Keynote Speaker
Andrews, David
Dr. David Andrews is Director of and senior scientist in Biological Sciences at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI), Professor of Biochemistry and Medical Biophysics at University of Toronto and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in membrane biogenesis. He has published over 150 research articles with an h-index factor of 58 and over 15,000 citations. His research includes, the molecular mechanisms by which Bcl-2 family proteins regulate apoptosis at mitochondria, the assembly of proteins into membranes, high-content screening and development of new microscopes for fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) and hyperspectral imaging. Together with the National Optics Institute in Laval Quebec he is currently commercializing a new instrument that enables measurement of the affinities for protein-protein interactions in live cells. The prototype of this instrument was used to make the first measurements of interactions between Bcl-2 family proteins in mitochondrial outer-membrane proteins that were published in Mol. Cell in 2012.
Blankenberg, Stefan
Dr. med. Stefan Blankenberg is Professor at the University Hamburg.
Eggert, Angelika
Professor Dr. med. Angelika Eggert is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Charité - University Medicine Berlin. She was trained as a medical doctor at the medical school of the University of Essen and the University Children’s Hospital Essen. She performed her MD thesis at the lab of Professor Esche at the Department of Molecular Biology. After her postdoctoral fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she started her own junior group at the Department of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the University Hospital Essen in 2002. In 2008 she became a full Professor and head of the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at the University Hospital Essen. Since 2013 Professor Eggert is Director of the Department of Pediatric Oncology/Hematology at the Charité - University Medicine Berlin. The main interest in the laboratory of Professor Eggert is the molecular biology and genetics of neuroblastoma. Research approaches include genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic and metabolomic analyses of primary neuroblastomas as well as molecular analyses of neuroblastoma cell culture models focussed on biologically relevant molecules. In addition, Angelika Eggert is chair of the clinical German Neuroblastoma Trial Group.
Eils, Roland
Prof. Dr. Roland Eils is founding director of the Digital Health Center at Berlin Institute of Health (Charité, Berlin) and director of the Health Data Science unit at the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University. Before, he was founding and managing director of Heidelberg University’s Systems Biology center BioQuant and Head of Division "Theoretical Bioinformatics" (B080) at the DKFZ in Heidelberg. His group has delivered significant contributions to the field of cancer genomics and systems biology. Since 2017 Roland Eils is member of the Organizing Committee of the Human Cell Atlas initiative and Coordinator of the HiGH-Med Consortium. He has published over 350 publications cited over 26500 times resulting in an h-index of 81 (source: google scholar).
Huang, Sui
Sui Huang, M.D., PhD. studied medicine, molecular biology and physical chemistry at the University of Zurich in the 1990s. As a postdoc and junior faculty at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Dr. Huang worked for 12 years on cancer biology with Donald Ingber and Judah Folkman, focusing on cellular regulation and tumor angiogenesis. At that time, he began to integrate “omics” with complex systems sciences to analyze living systems and human health. He demonstrated that cell types are high-dimensional attractor states of complex genetic networks --which helps explain many counterintuitive observations on the origin of cancer. Sui Huang then helped establish an institute dedicated to biocomplexity and cancer drug discovery founded by Stuart Kauffman at the University of Calgary, Canada, before joining the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle in 2011. His current work at the Institute for Systems Biology uses new technologies, including single-cell omics, along with theory of non-linear stochastic dynamical systems and “big data” to better understand cancer therapy resistance, stem cell differentiation and wellness-disease transitions.
Lichter, Peter
Since 1992, Professor Peter Lichter has been head of the Molecular Genetics Division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and since 2015 he is Deputy Managing Director of the NCT. He is member and chair of various international bodies and coordinator of several scientific networks in the fields of cancer genome analysis and personalized oncology. He is the spokesperson for the Heidelberg Center for Personalized Oncology (DKFZ-HIPO) and editor in chief of the International Journal of Cancer. One primary focus of his scientific work is the characterization of the human genome/epigenome in cancer cells and the investigation of pathomechanisms for the formation and development of tumors. He has made important contributions to the development of new treatment strategies and the determination of new prognostic and predictive biomarkers for cancer patients. He has published over 450 original articles in renowned journals.
Ritter, Petra
Petra Ritter holds a BIH-Johanna Quandt full professorship of Brain Simulation at the Department of Neurology, Charité University Medicine Berlin. Petra Ritter studied medicine at Charité. She spent a large part of her clinical traineeships and practical year abroad: at the universities UCLA and UCSD in Los Angeles and San Diego, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the Harvard Medical School in Boston. In 2002, she received her license to practice medicine. In 2004, she completed her doctoral thesis at the Charité and in 2010 she received habilitation in Experimental Neurology. After being Max Planck Minerva research group leader from 2011 to 2015, she now is heading the Brain Simulation Section at Department of Neurology at Charité Berlin, one of Europe’s largest University Hospitals. Petra holds a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant. Besides The Virtual Brain, she has lead and co-lead several other successful projects: The national Bernstein Focus State Dependencies of Learning, comprising 7 research groups with focus in Computational Neuroscience and together with Randy Mcintosh My Virtual Dream, a participatory public outreach project that combines Art and Science. Recently she successfully led two consortia to join the EU Flagship Human Brain Project and the VirtualBrainCloud – a European project funded with 15 Million Euros. With her work Dr. Ritter particularly focuses on the translational aspect of The Virtual Brain and the development of accessible technologies. She has successfully setup the first TVB startup BrainModes App that delivers TVB technology to the end user.
Quackenbush, John
Dr. John Quakenbush is Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Department of Biostatistics, Harvard.
Zeller, Tanja
Tanja Zeller is professor of Genomics and Systems medicine at the University Heart Center Hamburg. Since 2014, she is head of the research group “Molecular Cardiology, Genomics and Systems medicine”, which is focused on system-oriented research of cardiovascular disease. She coordinates several research projects and consortia such as the ERA-CVD PREMED-CAD consortium, the e:Med symAtrial and coNfirm consortia and is PI of the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK). Professor Zeller is speaker of the e:Med project committee, the DZHK omics Group and is organizer of initiatives such as e:Med Summer School on Systems Medicine in Cardiovascular Disease.