Professor Mervyn Bibb

Mervyn Bibb is Head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology at the John Innes Centre in the UK. His research focuses on the regulation and manipulation of antibiotic biosynthesis in actinomycetes, Gram-positive bacteria that produce about two-thirds of all known antibiotics of microbial origin, many of which possess clinical utility. He has a particular interest in lantibiotics (modified peptide antibiotics) produced by Streptomyces, Actinoplanes, Microbispora and Planomonospora species. He has published over 140 papers and has been the recipient of the Lepetit Award, the Colworth Prize, and the Charles Thom Award. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia and at Imperial College London, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

http://www.jic.ac.uk/profile/mervyn-bibb.asp

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Professor Arnold Demain

For over five decades, Professor Arnold L. Demain, Research Fellow in Microbial Biochemistry at the Research Institute for Scientists Emeriti (R.I.S.E.) of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey ( USA ) has been a scientist constantly in the forefront of industrial microbiology and biotechnology. Demain was educated in the New York City public school system, received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Bacteriology from Michigan State University in 1949 and 1950, respectively, obtained his Ph.D. in 1954 from the University of California, having divided his time between the Berkeley and David campuses. Dr. Demain joined Merck & CO., Inc. where he worked on fermentation microbiology, b- lactam antibiotics, flavor nucleotides, and microbial nutrition. In 1965, he founded the Fermentation Microbiology Department at Merck and directed research and development on processes for monosodium glutamate, vitamin B 12, streptomycin, riboflavin, cephamycin, fosfomycin, and interferon inducers. In 1969, he joined MIT, where he set up the Fermentation Microbiology Laboratory. After retiring from MIT in 2001, he has continued his career at Drew University, where he teaches undergraduate students the essence of microbiology research. He has published extensively on enzyme fermentations, mutational biosynthesis, bioconversions, and metabolic regulation of primary and secondary metabolism. His success is evident in a long list of publications (510), 14 books of which he is coeditor or coauthor, and 21 U.S. Patents. His ability to “hybridize” basic studies and industrial applications was recognized by his election to the presidency of the Society for Industrial Microbiology in 1990, membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1994, the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 1997, and the Hungarian Academy of Science in 2002. Demain has received honorary doctorates from the University of Leon (Spain), Ghent University (Belgium), Technion (Israel), Michigan State University (USA), Muenster University (Germany) and Drew University.

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Professor Sang Yup Lee

Dr. Sang Yup Lee is Distinguished Professor and LG Chem Chair Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (known as KAIST). He is currently the Dean of College of Life Science and Bioengineering, Director of Center for Systems and Synthetic Biotechnology, Director of BioProcess Engineering Research Center, and Director of Bioinformatics Research Center. He has published 297 journal papers, 47 books/book chapters, and more than 440 patents either registered or applied. He received numerous awards including National Order of Merit, Merck Metabolic Engineering Award from Merck, and Elmer Gaden Award from Biotechnology and Bioengineering. He is currently Fellow of AAAS, Fellow of American Academy of Microbiology, Fellow of Korean Academy of Science and Technology, Editor-in-Chief of Biotechnology Journal, and Associate Editor and board member of numerous journals. His research interests are systems biology and biotechnology, industrial biotechnology, metabolic engineering, and nanobiotechnology.

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Professor Victor de Lorenzo

Víctor de Lorenzo (Madrid, 1957) is a Chemist by training and he holds a position of Research Professor in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he currently heads the Laboratory of Environmental Molecular Microbiology at the National Center for Biotechnology. After his PhD at the CSIC Institute of Enzymology (1983), he worked at the Pasteur Institute (1984), the University of California at Berkeley (1985-1987), the University of Geneva (1988) and the Federal Center for Biotechnology in Braunschweig until 1991, the year in which he joined the CSIC in Madrid. He specializes in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of soil bacteria (particularly Pseudomonas putida ) as agents for the decontamination of sites damaged by industrial waste. In 2001 this work received the National Award King James I for Environmental Protection. In June 2008 he was honored with the GSK International Award of the American Society for Microbiology, and in October of the same year he was granted a Grand Prix of the French Academy of Sciences. He is an elected member of EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) and the American Academy of Microbiology. He has published over 200 articles in scientific journals and specialized books, and he has served as advisor of numerous international panels. At present, his work explores the interface between the Synthetic Biology and Environmental Biotechnology.

