Speakers 2022

James E. Rothman is the Sterling Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University and chairs Yale School of Medicine's Department of Cell Biology. His research has elucidated the molecular mechanisms and machinery governing vesicle traffic in the cell, explaining such diverse processes as the secretion of hormones like insulin, the action-potential controlled release of neurotransmitters in synaptic transmission, and the propagation of membrane compartments of the cytoplasm during cell growth and division. This work has been recognised by many awards including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical research (2002), the Kavli Prize for Neuroscience (2010) and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2013). Rothman graduated from Yale College (1972) with a BA in Physics, then attended Harvard Medical School (1971-1976) as an MD-PhD student, leaving before completing the MD program. Before returning to Yale in 2008 he held professorships at Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia universities, and was Vice-Chairman to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. 

Kushagra Bansal received his PhD degree in Microbiology & Cell Biology from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2010. His doctoral research was focused on the signaling pathways that govern the immune subversive phenotype of macrophages and dendritic cells during pathogenic infections. Kushagra carried out his post-doctoral research at Harvard Medical School, Boston. During his post-doctoral tenure, Kushagra sought to delineate the molecular basis of immune tolerance mechanisms that operate in the thymus.

In 2018, Kushagra joined the Molecular Biology & Genetics unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, as a faculty member. He was awarded Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India and DBT/Wellcome India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship to jump start his research program. His research group focuses on understanding the mechanistic details of gene regulation in immune cells and also aims to unveil dysregulation of these mechanisms in infectious and autoimmune diseases.

Olivier Duss studied Chemistry at the ETH Zurich. After traveling for 6 months, teaching Chemistry at a high school and doing a research stay with Kurt Wüthrich, he did a PhD in the group of Prof. Fred Allain at the ETH Zurich developing integrative structural biology approaches (combining NMR with electron paramagnetic resonance) for structure determination of dynamic protein-RNA complexes and investigating how bacterial non-coding RNAs regulate translation initiation. In 2014, he moved to California to do a joint-postdoc in the labs of Jamie Williamson at Scripps Research and Jody Puglisi at Stanford University where he developed single-molecule fluorescence microscopy approaches to study co-transcriptional ribosome assembly. Since the end of 2020, he is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where he studies how RNA folds and how protein-RNA complexes assemble in context using a combination of single-molecule techniques, structural biology and biochemistry (https://www.embl.org/groups/duss/).

Prerana Shrestha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Stony Brook University in the Renaissance School of Medicine. Her lab studies cell type-specific protein synthesis dynamics during memory processes in both healthy and diseased brain states. Prerana received her Ph.D. in Life Sciences from The Rockefeller University. She did her postdoctoral work at NYU Center for Neural Science, where she developed novel chemogenetic strategies to block nascent protein synthesis with cell type specificity and applied them to probe protein synthesis requirement in memory consolidation. She has received several accolades for her work – she was named the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society (MCCS) Scholar in 2017, and more recently she has been named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2022. Prerana is also a recipient of the Anuradha Rao Memorial travel award, and a NARSAD Young Investigator grant.

Azim Surani received his PhD at Cambridge University (1975) under Robert Edwards, established his lab at the Animal Research Station in Cambridge (1979) and was elected Marshall-Walton Professor at the Gurdon Institute (1992) and later Director of Germline and Epigenetics Research (2013). His research led to the discovery of genomic imprinting (1984), which is critical for totipotency and mammalian development, and pivotal for advances in epigenetics, including the unique epigenetic resetting of the mammalian germline. Surani also elucidated the hitherto unknown genetic basis of previously unknown germ cell specification in humans (2015) and other mammalian species. His awards include a Royal Medal, McEwen Award by the ISSCR, Rosenstiel Award, Genetics Society’s Mendel Medal and the Gairdner International Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Shiv Pillai MD PhD is a Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School. He is the director of the Harvard PhD and MMSc Immunology programs and of the HMS-HST MD student research program. He is also the program director of an NIH-funded Autoimmune Center of Excellence at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Pillai coined the term “surrogate light chains” for proteins that he identified as part of the pre-B receptor, that drives early B cell development. His laboratory postulated and provided evidence for the first ligand-independent signaling model during lymphocyte development and showed that BTK, the product of the gene mutated in X-linked agammaglobulinemia, is functionally linked to the pre-B receptor and the B cell receptor. Btk inhibitors are now widely used in lymphoid malignancies and autoimmunity His laboratory is currently located at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and his group studies T cell-B cell collaboration and its relevance to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases including IgG4-related disease, systemic sclerosis, common variable immunodeficiency and COVID-19.  He has been the recipient of a number of teaching awards at Harvard including the Irving M. London Award for Teaching and the Thomas McMahon Mentoring Award.  Dr. Pillai is the author of a monograph "Lymphocyte Development" and co-author with Abul Abbas and Andrew Lichtman of two widely used textbooks of immunology.

Dr. Tom Rapoport received his Ph.D. from Humboldt University (Berlin) and then joined the Zentralinstitut für Molekularbiologie der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR in Berlin. In 1995, he became a  Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and in 1997, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Rapoport is a member of the National Academies of the USA and Germany.  

