METABOLOMICS SOCIETY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Treasurer
- Global Staff Scientist for Metabolomics & Lipidomics Applications at SCIEX
- Society Treasurer
Baljit is currently the global staff scientist for metabolomics & lipidomics applications at SCIEX and is based on the West Coast in California, USA. In this role, she has global responsibilities, to drive key collaborations, generate scientific proof statements, and work closely with market managers, product planners and R&D to drive new market opportunities as well as many other responsibilities. Baljit joined SCIEX as an application scientist in Europe in November 2011 after finishing her Ph.D. studies at the University of Cambridge, where she applied metabolomics to disease biomarker research in the group of Dr Julian Griffin. Prior to this, she held a research scientist position in the metabolic profiling group at GlaxoSmithKline R&D in the UK where she evaluated biomarkers from the effects of drug toxicity in support of drug candidate selection and development.
C. Junot is a doctor of Pharmacy. After having gained a PhD in Analytical Chemistry in 2000 (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris), he joined GlaxoSmithKline laboratories and developed experience in the field of pharmacokinetics and metabolism applied to drug discovery for 2 years. Since 2002, he works at the Life Science Division of CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) where he develops mass spectrometry based analytical methodologies for metabolome analysis in the fields of medicine and microbiology. C. Junot has been appointed as head of the Laboratory for Drug Metabolism Studies since September 2010. He is the deputy coordinator of the French MetaboHUB infrastructure for metabolomics and fluxomics and also in charge of the coordination of analytical chemistry developments in this infrastructure.
Charmion Cruickshank-Quinn is from the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. She is an enthusiastic scientist whose background is in lung disease research, omics integration, and biomarker discovery, using LCMS-based metabolomics.
She received her BS in Chemistry from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany and her PhD in Chemistry from SUNY Buffalo. As part of her doctoral project, she performed method development for profiling biological samples to determine markers of oxidative stress and autism.
Charmion then pursued a Postdoctoral fellowship at National Jewish Health followed by a position as Instructor at the University of Colorado Denver|Anschutz working in the laboratory of Dr. Nichole Reisdorph. She performed targeted and untargeted liquid chromatography mass spectrometry-based metabolomics for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease projects. She also worked towards understanding the biological effects of cigarette smoking on a healthy metabolome using an emphysema mouse model, and determining parallels between mouse and human data for translation studies. Her other contribution to metabolomics involves taking a systems biology approach by integrating functional genomics and metabolomics data. Charmion recently accepted a position with Agilent Technologies as an Applications Scientist where she consults with clients nationwide on their LCMS-based projects.
Charmion has been active in the Metabolomics Society for the past two years where she was a member of the EMN Committee from 2016-2017, and currently serves as Chair for 2017-2018.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Biochemistry
Craig E. Wheelock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, where he serves as director of the Integrative Molecular Phenotyping Laboratory (www.metabolomics.se). He is also a visiting professor at the Gunma Institute for Advanced Research (GIAR), Japan, where he leads the Karolinska International Open Laboratory in metabolomics. Following post-doctoral work on lipid mediators at the University of California Davis, he conducted additional post-doctoral studies at the KEGG laboratory in Kyoto University, Japan. In 2006, he was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to relocate to the Karolinska Institute, where he founded the Integrative Molecular Phenotyping Laboratory. Research in his group focuses on elucidating mechanisms in respiratory disease, with an emphasis on the relationship between childhood environmental exposure and disease onset. In recent years, efforts in his group has moved into the challenges of data analysis and the laboratory has worked extensively on applying multivariate modeling to integrate and investigate ‘omics-based data structures. He is a member of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Science Event Working Group and a consultant on the NIEHS funded Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) project at Mount Sinai, New York. When not balancing his time between Sweden and Japan, he enjoys teaching his kids to kayak and play nicely with others.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at the Nutrition, Food Science
Cristina Andres-Lacueva is Associate Professor at the Nutrition, Food Science & Gastronomy Department of the Pharmacy and Food Science Faculty at the University of Barcelona (UB) and leader of the Biomarkers & Nutritional and Food Metabolomics research group.
Posdoctoral Research at Tufts University/HNRCA (Boston). IP in CIBERFES-isciii, Biomedical Research Network on Frailty and Healthy Aging. Author of over 190 peer-reviewed papers. She is partner of an Innovation by Design project, CooK2Health and Coordinator of the INJOY Campus Activity both from EIT-Health/H2020. Active participation on the EU-Joint Programming Initiative a Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life JPI-HDHL Actions Biomarkers, Microbiomics, Nutrition and Cognition and INTIMIC. At National level, active leadership in grants with MINECO & Health Institute Carlos III, FIS as well as Tranfer Actions with Industry by CDTI funds.
Dan Bearden is a Research Chemist for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), at the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML) in Charleston, South Carolina. Dan earned a PhD in Physics from Rice University (Houston, Texas) and he conducted postdoctoral research in structural biology at the Australian National University, Research School of Chemistry. He was on the faculty of the Chemistry Department of Clemson University for nearly 4 years before taking up his current position. Currently, he is the NIST Senior NMR Scientist at HML. His current research involves metabolomics for marine environmental research and quantitative NMR. Metabolomics is proving to be a powerful tool for the environmental community, linking biological response to organismal stressors with novel approaches.
Job Titles:
- Medical Education and Research Endowed Professor
Dan Raftery is currently a Medical Education and Research Endowed Professor at the University of Washington, School of Medicine, and is a Member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle WA. Dr. Raftery received his PhD from Berkeley and was previously Professor of Chemistry in the Analytical Division at Purdue University, where his group started research in metabolomics in 2003. Dr. Raftery's current research program is focused on the development of new analytical methods and their application to a range of clinical and basic science studies in metabolomics. His group uses advanced mass spectrometry and NMR methods for the identification of early biomarkers and metabolic risk factors for a number of cancers and other diseases, and for the exploration of systems biology in cells and mitochondria. Dr. Raftery founded and directs the Northwest Metabolomics Research Center at UW Medicine, and works with more than 75 research groups per year on a large variety of metabolomics studies.
Professor David Broadhurst (www.davidbroadhurst.net), born Chester UK, holds a first class honours degree in Electronic Engineering, an MSc in Medical Informatics, and a PhD on the subject of ‘‘Application of Artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Algorithms to Metabolic Profiling''. He has been an active member of the metabolomics community for the last 18 years, where he is a recognized expert in design of experiments, signal processing, biostatistics, and machine learning. David worked for an extended period as a post-doctoral research fellow developing large-scale clinical metabolomics protocols alongside Dr. Warrick Dunn, at the University of Manchester as part of Professor Douglas Kell's Bioanalytical Sciences Group. In 2009 he moved to Cork University Maternity Hospital, Ireland, to investigate pre-symptomatic metabolite biomarkers predictive of major pregnancy diseases. In 2011 David was appointed Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he was scientific lead for a range of basic/clinical metabolomics projects, and continued his pregnancy related research. More recently he has expanded his research portfolio to a diverse range of post-genomic translational/precision medicine projects. In March 2016 he was appointed to his current position as Professor at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. In addition to many collaborative Systems Biology projects. His current research primarily focuses the application and optimization of diverse multivariate modelling techniques (parametric & non-parametric linear models, decision trees, machine learning, Structural Equation Modelling, Multilevel random-effects models, etc.) within the domain of systems-biology. Additionally, he has research interests in data visualization, design of experiments, and developing quality assurance procedures for ‘omic based studies. David travels extensively around the globe lecturing on the perils of poor experimental design and importance of robust and diverse statistical analysis.
Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He also holds adjunct appointments with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He has been with the University of Alberta since 1995. Dr. Wishart's research interests are very wide ranging, covering nanotechnology, molecular biology, analytical chemistry, metabolomics and bioinformatics. For the past 12 years, Dr. Wishart has led the "Human Metabolome Project" (HMP), a multi-university, multi-investigator project that is cataloguing all of the known metabolites in human tissues and biofluids. Using advanced methods in NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, multi-dimensional chromatography and machine learning Dr. Wishart and his colleagues have identified or found evidence for more than 110,000 metabolites in the human body. This information has been archived on a freely accessible web-resource called the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). More recently, Dr. Wishart's efforts have focused on using metabolomics to develop rapid diagnostic tests for cancer, colitis and kidney disease. This is part of an ongoing effort to integrate metabolomics into precision medicine. Over the course of his career Dr. Wishart has published more than 400 research papers in high profile journals on a wide variety of subject areas. He currently directs The Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC), Canada's national metabolomics laboratory.
Job Titles:
- NHMRC CJ Martin Research Fellow
Dr Darren Creek is a NHMRC CJ Martin Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne. Darren completed his PhD in pharmaceutics at Monash University in 2008, which involved applications of LCMS and spectroscopic methods to support the discovery of novel antimalarials, arterolane and OZ439. He then conducted post-doctoral research on clinical pharmacology of malaria with the University of California San Francisco and Makerere University in Uganda, and returned to Australia to investigate drug metabolism at the Centre for Drug Candidate Optimisation. On being awarded the NHMRC CJ Martin fellowship, Darren moved to Glasgow University, UK, where he played a major role in the implementation of the Scottish Metabolomics Facility. Darren has developed numerous analytical and bioinformatic methods to optimise outcomes from LCMS and GCMS based untargeted metabolomics studies, and his major contributions to the metabolomics field include: retention time prediction for metabolite identification, untargeted stable-isotope labelling for pathway discovery, and the user-friendly, open-source software for identification and evaluation of metabolomics data, IDEOM. His research has demonstrated the power of metabolomics for the unbiased discovery of novel enzymes, pathways and mechanisms of drug action, and he continues to develop metabolomics techniques, and apply metabolomics to parasitology, microbiology and pharmacology. Darren has over 30 peer-reviewed publications and maintains collaborations across all 6 continents that apply metabolomics to address important issues in biomedical research.
Dr. Candice Ulmer, a native of South Carolina, graduated from the College of Charleston in 2012 with a B. S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry. While at the College of Charleston, Candice investigated the pharmaceutical photodegradation of NSAIDs using ESI-LC-MS/MS under the direction of Dr. Wendy Cory. Dr. Ulmer graduated (May 2016) with a PhD in Chemistry as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow from the University of Florida in Dr. Richard Yost's research group. For her doctoral work, she applied UHPLC-HRMS techniques to profile the metabolome/lipidome of human cells and tissues to better understand the disease etiology of Type 1 Diabetes and melanoma skin cancer. Dr. Ulmer's research comprised experience with various modes of ionization (e.g., MALDI, ESI, APCI, DESI, FlowProbe, and DART). She also incorporated novel stable isotope labeling methodologies such as Isotopic Ratio Outlier Analysis (IROA) to aid in the identification of metabolites as compound identification is still considered a bottleneck in metabolomics studies. In addition to her duties as a graduate student, she was an active researcher with the NIH-funded Southeast Center for Integrated Metabolomics (SECIM). Dr. Ulmer was a member of the Florida mass spec discussion group and the ASMS diversity committee in an effort to increase diversity at conferences and ASMS supported events. Dr. Candice Ulmer was a NIST NRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate (June 2016 - August 2017) and was involved with multi-omic UHPLC-HRMS method development, the first lipidomics interlaboratory study, and experiments that monitored the effects of environmental exposures on human/marine life. Dr. Ulmer is currently a Clinical Chemist Battelle contractor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA (National Center for Environmental Health, Division of Laboratory Sciences, Clinical Chemistry Branch). Her responsibilities include the accurate measurement of chronic disease biomarkers and the assessment of clinical analytical methods in patient care.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Epidemiology
Dr. Caroline Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Metabolomics in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). In 2009, she graduated from Imperial College London with a PhD in Analytical Chemistry under the mentorship of Profs. Jeremy Nicholson, John Lindon and Ian Wilson, where she studied the role of reactive drug metabolites in relation to toxicity. She then held a postdoctoral appointment at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in Dr. Frank Gonzalez's lab and examined the biological effects of ionizing radiation and dietary exposures on human health using metabolomics. From 2012-2016 she directed the cancer metabolism efforts at the Scripps Research Center for Metabolomics with Prof. Gary Siuzdak's lab where she was involved in the optimization of XCMS Online and METLIN technologies.
Since joining YSPH in 2016, her lab's primary focus has been to develop metabolomics for epidemiologic and population-level analysis. The lab is also using mass spectrometry imaging approaches to better understand tissue metabolite heterogeneity and the link between metabolites and cellular pathology. The lab is currently investigating the relationship between genetic and environmental influences in women with colon cancer, and the examination of early-life exposures in pregnancy outcomes. Dr. Johnson also serves on the editorial boards for Metabolites, Toxicological Sciences and Frontiers in Immunology and Nutrition.
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute
Dr. Emma Schymanski is a research Scientist at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology. Her research interests lie in the suspect and non-target screening of environmental contaminants, primarily with LC-HRMS/MS, but also GC-MS and applying structure generation to the identification of "unknowns". The contribution of mass spectra to open spectral libraries is an essential part of her work and she is an active member of the MassBank consortium, developing RMassBank in a team. She also works on optimizing compound database search strategies for candidate selection and how to communicate the confidence of high-throughput identification results, currently applying these in the SOLUTIONS EU project (http://www.solutions-project.eu/) for emerging and future contaminants. Together with Steffen Neumann she founded the CASMI contest for small molecule identification in 2012, now into the fourth round. She is an active member of the Metabolite Identification and Computational Mass Spectrometry Task Groups of the Metabolomics Society. Find out more on her Eawag website or Google Scholar.
Originally from Rwanda (and currently living in South Africa, SA), Fidele Tugizimana holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry (University of Johannesburg, SA), After the completion of a B.Phil. degree in Philosophy (Urbaniana University, Rome), Fidele Tugizimana enrolled in a B.Sc. Biochemistry-Chemistry degree at the University of Johannesburg; and completed a M.Sc. degree in Biochemistry in 2012. He has received different non-degree purpose training in Advanced Mathematics (UNISA) and in Metabolic modelling, Pathway and Flux analyses (Wageningen University, Netherlands).
Currently, Dr. Fidele Tugizimana is a specialist scientist in the International R&D Management of the Omnia Group Ltd. SA, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Johannesburg, a scientific consultant in the L.E.A.F. Pharmaceuticals LLC (USA & Rwanda). He applies metabolomics approaches in interrogating cellular biochemistry at global level, specifically in plant-environment interactions, plant biostimulants and in the natural products research. His research interests include metabolomics, host-pathogen interactions, immune response (at molecular level). Furthermore, He is involved in driving the implementation of tools and workflows developed and used in extracting information from metabolomics data, exploring 4IR technologies in metabolomics, the use of machine learning and integrated novel computational frameworks (e.g. GNPS) in mining and interpreting metabolomics spectral data.