View http://www.cnb.csic.es/~meml for details.

Professor Jozef Anné

Jozef Anné graduated from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) as bio-engineer, and obtained his PhD (Applied Biological Sciences) in 1977, also at K.U.Leuven, for which he obtained the Kluyver Award 1978 (Dutch Society for Microbiology). During his training period he worked at Nottingham University (UK) 1974-1975, and afterwards in 1981-1982 he stayed as a postdoc at Bielefeld University (Germany). Appointed professor at K.U.Leuven in 1990, he is currently heading the division of Bacteriology (Dep. Microbiology & Immunology) and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Rega Institute. His research interests are in the field of medical and applied bacteriology, the latter with emphasis on protein secretion in Streptomyces. He is (co)author of circa 125 peer-reviewed papers, several book chapters and numerous abstracts. He is cofounder and Secretary of the Belgian Society for Microbiology (BSM), and FEMS delegate for BSM. He is member of the National Committee of Microbiology (Belgium), member of the editorial Board of Microbiology, Future Microbiology, Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology and Open Proteomics.

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Dr Richard Baltz

Richard H. Baltz, Ph.D., received a B.S. degree from The Ohio State University in 1966, and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1971. After completing Postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois, he joined Eli Lilly and Company in 1974 to establish a Streptomyces genetics program focused on improving the production yields of antibiotic fermentations. In 1981, Dr. Baltz joined the Molecular and Cellular Biology Division to build a Molecular Genetics Department. His group focused on gene expression systems for the production of mammalian proteins, and genetic engineering technologies for Streptomyces focused on macrolide, glycopeptide, and b-lactam antibiotics. In 1990, he joined the Natural Products group, and in 1992 the Infectious Disease Discovery group. He initiated a bacterial genomics program to identify novel targets for antibiotic intervention, and began work on genetic engineering of daptomycin biosynthetic in Streptomyces roseosporus. In 1997 he took sabbatical leave to work with Dow AgroSciences on spinosad yield enhancement and discovery of natural products from rare actinomycetes. He retired from Lilly and founded CognoGen Biotechnology Consulting in 1998, then joined Cubist Pharmaceuticals in 2001 as Executive Director. His group developed combinatorial biosynthesis for lipopeptides, and produced many derivatives of daptomycin and A54145.

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Dr Anthony Borneman

Dr Anthony Borneman obtained his PhD in 2002 from the Genetics department at the University of Melbourne where he studied the regulation of morphology in the fungal pathogen Penicillium marneffei.

He then spent four years as a postdoctoral associate with Prof. Michael Snyder at Yale University where applied whole genome techniques to compare transcriptional networks across several yeast species.

Dr Borneman is currently working as a Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute where he is using next-generation sequencing and comparative genomics to investigate the genetic basis of phenotypic diversity in industrial microorganisms such as the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

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Dr Carl Cerniglia

Dr. Carl E. Cerniglia is Director of the Division of Microbiology at the National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR), Jefferson, AR., and is a Senior Biomedical Research Service Scientist for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Cerniglia has been at NCTR since 1980.  He is also an adjunct Professor in the Dept. of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR. Dr. Cerniglia received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C. in 1976.  After leaving N.C. State University, Dr. Cerniglia was a National Cancer Institute Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976-1980 in the laboratory of Dr. David T. Gibson. Dr. Cerniglia's principle research at NCTR involves: 1) food safety/biosecurity and methods development; 2) gastrointestinal microbiology; 3) microbial transformation of drugs as models of mammalian metabolism; and 4) metabolism biochemistry, genetics of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon metabolism and the biodegradation of priority pollutants in the environment.  Dr. Cerniglia was recently awarded the Silver Medal by the World Health Organization for outstanding scientific contribution to the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) and the DHHS Outstanding Leader Award in providing mentoring, training and career advancement opportunities to employees in a diverse workforce.