In early work, Rapoport developed the Metabolic Control Analysis (MCA) (with Reinhart Heinrich). Subsequently, he elucidated the mechanism of protein translocation across the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane, which culminated in the determination of the first structure of a protein-conducting channel (together with Steve Harrison). He also studies the mechanism of ER-associated protein degradation (ERAD), recently determining the structure of the retro-translocon and elucidating the function of the Cdc48/p97 ATPase. Rapoport also studies how the ER is shaped and how proteins are imported into peroxisome

Alexey Amunts earned his PhD from Tel Aviv University for work on a plant Photosystem I, and did a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge on cryo-EM studies of a mitoribosome that became known as the ‘Resolution Revolution’. In 2016, he established an independent group at Stockholm University focusing on mechanisms of mitochondrial translation and bioenergetics, and since 2020 he is an Associate Professor. The group studies mitochondrial protein synthesis and energy production at the molecular and cellular level, and examines how these fundamental processes are affected by natural selection and disease.

Luca Scorrano is Professor of Biochemistry at the Department of Biology, University of Padua (Italy). He completed his Medical Degree (1996) and his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Pathology (2000) at the University of Padua with Paolo Bernardi. From 2000 to 2003 he was Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) postdoctoral fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School in Boston (USA), in the lab of the late Stanley J. Korsmeyer, a founding father of the field of apoptosis. In 2003 he was awarded an Assistant Scientist position at the Dulbecco-Telethon Institute, in 2006 he was recruited as Full Professor at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). In 2013 he moved to the University of Padova as Professor of Biochemistry (appointed by chiara fama) and from 2014 to 2020 he served as Scientific Director of the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine.

The work of L. Scorrano addresses the central question of form-function relationship at the molecular level. During his career, he has changed classical tenets in the fields of apoptosis, mitochondrial pathophysiology, and medicine. His work on cristae remodeling paved the way for the new field of mitochondrial dynamics. In the following years, his lab discovered that Opa1 works as a molecular staple holding cristae junctions tight, deficient in dominant optic atrophy, targeted during apoptosis and essential in vivo to control tissue damage and to correct mitochondrial diseases, as well as a key factor in angiogenesis that can be pharmacologically targeted to curtail tumor growth; identified the first molecular bridge between ER and mitochondria (propelling the new field of interorganellar contact sites); showed that mitochondria change shape to control autophagy, or to produce progesterone during pregnancy; demonstrated that cristae shape dictates assembly of proteins and efficiency of respiration; discovered a novel pathway of Notch1 signaling controlled by mitochondrial fusion and Ca2+ essential during heart development; discovered that mitochondrial fusion mounts a metabolic defense against Toxoplasma. He received several Prizes and Awards (including the 2006 Eppendorf European Young Investigator, the 2011 Chiara D’Onofrio Award and the 2013 European Society for Clinical Investigation Award). He was elected EMBO Member in 2012 and Member of the Academia Europaea in 2019 and he is among the Clarivate Highly Cited researchers in 2021. He sits on several Scientific Advisory Boards (e.g., Institut Necker Enfants Malades, Paris; IBT Czech Academy of Sciences), on reviewing panels of the ERC, the Flemish Science Foundation, the Finnish Academy of Sciences, and he chaired the EMBO Fellowship Committee until 2020. He is an Editorial Board member of several Journals including CDD, Cardiovasc Res, BBA-Mol Cell Res.

Sonja Lorenz has been an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen since 2021. She received a PhD from the University of Oxford/UK working with Iain Campbell and Martin Noble, followed by postdoctoral research with John Kuriyan at University of California, Berkeley/USA. In 2014, she started her independent research career at the Rudolf Virchow Center in Würzburg. Sonja’s group explores the structural mechanisms of posttranslational protein modifications - specifically ubiquitination and phosphorylation. The laboratory combines X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM and NMR with biochemistry, chemical biology, and cell-based approaches. In 2018 Sonja was named an EMBO Young Investigator.

Barbara Treutlein studied chemistry at the Universities of Tübingen and Mainz and at UC Berkeley in 2001-2007. From 2007-2012, she performed her doctoral research in single-molecule biophysics with Jens Michaelis at LMU Munich, Germany. During her Postdoc with Stephen Quake at Stanford University from 2012-2014, she pioneered the use of microfluidic-based single-cell transcriptomics to dissect the cellular composition of complex tissues, and to elucidate differentiation pathways during lung development and cell reprogramming. 2015-2018, she was a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and held a tenure-track assistant professorship at TU Munich. Since 2019, Barbara is Professor for Quantitative Developmental Biology at the ETH Zürich D-BSSE, Switzerland. Her group uses and develops single-cell genomics approaches in combination with stem cell based 2- and 3-dimensional culture systems to study human organogenesis. For her work, Barbara has received multiple awards including the Friedmund Neumann Prize of the Schering Foundation and the Dr. Susan Lim Award for Outstanding Young Investigator of the International Society of Stem Cell Research.

Tal Dagan had a PhD in Molecular Evolution from Tel-Aviv university. Since 2013 she is a professor of genomic microbiology at Kiel University. Her main interests are in field of bacterial genome evolution with a focus on evolution via lateral gene transfer. In recent years her research is mainly focussed on plasmid evolution.