Dr. Fidele Tugizimana was involved in setting up the metabolomics group at the University of Johannesburg. He is involved in metabolomics training in SA, and had been involved in the establishment of the Metabolomics South Africa (MSA), an affiliate to the Metabolomics Society since June 2018, and he is currently the president of MSA. Dr. Tugizimana is an author/co-author of several metabolomics papers in leading peer-reviewed international scientific journals; and he serves as a guest editor and a reviewer for scientific journals such as Metabolomics, Frontiers in Plant Science, Metabolites, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.
Dr. Laura K. Reed, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama since 2010. She also serves as the co-founder of the International Drosophila Metabolomics Curation Consortium. She received her BS from the Department of Biology at the University of Oregon in 2000 and her Ph.D. from the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Arizona. In 2007, she received a NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellowship to study the genetic and dietary contributions to Metabolic Syndrome-like phenotypes in Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) at North Carolina State University. Professor Reed continues her NIH funded research on the genetic and environmental factors of obesity by mapping the genes contributing to metabolic interactions with diet in fruit flies. Dr. Reed also teaches Integrated Genomics and Evolutionary Biology courses.
Dr. Mioara Larion received her B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Cuza University, Lasi, Romania in 2002. She moved to Florida State University where she received a M.Sc. in Biophysics in 2005 working on saturation transfer electron paramagnetic resonance methods and their sensitivity to molecular motion upon increasing the field. In 2009, Dr. Larion received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry working on divergent evolution of function in bacterial kinases and the origin of kinetic cooperativity in human pancreatic glucokinase in the laboratory of Prof. Brian Miller. After obtaining her Ph.D in 2009, she was awarded the AHA postdoctoral fellowship to work with Prof. Rafael Brüschweiler on biophysical characterization of glucokinase and PHHI-like variants. Her work helped understand the mechanism of glucokinase's activation for design of better anti-diabetic therapeutics. Currently, her major interest is in metabolomics of brain tumors. In 2015, she started a metabolomics-based laboratory at National Cancer Institute, to work on isocitrate dehydrogenase mutant brain tumors. Dr. Larion's work on understanding metabolic reprograming of lower grade gliomas in the indolent and progressed state has identified imaging and therapeutic targets.
Nils Hoffmann studied Computer Science in the natural sciences with a focus on data mining, machine learning, and organic, as well as theoretical chemistry at Bielefeld University. In 2006 he spent a six months student internship at the computer chemistry center (CCC) at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in the group of Prof. Johann Gasteiger. He received his diploma in 2007 from Bielefeld University and started his PhD on computational methods for the analysis of GC-MS and GCxGC-MS metabolomics data as a staff scientist in the group of Prof. Jens Stoye. After finishing his PhD magna cum laude in 2014, he joined German AI pioneer Empolis Information Management GmbH in Bielefeld as a solution engineer and later worked as an instructor and technical project manager for semantic search applications.
Since June 2017, Nils Hoffmann is a PostDoc in Bioinformatics for Lipidomics within the de.NBI/LIFS project at ISAS (Dortmund, Germany) in the group of Dr. Robert Ahrends.
Professor Dr. Robert D Hall gained a PhD in plant biotechnology and enzymology (Edinburgh, 1984) and has subsequently completed 30 years research experience, including 20 years project / group management experience. He moved to The Netherlands in 1987 where he currently works at Wageningen Plant Research as Deputy Business Unit Manager Bioscience (www.pri.wur.nl/uk/). He also holds a Special Professorship in plant metabolomics at Wageningen University. He was previously Director of the Netherlands Centre of Biosystems Genomics, a Public Private partnership in plant science and was coordinator of the EU-METAPHOR project (www.meta-phor.eu). He is co-founder of the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre (www.metabolomicscentre.nl) and currently serves on the Supervisory Board. He (co)organised the first ever international metabolomics conference in Wageningen in 2002 and the international Metabolomics Society conference in Amsterdam in 2010. He was on the Board of the international Metabolomics Society from 2008-2014 and was the elected President (2010-2012). He was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship of the Society in 2015. He is scientific advisor / member of a number of (inter)national research committees coordinating research strategy and funding both in Europe and N. America. His primary research activities are now centred on functional genomics and developing metabolomics technologies for application in plants for both science and industry (www.metabolomics.nl). He is on the Editorial Boards of Frontiers in Metabolomics, Molecular Biotechnology and the journal Metabolomics. He has completed nearly 200 publications of which 75% are in peer-reviewed journals and he has edited 3 books including 2 on Plant metabolomics.
Dr.Michael Witting studied Applied Chemistry with a functional direction into biochemistry at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg. In 2009 he joined the Research Unit Analytical BioGeoChemistry at the Helmholtz Zentrum München for his PhD studies. In 2013 he obtained his PhD from the Technical University of Munich. At the moment he is performing his habilitation at the Chair of Analytical Food Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich. His current research interests are the definition of the metabolome and lipidome of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and the understanding of the lipid metabolism regulation on lipid species level. Furthermore, he is interested in metabolite identification workflows in LC-MS-based non-targeted metabolomics and in the use of orthogonal information such as retention time, retention indices and ion mobility and CCS information for an improved metabolite identification.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- EMN Committee Chair
Dr Evelina Charidemou holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge UK. She specialises in Nutritional Biochemistry and Metabolism. Her research was performed at the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research (MRC HNR). She holds a bachelor's degree (Hons) in Biochemistry from Imperial College London, where she was awarded the honorary degree of the Associateship from the Royal College of Science UK (ARCS) for excellence during her studies. Her research focuses on the development of metabolomics and lipidomics tools to investigate aspects of the Metabolic Syndrome, particularly Type II diabetes and Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Specifically, she is using high-performance liquid chromatography and multivariate bioinformatic tools to analyse biological samples and identify biomarkers to understand the underlying mechanism of metabolism in diseases.
Dr Charidemou presented her work in National and International Conferences; The 12th and 14th International Conference of the Metabolomics Society in Dublin and Seattle respectively as well as the 11th annual Metabomeeting in Nottingham UK. In the 2nd Metabolomics Sardinian Scientific School, she was awarded the best presentation and she was invited to publish her research work at the International Journal of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Dr Charidemou has published her work at high impact journals such as Journal of Clinical Investigations Insights, Hepatology, Cell Science, Diabetologia and she has multiple scientific collaboration with the University of Oxford UK, University of Aarhus Denmark, Imperial College, as well as the University of Cyprus. In addition, she is an active member of the International Metabolomic Society, the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism, the Biochemical Society and she founded the Cyprus Metabolomic Network, of which she is currently the President. She has also been awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship.
Besides her scientific interests, Dr Charidemou is a former elite athlete of the Cyprus National Track and Field team and enjoys running.
Job Titles:
- Secretary
- Senior Research Scientist at INRAE
- Society Secretary
Fabien Jourdan is a senior research scientist at INRAE (the French National Research Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research) Toulouse, France. He graduated with a PhD in computer science at the University of Montpellier (France) in 2004, working on the premises of social networks, in particular studying their topology. He then shared his time between a software startup company and a research assistant position. In 2005 he was hired by INRAE (Toulouse, France) to develop computational solutions for metabolomics studies (mainly NMR). In 2006 he spent a year as a visiting researchers at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) working with Pr. Michael Barrett on metabolic profiling (HRMS) of Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite and causative agent of sleeping sickness.