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Dr Nina Chanishvili

Dr Nina Chanishvili Head of Laboratory for Genetics of Microorganisms at the international reputed George Eliava Institute of Microbiology and Virology in Tbilisi specializing in "Bacteriophage Therapy".  The Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology (IBMV), which celebrated its 85th anniversary in 2008, was founded in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1923 and since then has delivered successful therapeutic solutions utilizing bacteriophages to combat antibiotic resistant bacteria. Dr. Chanishvili is an author of over 120 publications and of amonograph “A Literature Review of the Practical Application of Bacteriophage Research”, which will be published soon.

 

 

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Paul Dyson

Paul Dyson joined Swansea University , UK in 1989 after post-doctoral research at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. His group has focussed on various aspects of streptomycete biology including site-specific DNA modification, cell division, stress responses and their impact on antibiotic production, and physiological influences on DNA topology and gene expression.

 

 

 

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Dr Alex Franzusoff

Dr Franzusoff has carried out cutting edge research in immunotherapy against cancer and infectious disease, as well as HIV virus assembly, secretory pathway function and engineering of recombinant yeast for the production of foreign proteins. In addition to co-inventing the Tarmogen technology, Dr. Franzusoff has authored more than 40 publications on immunotherapy against infectious diseases and cancer, yeast cell biology, HIV infectivity and recombinant DNA engineering. His work has led to multiple patents in the fields of drug discovery, antiviral and cancer therapy, which led to being awarded Faculty Inventor of the Year at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 2003. While at the University of Colorado , Dr. Franzusoff founded GlobeImmune, Inc. with two other colleagues, Drs. Don Bellgrau and Richard Duke . He resigned his tenured Associate Professor position in 2003 to join GlobeImmune full-time, first as V.P. of Research, then as the V.P. of Research and Development and currently VP of new and external programs. Dr. Franzusoff has led the discovery, process development and clinical manufacturing teams to develop and produce multiple yeast-based Tarmogens, six of which are currently being tested in Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials. GlobeImmune recently signed a corporate partnership deal with Celgene for our oncology platform products, worth over $500 million. GlobeImmune was awarded Innovative Biotech Company of the Year (2003) by the Colorado Biotechnology Association, Top 100 Innovative Start-Up Companies in U.S. in 2006 by Red Herring Magazine and the Fierce15 award by FierceBiotech in 2008.

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Professor Bärbel Hahn-Hägerdal

Professor Bärbel Hahn-Hägerdal’s research concerns the development of industrial strains of yeast for the fermentation of lignocellulosic hydrolysates with special emphasis on recombinant pentose fermenting strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. She obtained a Ph. D. in Biochemistry from Lund University followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She has been a visiting scientist at AIST, Tsukuba, Japan, and a visiting professor at universities in South Africa and Brazil. She is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Free State, Bloomfontein, SA. She serves as Swedish representative on the IEA task “Bioconversion of Lignocellulosics” and on the International Commission for Yeast. She has coordinated a number of national, Nordic and EU research projects with focus on metabolic engineering. She serves on the Natural and Engineering Sciences board of the Swedish Research Council. In 2008 she received the Charles D Scott Award for outstanding contributions in the area of the use of biotechnology to produce fuels and chemicals.

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Professor Michael Hecker

Michael Hecker is Professor for Microbiology at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University Greifswald. He is a member of the Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, of the Akademie der Wissenschaften Hamburg , of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. He is Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and Chairman (Bacteriology and Applied Microbiology) of the International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS). His main research field is bacterial proteomics.

