molecular dynamics simulations. She is currently the main developer of the GPCRmd and SCoV2-MD databases, aimed at the visualization, analysis, and dissemination of simulations involving GPCRs and SARS-CoV-2-related proteins, respectively.