Fabien Jourdan has pioneered bioinformatics methods to study Genome-Scale Metabolic Networks using metabolomics (and other omics data, e.g. transcriptome/proteome) to predict impacts on metabolism and phenotype associated with genetic or environmental perturbations. His research team is currently applying these approaches to food toxicology and more broadly in studying the link between metabolism and human health (e.g. in cancer). Since 2009, Fabien Jourdan has led the development of MetExplore open and its open access web server (www.metexplore.fr) which is used by more than 800 users worldwide and maintained and developed by a group of 8 computational biologists. Fabien Jourdan is member of the board of the French National infrastructure for metabolomics and fluxomics, MetaboHub. He was president of the French-speaking Metabolomics and Fluxomics Network (RFMF) from 2015 to 2019. He was elected on the board of the metabolomics society in 2019.
Gary Siuzdak is Professor of Chemistry, Molecular and Computational Biology and Director of the Center for Metabolomics at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California (http://masspec.scripps.edu/). He has also served as Vice President of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and guest faculty at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research has focused on developing mass spectrometry-based metabolomic technologies including nanostructure-based imaging, XCMS (https://xcmsonline.scripps.edu/) and METLIN (http://metlin.scripps.edu/) informatic tools, and their application to understanding the fundamental biochemistry of cancer, stem cells and chronic pain. He has two books, "Mass Spectrometry for Biotechnology" and the "The Expanding Role of Mass Spectrometry in Biotechnology". My interest in serving the Metabolomics Society is to further help this rapidly growing and exciting area of science.
Dr Schirra is one of the leaders of NMR-based metabolomics in Australia. He studied Chemistry at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland). In 1999, he joined the University of Queensland, where he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Australian Research Council and a prestigious Queensland Smart State Fellowship. In 2009, Dr Schirra became an independent Lecturer in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences at UQ, and in 2012 he joined UQ's Centre for Advanced Imaging, where he leads a multidisciplinary research program in Metabolic Systems Biology and administers the newly established UQ Facility for NMR-based Metabolomics. Dr Schirra uses NMR-based metabolomics to investigate the basic principles of metabolic regulation and the role they play in fundamental biological processes, environmental change, and in the development of disease, especially obesity and cancer. His research aims to integrate metabolomics with other -omics methods and genome-scale metabolic simulations. Dr Schirra is Board Member of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance (ANZMAG) and committee member of the Australian and New Zealand Metabolomics Network (ANZMN). He has been a member of the Metabolomics Society since 2008 and was Co-chair of the 13th International Conference of the Metabolomics Society in Brisbane 2017. He is editorial board member of the journals Metabolites, and International Scholarly Research Notices, and regional editor of Current Metabolomics.
Professor Ines Thiele is the principal investigator of the Molecular Systems Physiology group at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Her research aims to improve the understanding of how diet influences human health. Therefore, she uses a computational modelling approach, termed constraint-based modelling, which has gained increasing importance in systems biology. Her group builds comprehensive models of human cells and human-associated microbes; then employs them together with experimental data to investigate how nutrition and genetic predisposition can affect one's health. In particular, she is interested in applying her computational modelling approach for better understanding inherited and neurodegenerative diseases. Ines Thiele has been pioneering models and methods allowing large-scale computational modelling of the human gut microbiome and its metabolic effect on human metabolism.
Ines Thiele earned her PhD in bioinformatics from the University of California, San Diego, in 2009. From 2009 until 2013, Ines Thiele was an Assistant Professor at the University of Iceland. From April 2013 until January 2019, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg. Since February 2019, Ines Thiele is a Professor for Systems Biomedicine at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
In 2013, Ines Thiele received the ATTRACT fellowship from the Fonds National de la Recherche (Luxembourg). In 2015, she was elected as EMBO Young Investigator. In 2017, she was awarded the prestigious ERC starting grant. She is an author of over 80 international scientific papers and reviewer for multiple journals and funding agencies.
Dr Kirwan started her career as a clinical veterinarian where she became increasingly interested in how clinical research translated into changes in clinical practice and evidence based medicine. After completing her PhD at the University of Liverpool, she moved to the University of Birmingham, UK and from there to the Max Delbrück Center of Molecular Medicine, Germany. She is part of the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) Initiative to improve translational research and now heads the BIH Metabolomics Platform in Berlin. This has enabled her to focus on health related metabolomics and mass spectrometry research and she is particularly interested in the gut-brain-heart health triad. She is currently involved in several studies which involve long term sampling and monitoring of individuals and this has led to an interest in appropriate biobanking of samples for metabolomics and lipidomics. She is also a member of the Metabolomics quality assurance and quality control consortium (MQACC) and the Evidence based veterinary network.
Job Titles:
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry
- Professor of Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University
Jeremy Everett is the Professor of Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Greenwich UK. In addition, he is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College and at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is also a Scientific Consultant and Acting Director of the Singapore Phenome Centre.
He previously held a variety of global drug discovery technology leadership positions for Pfizer, and before that, SmithKline Beecham, including responsibility for drug target analysis, drug design, drug lead generation, analytical sciences, biobanking, screening file management, high throughput screening (HTS), and structural biology. He is a consultant on drug discovery to both large pharma and small research institutes, and also consults on pharmaceutical patent litigation.
Jeremy conducts research in metabonomics and pharmaco-metabonomics, in which he has worked for over 30 years, including co-naming and defining both areas. He is a co-discoverer of pharmacometabonomics in animals and humans. Current work is focused on genotype - metabotype correlations in the areas of colorectal cancer, obesity and diabetes in collaborations with Horizon Discovery, UK and University College, London respectively.
Jeremy received both his BSc and PhD in chemistry from Nottingham University, UK. He did post-doctoral studies at McMaster University and at McGill University in Canada.
Jeremy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Chartered Chemist, a Member of the American Chemical Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is an author or co-author on 95 peer-reviewed publications and several patents, with over 3,600 citations to date and an h-index of 25. He has delivered over 60 invited lectures.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- President
- Associate Professor in Medicine at Brigham
- Society President
Dr. Lasky-Su is an Associate Professor in Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She earned her doctoral degree in Genetic Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health and has spent the last 20 years focusing on the identification of genetic, genomic, and metabolomic determinants for complex diseases. The accumulation of these efforts has resulted in over 150 peer-reviewed original research manuscripts. Dr. Lasky-Su's more recent work has focused on analytic and network approaches to integrate metabolomics and other omics data types with the end goal of making strides towards precision medicine. She is currently the principal investigator and co-investigator on many grants focused on the integration of metabolomics and other omics data types for several diseases including asthma, allergies, preeclampsia, macular degeneration, cancer, and several other complex diseases. Dr. Lasky-Su currently serves in leadership capacities in a variety of consortiums, including acting as the chairman of the Consortium of METabolomic Studies (COMETS) and a scientific advisor to the "Metabolomics Workbench." Through these efforts, she has worked to facilitate the utilization of metabolomics in large population-based cohorts. Her long-term goals are to continue to promote metabolomics research among the epidemiological community through the establishment of solid statistical approaches, the harmonization of data, and the integration of metabolomics or other omics data.