 

 

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Professor Lutz Heide

Professor Lutz Heide studied pharmacy and obtained his PhD in 1981 at the University of Münster, Germany. For three years he worked as a Senior Pharmacist Adviser to the Refugee Health Unit of the Ministry of Health, Somalia. From 1985 -1987, he held a JSPS/Humboldt-Fellowship at Kyoto University, Japan (Prof. M. Tabata), working on secondary metabolism in plant cell cultures. Returning to Germany, he joined the Pharmaceutical Biology department of Bonn University. He was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Freiburg in 1991 and Full Professor of Pharmaceutical Biology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1994. In sabbaticals, he worked with H. G. Floss at the Department of Chemistry, University of Washington, Seattle, and with Joseph P. Noel at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Heide received various awards, including the Phoenix Prize of Pharmaceutical Sciences (1997 and 2004), the Alfried Krupp-Award for Young University Professors (1992) and a Heisenberg Scholarship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1990). He is currently an Associate Editor of the journal “Microbiology”.
His main research interest is the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, and the genetic engineering of antibiotic biosynthesis in microorganisms.

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Professor Rolf Müller

Professor Rolf Müller studied pharmacy at the University of Bonn and obtained his PhD in 1994. As a research scholar of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft he spent two years at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the Department of Chemistry with Prof. H.G. Floss. Upon his return to Germany he became a junior group leader at the Gesellschaft für Biotechnologische Forschung in Braunschweig (GBF). During this time he also worked towards his habilitation with the topic “molecular biology of the biosynthesis of antibiotics in actinomycetes and myxobacteria” at the Technical University Braunschweig. Next to the Phönix-Pharmacy Research Award 2001 and 2007, Rolf Müller received the DECHEMA award for Natural Products Research in 2002 and the BioFuture Award of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research in 2003. Since October 2003, Rolf Müller is Professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University. Research in the Müller group addresses the chemistry, biosynthesis, regulation, heterologous production and mode-of-action of secondary metabolites from myxobacteria and actinomycetes. A number of these compounds are of significant interest both to natural products researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. For more information about the scientific work view http://www.myxo.uni-saarland.de/

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Professor Alfred Pühler

Alfred Pühler studied Physics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen Nürnberg, got his Ph.D. degree in Microbiology in 1971 and habilitated in 1976. In 1980, he became head of the Chair of Genetics at Bielefeld University . Since 2004, he is chairman of the Executive Board of the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) of Bielefeld University . The CeBiTec is equipped with all omics technologies and also with a Bioinformatics Resource Facility. From 1999 to 2005, A. Pühler was member of the Science Council installed by the Federal President of Germany . He also is member of the Northrhine-Westfalian Academy of Sciences, of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the German Academy of Science and Engineering. Since 2008, he works as a Foreign Secretary for the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests concern genome research of industrially relevant microorganisms like coryneform bacteria.

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Professor Peter Rogers

Professor Peter Rogers is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at UNSW and holds a BE Hons (Adel), an MBA (UNSW) and DPhil, DSc Degrees from Oxford where he studied as an Australian Rhodes Scholar. He has been a Visiting Scientist at the Canadian NRC Labs in Ottawa, held Visiting Professorships at MIT (Boston) and ETH (Zurich) and published widely in the scientific/engineering literature (more than 250 publications). He also holds 6 international patents in biotechnology, and has consulted extensively to industry, government and international agencies including the World Bank, UNESCO, UNIDO and AusAid. He is a former Director of the Australian Biotechnology Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia (FIEAust). His main research interests are in industrial and environmental biotechnology/biochemical engineering with application to high productivity processes for renewable energy production (fuel ethanol) and optimization of enzymatic processes for fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In 2004 he received the Exxon-Mobil Award for ‘Excellence in Innovation in Chemical Engineering’ and in 2009, the Hanson Medal from IChemE (UK) for a paper on ‘Second Generation Biofuels’.

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Dr Dennis Romero

Education: BS / MS, University of Minnesota and Ph.D North Carolina State University . Professionally: Senior Scientist at Transgene S.A. , Promega Corp., and since 1994, R&D Group Manager for Danisco (formerly Rhone-Poulenc and Rhodia). Basic research and product development focus on the genetics, physiology, and application of lactic acid bacteria.