SPEAKERS
Kara Lavender Law
Dr. Kara Lavender Law is Research Professor of Oceanography at Sea Education Association (Woods Hole, MA). For more than 15 years she has researched plastic debris in the ocean, initially focusing on the physical processes that carry, transport and transform plastics in the marine environment, with more recent work focused “upstream” on the generation, pathways and treatment of plastic waste, ultimately aiming to prevent plastic leakage to the environment. Dr. Law served as co-principal investigator of the Marine Debris Working Group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), is co-chair of the SCOR Working Group FLOTSAM (Floating Litter and its Oceanic TranSport Analysis and Modelling), and has participated in many other international working groups, workshops and panels, including at the U.S. National Academies, on the topic of plastic marine debris. Dr. Law received her Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography/University of California, San Diego in physical oceanography, and a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University.
Wolfgang Zimmermann
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Zimmermann obtained his received his Diplom degree in 1981 and his Doctorate in 1984 at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. From 1985 to 1987, he was post-doctoral fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. From 1988 to 1993, he worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Biotechnology from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, from 1993 to 1999 as Professor in Biotechnology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and from 1999 to 2004 as Professor and Chair in Bioprocess Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. He became Professor and Chair in Microbiology and Bioprocess Technology of Leipzig University between 2005 and 2019, and is now Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Analytical Chemistry of the same German Institution since 2019. He is a worldwide renowned researcher in the development of enzyme-related technologies, allowing access to a portfolio of novel products directed at the biopharmaceutical, biomaterial, and food sectors. Among numerous achievements, his research led to the identification of enzymes that degrade plastics, previously considered as non-biodegradable materials, thus opening up opportunities to steer the plastic recycling industry into the realm of biotechnology.
Basak Öztürk
Basak Öztürk graduated from Bilkent University, Turkey with a B.Sc. degree in molecular biology and genetics. She completed her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in marine microbiology in the MPI for Marine Microbiology, Bremen in 2011. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Wageningen University and Research Center working on bacteria-sponge symbiosis, and in KU Leuven working on the biodegradation of herbicides in the terrestrial ecosystem. She worked at BASF SE for one year as a research scientist, working on the biodegradation of biodegradable plastics in the marine environment. In 2018, she has started her own research group at Leibniz Institute DSMZ. Her research interests are biodegradation of xenobiotic compounds, environmental microbiology, bioinformatics, and enzymology.
Cristóbal Galbán-Malagón
Cristóbal Galbán-Malagón is an Environmental Biologist from Universidad de Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, where he also obtained a Diploma in Advanced Studies in Environment and Natural Resources. He then obtained his PhD in Marine Sciences from Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña and Universidad de Barcelona. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Center for Genomics, Ecology and the Environment (GEMA) of Universidad Mayor. His laboratory focuses on understanding the processes and mechanisms that contaminants follow to distribute themselves in the environment and how they bioaccumulate and biomagnify in trophic chains in pristine areas.
Beatriz Díez
Beatriz Díez has a PhD in Biology from Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona in Spain, associated to the Institute of Marine Sciences in 2001, under the supervision of Drs. Carlos Pedrós-Alió and Ramón Massana. During 2002 and 2005 she did a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council at the University of Stockholm, and between 2006 and 2008 she was Assistant Professor at the same institution. From 2008 to 2010 she was a researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona, continuing with the study of the microbial ecology of marine systems. In 2010, she was hired as Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Universidad Católica de Chile, where she is Associate Professor since 2016. The main research framework in her lab is the study of the structure, function, biogeography, and interactions of microbial and viral communities in extreme environments, using a combination of metaomics and biogeochemical approaches.
César A. Ramírez-Sarmiento
César A. Ramírez-Sarmiento is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering from Universidad Católica de Chile, Adjunct Researcher from the ANID Millenium Institute for Integrative Biology, and an EMBO Global Investigator. He obtained his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Neurosciences at Universidad de Chile in 2014, and received doctoral training in biophysics and computational biology at the University of California San Diego. His research group employs experimental and computational strategies to characterize and engineer bacterial enzymes that degrade the synthetic plastic PET, to study the evolution of protein structure and function, and to develop protein-centered biotechnologies with applications to tissue engineering, food technologies, and the detection of viral infections.