Dr. Griffin studied chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went on to do postgraduate research in biochemistry, gaining his DPhil from Oxford in 1999 after studying in the laboratory of Professor George Radda. Following this he held Postdoctoral posts as a Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Fellow in Radiology, as a research associate at Imperial College London and, later, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (UK). He was formally appointed as a University Lecturer (the US equivalent to an associate professor) at Cambridge University in 2007. Dr. Griffin's group uses a range of analytical techniques including NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (they have access to a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer, a Thermo LTQ ion trap, a Waters QTOF Ultima, a Waters Quattro Premiere triple quadrupole LCMS and two GC-MS), to follow metabolism in the brain to look at a range of disease processes. The majority of his work has centered on mouse models of disease including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses. More recently, Dr. Griffin's group has been using a combination of animal models (mouse, rat and C.elegans) to understand the metabolic consequences of "metabolic syndrome" including type II diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease and dyslipidaemia. His studies have attempted to cross-correlate metabolomic data with proteomics and transcriptomics to create a "systems biology" description of the consequences of pathology and genetic modulation related to the metabolic syndrome.
Dr. Griffin studied chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went on to do postgraduate research in biochemistry, gaining his DPhil from Oxford in 1999 after studying in the laboratory of Professor George Radda. Following this he held Postdoctoral posts as a Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Fellow in Radiology, as a research associate at Imperial College London and, later, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (UK). He was formally appointed as a University Lecturer (the US equivalent to an associate professor) at Cambridge University in 2007. Dr. Griffin's group uses a range of analytical techniques including NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (they have access to a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer, a Thermo LTQ ion trap, a Waters QTOF Ultima, a Waters Quattro Premiere triple quadrupole LCMS and two GC-MS), to follow metabolism in the brain to look at a range of disease processes. The majority of his work has centered on mouse models of disease including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses. More recently, Dr. Griffin's group has been using a combination of animal models (mouse, rat and C.elegans) to understand the metabolic consequences of "metabolic syndrome" including type II diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease and dyslipidaemia. His studies have attempted to cross-correlate metabolomic data with proteomics and transcriptomics to create a "systems biology" description of the consequences of pathology and genetic modulation related to the metabolic syndrome.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- EMN Chair
- Wageningen University & Research ( WUR ) ( Netherlands )
After his BSc and MSc in ‘Molecular Sciences' in Wageningen, The Netherlands, Justin also did his PhD in Systematic Metabolite Identification and Annotation at the WUR. His PhD resulted in papers in metabolomics-oriented peer-reviewed scientific journals like Analytical Chemistry and Metabolomics. Justin also presented his work at international meetings such as the Metablomics2010 meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the International Conference on Polyphenol and Health, 2011, Sitges, Spain, and the Metabomeetings in 2012, Manchester; and in 2014, London, UK.
Most importantly, he gained skills and hands-on experience in different aspects of the metabolomics pipeline: the use of mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (for metabolite annotation and identification) and data analysis of comprehensive data sets. In addition, Justin gained knowledge in plant polyphenol production and analysis and the human metabolism of ingested polyphenols. After his PhD, he held postions as a junior researcher at Plant Research International (NL), and as research associate in Glasgow (UK) at the group of Prof. Alan Crozier where he investigated the fate of (-)-epicatechin in human and rat using radioactivity monitoring, mass spectrometry, and NMR based approaches.
He then moved to Glasgow Polyomics to work with Dr Karl Burgess and Prof. Mike Barrett and different partners from Glasgow Polyomics. Justin obtained an ISSF Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to work on method development and implementation of fragmentation approaches to enhance the metabolite annotation capacities of the high-resolution LC-MS systems focusing on small polar metabolites in urine, beer, and bacterial extracts. The fellowship resulted in three first-author papers, of which one describes the implementation of Molecular Networking (http://gnps.ucsd.edu/) to perform drug and drug metabolite screening in urine extracts.
In collaboration with Dr Simon Rogers (Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK), Justin published a PNAS paper where topic modelling - often used in text-mining - is used for unsupervised substructure exploration in metabolomics data sets using a newly developed software tool MS2LDA. Justin has been working on metabolomics projects thereby exploiting the information-rich fragmentation data that modern mass spectrometers generate and alleviate the bottleneck of metabolite annotation and identification in untargeted metabolomics approaches. He now moved to the WUR to take up a shared Postdoc position between WUR and the group of Prof. Pieter Dorrestein at the UCSD, USA. The work will be focusing on how to combine workflows developed for genome and metabolome mining to aid in functional annotations of genes and structural annotations of metabolites.
Justin has been an active member of the Metabolomics Society for several years. He was part of the founding Early-Careers Members Network (EMN) committee and chaired the committee in the lead-up to Metabolomics2016 in Dublin. Recently, Justin joined the Board of Directors. He is part of the Strategy Task Group and the Metabolite Identification Task Group - something which is close to his heart.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine
Karsten Suhre is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) and the Director of the Virtual Metabolomics and Bioinformatics Core at the WCM campus in Qatar. He publishes in top-tier journals, including Nature and Nature Genetics, and has a publication H-index of 50. He holds honorary appointments with Kings College London and Cambridge University (both institutions maintain large population cohorts) and sits on the International Scientific Advisory Board of the UK Biobank. Before joining WCM-Q in 2011, Prof. Suhre was Professor for Bioinformatics at the Department of Biology of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany and was also a Group Leader for Metabolomics Research at the Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology of the Helmholtz Center Munich, where he initiated metabolomics research in the KORA population study. Between 1994 and 2006, he served at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), first as a Charge and then as a Director of Research, with a two-year interruption (2000-2001), where he worked as a Project Engineer in the German Automobile Industry. After a very interdisciplinary career starting with Theoretical Physics, followed by Atmospheric Sciences, and then Structural and Functional Biology, Prof. Suhre is now investigating how genetic variation in human metabolism interacts with environmental challenges and lifestyle factors in the development of complex diseases, especially diabetes, cancer, heart and kidney diseases, and how to translate findings from studies with deep molecular phenotyping (multi-omics) to clinical application.
Kazuki Saito obtained Ph. D from the University of Tokyo in 1982. After staying in Keio University in Japan and Ghent University in Belgium (Prof. Marc Van Montagu's laboratory) as a post-doc, in 1995 he has been appointed as a full professor at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chiba University, until now. He now holds the post of Deputy Director of RIKEN Plant Science Center, where he is also Group Director of the Metabolomic Function Research Group. Kazuki is one of the pioneers in the field of plant metabolomics, featuring with the efforts on functional genomics by integration with transcriptomics. For his distinguished research, in 2010 he was awarded The Prize for Science and Technology (Research Category) by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. Kazuki's current research aims to understand the mechanism and regulation of plant metabolism through the genomics and post-genomics approaches and subsequently to apply the obtained knowledge to synthetic biology.
Job Titles:
- Program Officer
- Secretary
- Immediate past Secretary
Krista Zanetti is a Program Officer in the Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program (EGRP), Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Zanetti earned her Ph.D. in Nutrition from Cornell University in 2003 and joined the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program at the NCI. During the first year of her fellowship, she earned an M.P.H. at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Zanetti then conducted primary research in the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis in the NCI's Center for Cancer Research from 2004 to 2010. Since joining EGRP in 2010, Dr. Zanetti's primary focus has been building infrastructure and capacity to support metabolomics in population-based studies. In 2014, she spearheaded collaborative efforts to establish the trans-NIH international Consortium of Metabolomics Studies (COMETS), which brings together 57 prospective cohorts from the North America, South America, Europe and Asia (http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/comets). COMETS allows investigators from across multiple disease phenotypes to: 1.) leverage existing resources and data; and 2.) work collectively to develop methods, tools and protocols for data harmonization and sharing, quality control and data standardization. More recently, Dr. Zanetti collaboratively organized a meeting in 2017 that led to the establishment of the metabolomics Quality Assurance and quality Control Consortium (mQACC). mQACC's mission is to engage the metabolomics community to communicate and promote the development, dissemination and harmonization of best QA/QC practices in untargeted metabolomics (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-018-1460-7).
Responsibilities of the Elected Directors
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair
- Treasurer
- Professor of Biochemistry / Director, MU Metabolomics Center
Dr. Sumner acquired his B.Sc. degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics in 1989 from Cameron University in Lawton, OK, USA and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry focused on mass spectrometry in 1993 from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK, USA. He then joined Texas A&M University, College Station TX, where he was the Director of the Mass Spectrometry Applications Laboratory and where he later served as the cofounder and Associate Director of the TAMU Laboratory for Biological Mass Spectrometry with Prof. David H Russell. He joined The Noble Foundation in 1999 and rose to the rank of Professor within the Plant Biology Division. Dr. Sumner relocated to the University of Missouri, Columbia in January 2016 as a Professor in the Biochemistry Department and Director of the new University of Missouri Metabolomics Center. Dr. Sumner's research is focused on the development, integration and application of large-scale biochemical profiling of plant metabolites, proteins, and transcripts (metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics) for the discovery and characterization of the molecular and biochemical components related to plant natural products/specialized metabolites biosynthesis. He also applies these integrated omics technologies for greater insight into the physiological and biochemical consequences of gene expression and system responses to genetic and environmental perturbations. In the process, he has published approximately 135 peer reviewed articles and book chapters; many with leading national and international collaborators. Dr. Sumner's research is or has been supported by the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, NSF 2010, NSF Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, NSF Major Research Instrumentation program, NSF-JST joint Metabolomics for a Low Carbon Society, NSF Integrative Organismal Systems, and The Oklahoma Commission for the Advancement of Science and Technology. Dr. Sumner is currently a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science; President of the Phytochemical Society of North America (2014-2017), former Treasurer (2010-2012) and President (2008-2010) of the Metabolomics Society; 2013 Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society; Co-founding Member of the International Advisory Committee for Plant Metabolomics; Principal investigator of a new Plant, Algae, and Microbial Metabolomics Research Coordination Network (PAMM-NET), and a 2007 Distinguished Alumni of Cameron University. Dr. Sumner has served as a Managing Editor for Plant Physiology, Front Pages Co-Editor and Editorial Board member for the journal Metabolomics, Associate Editor of Frontiers in Plant Metabolism and Chemical Diversity, and review Editor for several plant and metabolomics related Frontiers journals.
Marine Letertre EMN Chair 2020 marine.letertre@univ-nantes.fr m.letertre16@gmail.com @LetertreMarine
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair
- President
- Professor of Metabolomics
Mark R. Viant is a Professor of Metabolomics in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. He also serves as the Director of the Natural Environment Research Council's (NERC) Environmental Metabolomics Facility at Birmingham. Prof. Viant received his BSc in Chemistry and PhD in Chemical Physics at the University of Southampton, UK. Following postdoctoral research in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, he shifted his research interests into environmental toxicology, conducting further postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Davis. In 2003 he was awarded a NERC Advanced Fellowship and relocated to the University of Birmingham, where his research team now focuses on the development and application of both NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry in environmental metabolomics, specifically as tools for chemical risk assessment and environmental monitoring. His primary research interests include the molecular characterisation and understanding of stress responses in aquatic organisms, in particular to environmental pollution. In addition his team develops novel analytical and bioinformatic approaches for metabolomics. He has authored over 90 publications, including pioneering applications of metabolomics to environmental health issues in aquatic organisms.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular
Mark Styczynski is an associate professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Dr. Styczynski earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), followed by postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute. While his Ph.D. work was in computational biology and bioinformatics, his postdoctoral training was in metabolomics and molecular biology; he has maintained research efforts in both of those areas since joining Georgia Tech in 2009. Currently his group's work is at the interface of systems and synthetic biology, with main emphases including the integration of metabolomics data into the development of metabolic models and the development of biosensors for diagnostics using synthetic biology. He is the founding president of the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA, an international affiliate of the Metabolomics Society), and a member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium.
Matej Orešič holds a PhD in biophysics from Cornell University (1999; Ithaca, NY, USA). He is a professor of medical sciences with specialization in systems medicine at Örebro University (Sweden), group leader in systems medicine at the University of Turku (Finland), and a guest professor in lipids and nutrition at the Oil Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Wuhan. As of 2016, he was made a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society. He previously served as member of the Board of Directors of the Metabolomics Society for two, consecutive terms (2008-2012). Prof. Orešič is one of the founders of the Nordic Metabolomics Society and currently its chair of the board. In 2019, he co-chaired the 1st Gordon Research Conference on ‘Metabolomics and Human Health' (Ventura, CA, USA). Previously, he also chaired the Keystone Symposium on Systems Biology of Lipid Metabolism (2015; Breckenridge, CO, USA). Prof. Orešič's main research areas include metabolomics applications in biomedical research and systems medicine. He is particularly interested in the identification of disease processes associated with different metabolic phenotypes and the underlying mechanisms linking these processes with the development of specific disorders or their co-morbidities, with a central focus on both type 1 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Prof. Orešič also initiated the popular MZmine open source project, which led to the development and release of popular software for metabolomics data processing.
Dr Nik Rattray is a bioanalytical chemist working within the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), part of the University of Manchester. At present, he is an Experimental Officer in the new BBSRC SYNBIOCHEM centre (http://synbiochem.co.uk/) where he serves as metabolomics lead. His current interests lie in applying mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to a design-build-test synthetic biology environment. This approach allows metabolomics to inform and influence the metabolic engineering of various microbial/mould based scaffolds with the ultimate goal of discovery and upscale of new valuable speciality chemicals.
Born in Dumfries UK, Nik earned his 1st Class undergraduate Masters (with Honours) in Medicinal Chemistry from Manchester Metropolitan University and subsequently gained his PhD from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Manchester in the area of Biophysics and Molecular Diagnostics. He subsequently moved to the MIB, worked as a mass spectrometry technician (breathomics) and subsequently as a post-doc (clinical and microbial metabolomics) under Professor Roy Goodacre, starting his journey into metabolomics based research.
Since gaining his PhD and working at the MIB, Nik has published over 25 peer review publications has contributed to over 40 conference proceedings and is co-investigator in grants totalling over £700,000. He is acting secretary within the University of Manchester Mass Spectrometry Steering Committee, serves as a technical director and trustee within the RORO registered charity (http://www.roro-uk.org/en/index - recycling scientific equipment and creating research opportunities in the developing world), is leading on the establishment of a UK-wide synthetic biology mass spectrometry users forum and currently acts as a Project Area Liaison within the ERA-net FAIRDOM data-management community (http://fair-dom.org/node/155).
His current research direction concentrates on advancing mass spectrometry based metabolomics into the automation of synthetic biology whilst at the same time developing methods to integrate ion-mobility and imaging mass spectrometry into more general metabolomics applications.
Job Titles:
- Treasurer
- Immediate past Treasurer
Oliver Fiehn Treasurer 2008-2009 2004-2011, 2013-2014 ofiehn @ ucdavis. edu
Job Titles:
- Professor for Analytical Chemistry
Christoph Steinbeck was born in Neuwied in 1966. He studied chemistry at the University of Bonn, where he received his diploma and doctoral degree at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, working on methods for computer assisted structure elucidation. In 1996, he joined the group of Prof. Clemens Richert at Tufts University in Boston, MA, USA, where he worked in the area of biomolecular NMR on the 3D structure elucidation of peptide-nucleic acid conjugates. In 1997 Christoph Steinbeck became head of the Structural Chemo- and Bioinformatics Workgroup at the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute of Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. In 2002 he moved to Cologne University Bioinformatics Center (CUBIC) as head of the Research Group for Molecular Informatics. In 2003 Christoph Steinbeck received his Habilitation in Organic Chemistry from Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. From 2008 to 2016, he was Head of Cheminformatics and Metabolism at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. During this time, his group developed open chemistry databases for the biosciences, such as ChEBI, the dictionary and ontology of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, and the MetaboLights database, a repository and reference database for Metabolomics.
Today, Christoph Steinbeck is Professor for Analytical Chemistry, Cheminformatics and Chemometrics at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. The Steinbeck group's research is dedicated to computational metabolomics and natural products research, the elucidation of metabolomes by means of computer-assisted structure elucidation and other prediction methods and algorithm development in cheminformatics. The group further helps developing a number of the leading open source software packages in Chemo- and Bioinformatics, including the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK), which was co-founded by Christoph Steinbeck
Christoph Steinbeck is also leading the European e-infrastructure project PhenoMeNal on large scale computing with human metabolic phenotyping data.
Over the course of his career, Christoph Steinbeck was founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cheminformatics, a director of the Metabolomics Society, chairman of the Computers-Information-Chemistry (CIC) division of the German Chemical Society, and established the German Conference on Cheminformatics. Christoph is a lifetime member of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC), a member of the Metabolomics Society, the German Chemical Society, as well as of various editorial boards and committees.
Job Titles:
- Director of Bioinformatics for the Phenome Centre Birmingham at the University of Birmingham
Ralf Weber is the Director of Bioinformatics for the Phenome Centre Birmingham at the University of Birmingham (UK). He obtained his BSc degree in Bioinformatics from the HAN University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen (Netherlands). In 2007 he moved to the University of Birmingham where he completed a PhD in computational mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. He continued to work as a Research Fellow from 2010 - 2016 and was involved in a variety of clinical, toxicology and computational-focused research projects. During spring 2016 he was a visiting researcher at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (China). Currently, he is the module lead for the ‘omics' science component of the MSc Bioinformatics course at the University of Birmingham. He is a co-founder of and trainer in the Birmingham Metabolomics Training Centre since 2015, and a past committee member of the Early-career Members Network of the international Metabolomics Society from 2013 - 2016. His research team's interests include the development and application of data processing, biostatistics and data mining tools to facilitate biochemical annotation and interpretation of clinical and toxicological metabolomics data.
Job Titles:
- US Food & Drug Administration ( USA )
Robert Mistrik (46), HighChem, Slovakia, has a masters degree in chemistry from the Slovak Technical University, Bratislava, Slovakia and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Austria. He held a postdoctoral position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA. He is the creator of Mass Frontier, a software for processing and interpreting mass spectral data in which the spectral tree concept was introduced. He is the author of precursor ion fingerprinting method that allows identification of metabolites based on substructural identities of tandem mass spectra. In 2009, he was awarded the Head of the Year prize, a national award for exceptional achievements in science and technology. Dr. Mistrik has been a member of the scientific steering committee of the METAcancer consortium, aiming to identify small molecule biomarkers in breast cancer tissue. Currently, he is leading the m/z Cloud initiative that is a collaborative effort to build a comprehensive spectral trees library for identification of metabolic components utilizing molecular evolutionary patterns.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Director
- Editor in Chief
- Founder
- Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester
Roy Goodacre Chair roy.goodacre@liverpool.ac.uk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Goodacre @roygoodacre https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-goodacre-5023166/
Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester. His research interests are broadly within analytical biotechnology and systems and synthetic biology. He has over 20 years experience of advanced bioanalytical measurements including MS-based metabolomics and has pioneered the application of a variety of Raman spectroscopy methods for the direct analysis of bacteria and their products. His research group (www.biospec.net) comprises 25 researchers (1:2 PDRA:PhDs) and as PI and CoI he has a combined grant portfolio of >£15M from the UK and EU. He is founding director of a novel microbial resistance typing diagnostics company (Spectromics; www.spectromics.com). He has published >350 scientific papers and if you believe in such metrics has healthy H-indices (58, WoK; 70, Google Scholar). He helped established the Metabolomics Society, is a director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum, is founding Editor-in-Chief of Metabolomics (established 2005) and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of four other journals. Finally, he was awarded the RSC Industrially-Sponsored Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry in 2005, made a Fellow of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy in 2015, and delighted to be made an Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society in 2016.
Roy is Professor of Biological Chemistry in the Department of Biochemistry and Systems Biology within the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology (ISMIB) at the University of Liverpool and a director of the Centre for Metabolomics Research.
Roy helped to develop and establish long-term metabolomics which allows fusion of GC-MS and LC-MS data. These approaches have been used by his team and collaborators to profile (e.g.) health human populations and investigate the frailty phenotype during the ageing process. In parallel, in order to understand metabolic flux on a single cell level for bacterial community analysis, his group are currently developing high spatial resolution photothermal infrared and Raman-based imaging methods.
Roy is a Founder and Director of the Metabolomics Society (2005-15) and is very happy to serve on the Board of Directors again. He is also a Director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum. Roy is a Committee member of Royal Society of Chemistry's Analytical Division Council (ADC) and is a Trustee of the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering
Sastia Prama Putri is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University. She received her PhD from International Center for Biotechnology, Osaka University in which she worked on the discovery of novel bioactive compounds from natural products and gained in depth techniques in analytical and organic chemistry as well as biochemistry. Her awards include "Metabolomics Australia Poster Prize" in the 9th Annual Conference of the Metabolomics Society, Glasgow, UK", a fellowship from UNESCO and scholarships from the Japanese Government. She is currently working on "JST-NSF: Metabolomics for low carbon society" project, focusing on application of metabolomics technology for optimization of various higher alcohols for use as biofuels. She has recently written two review articles on current metabolomics: technological advances and practical applications and is currently working as an editor for a book entitled "Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics: A Practical Guide" with CRC Press, Taylor and Francis.
Since she joined a metabolomics laboratory in 2011, she has been actively promoting metabolomics to scientific communities in her home country, Indonesia. One of her endeavors resulted in the establishment of a research collaboration with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute. This collaboration resulted in a paper on authentication of world's most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak that recently gained worldwide attention and is featured including NPR USA, Science Magazine, BBC UK, RSC's Chemistry World, USA Today, Nikkei Business Daily Japan, etc. During her PhD study, she served as the student representative for the Society of Invertebrate Pathology. She is now a part of the Metabolomics Society Strategy Task Group and is appointed as the first chair of the newly established Early Career Member Scientist Member Network (EMN) of the Metabolomics Society.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Senior Lecturer
- EMN Chair
Stacey Reinke is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Statistics and Computational Biology, and head of computational biology at the Centre for Integrative Metabolomics and Computational Biology (CIMCB) at Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia). She completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Alberta (Canada) in 2011. Her early metabolomics research investigated mitochondrial dysfunction in model systems, which later expanded to investigating energy metabolism dysregulation in inflammatory diseases. Stacey's current research focusses include applied investigations of respiratory and early-life diseases, and methodological research into intuitive data science. She also has a keen interest in the intersection between contemporary research and pedagogical best practice, having recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education.
Stacey Reinke received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Alberta (Canada) where she investigated mitochondrial dysfunction in nematode and yeast model systems using NMR spectroscopy, under the supervision of Prof. Brian Sykes. Upon graduation she remained at the University of Alberta as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, moving into the area of clinical metabolomics, where she used metabolic profiling in conjunction with classical molecular biology approaches to investigate the complex role that mitochondrial dysfunction and hypoxia play in inflammation, specifically in neurological diseases. During this time, she worked alongside Dr. David Broadhurst to gain experience in statistics, experimental design, and computer programming. After receiving a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Fellowship in 2014, Stacey moved to Sweden and joined the laboratory of Dr. Craig Wheelock at Karolinska Institutet. During this time, she applied mass spectrometry based metabolomics to investigate multi-factorial inflammatory diseases in large clinical cohorts. In 2016, Stacey moved to Perth, Australia to work at the Separation Science and Metabolomics Laboratory (under the direction of Dr. Robert Trengove) at Murdoch University. Stacey's current research focuses on inflammatory and neonatal/childhood diseases.
Steffen Neumann studied computer science and bioinformatics at Bielefeld University, and now his group focuses on the development of tools and databases for metabolomics and computational mass spectrometry. The group develops algorithms for data processing of metabolite profiling experiments, which are available in several Open Source Bioconductor packages, and addresses the identification of unknowns in mass spectrometry data. The IPB is member of the MassBank consortium and operated the first MassBank server in Europe. The MetFrag and MetFusion tools allow the identification of compounds where no reference spectra are available.
Hello. I am Susan Sumner and I direct the NIH Common Fund (C-F) Eastern Regional Comprehensive Metabolomics Research Center (RCMRC) at RTI International (a non-profit basic research institute located in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA). The RTI RCMRC is part of the NIH C-F Metabolomics Consortium that established Metabolomics Workbench, and worked together to establish standards for data deposition and reporting. I also work within the NIH C-F program to develop and implement programs for training early career and seasoned scientists who want to include metabolomics in their research. As the PI of the RTI RCMRC, I lead a team of 25 researchers who conduct targeted and broad spectrum metabolomics analysis of cells, tissues, and biological fluids using NMR and chromatography coupled mass spectrometry. My team works with basic, applied, and clinical researchers to identify biomarkers for the early detection and diagnosis of disease, to monitor treatments, and to provide insights into biological mechanisms. In addition to directing the metabolomics core at RTI, I also direct an analytical core for the NCATS-funded North Carolina Translational Sciences Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the metabolomics core for the NIEHS-funded Center for Human Health and Environment at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and the NIEHS-funded Untargeted Analysis Resource Core for the Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) Program at RTI. I serve on the editorial boards for Metabolomics, the Journal of Applied Toxicology, the Journal of Toxicology, and as an Associate Editor for Environmental Health Perspectives. I am an adjunct professor in the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, and the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Theodore Alexandrov received a PhD in mathematics in Russia in 2007 and did a postdoc at the University of Bremen, Germany, where he became a group leader at the Center for Industrial Mathematics and the head of MALDI Imaging Lab. In 2010-2015, he was a visiting researcher at University of California San Diego (UCSD), mainly at the Dorrestein lab, Skaggs School of Pharmacy. He is a co-founder and since 2012 the scientific director of the company SCiLS GmbH, Germany. Since 2014, he is a team leader at European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, with a research program on spatial metabolomics and the head of the EMBL Metabolomics Core Facility. Since 2015 he is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy, UCSD. He is also the coordinator of the European Horizon2020 project METASPACE aiming to create metabolite annotation engine for imaging mass spectrometry (2015-2018). The Alexandrov team at EMBL develops novel tools of computational biology that reveal spatial organization of metabolic processes by exploiting high-throughput metabolic imaging and by translating the generated big data into molecular knowledge.
Tim Ebbels obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge and in 1998 moved into bioinformatics via postdoctoral work at Imperial College in the metabolic profiling group of Prof Jeremy Nicholson. He was a key post-doctoral member of the Consortium for Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET), a large academic-industry collaboration which developed expert systems for predicting adverse effects in pre-clinical toxicity studies via metabolic profiling. In 2003 he joined Prof David Jones' group at University College London to work on modelling and visualisation of transcriptomic data. In 2005 he returned to a faculty position at Imperial, within one of the world's largest metabolomics departments. His group focuses on the application of bioinformatic, machine learning and chemometric techniques to post-genomic data, with a particular emphasis on metabolic profiles. He is involved in projects ranging from ecotoxicology, through molecular epidemiology, to the development of in vitro omics platforms to predict carcinogenicity. Much work focuses on detailed modelling of the analytical technologies used to obtain metabolic profiles, but his group is also addressing problems of data integration, visualisation and time series analysis.
Job Titles:
- Secretary
- Secretary 2012 - 2013 / President 2014 - 2015
Vidya Velagapudi obtained her Bachelors in Bioscience (1999), Masters in Biotechnology (2001), Advanced PG diploma in Bioinformatics (2002), and then joined a Pharmaceutical company as a Research Associate (2002) in India. Later on she moved to Germany in 2003 for her graduate studies and obtained Ph.D in Applied Biochemistry from the University of Saarland in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrucken. Dr. Velagapudi then moved to VTT, Finland as a post-doctoral fellow in collaboration with University of Cambridge, UK, and continued as a Research Scientist and Project Manager during 2006-2009. Since 2010, Dr. Velagapudi has been leading the national Metabolomics core facility at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM). Dr. Velagapudi is also affiliated to University of Helsinki (UH) as an Adjunct Professor (2012-) and Principal Investigator at the Faculty of Medicine (2016-), and Chair of Metabolomics Platforms in Biocenter Finland and HiLIFE (2017-). Dr. Velagapudi has published around 60 scientific articles in reputed journals and given over 30 invited talks in international scientific events and conferences. Dr. Velagapudi was an invited Metabolomics technology expert for an interview (2014) and spotlight article contributor (2016) at MetaboNews Letter, and international organising committee member for the Metabolomics Society 13th annual conference in Australia. Dr. Velagapudi is Finnish ambassador for ELIXIR Metabolomics community, a member of Metabolomics quality assurance and control consortium (mQACC), and an invited reviewer for H2020 proposals and core facilities.
Prof. Warwick (Rick) Dunn obtained a BSc (Hons) degree in Chemistry with Analytical Chemistry and Toxicology at The University of Hull followed by a PhD at BP Chemicals and The University of Hull focused on the placement of mass spectrometers on industrial chemical process plants. He has developed a passion for academic life and from 2003-2012 he worked at The University of Manchester, first as a post-doctoral researcher with Professor Douglas Kell and then as a Lecturer in Metabolomics. He moved to the University of Birmingham in early 2013 and is currently a Professor in Metabolomics, Director of Mass Spectrometry in Phenome Centre Birmingham and Director of the Birmingham Metabolomics Training Centre. Warwick has performed metabolomics research for 19 years and has concentrated his research on analytical and software tool development and their application in untargeted and targeted assays. He has a passion for maximising metabolite annotation in untargeted studies and has developed tools for conversion of m/z to putative metabolite annotations (PUTMEDID_LCMS) and in optimal acquisition of MS/MS data. Away from development work he focuses on the study of metabolism during human ageing and in human diseases to understand pathophysiological mechanisms and identify prognostic or diagnostic biomarkers for stratified medicine. Warwick is currently Associate Editor (Reviews) for the journal Metabolomics and is a past-director of the Metabolomics Society (2010-2015). Warwick has published greater than 120 peer-reviewed papers (>12,500 citations) and 6 book chapters.