Przejdź do głównej treści
Pomiń baner

 

Logo obchodów Jubileuszowych: napis 50 lat historii WBBiB

ZAPROSZENI GOŚCIE

Virginijus Šikšnys w 1978 roku ukończył studia chemiczne na Uniwersytecie Wileńskim. W 1983 roku otrzymał tytuł doktora na Uniwersytecie im Łomononosowa, w Moskwie, gdzie zajmował się kinetyką enzymatyczną. Po doktoracie wrócił na Litwę i przez 10 lat pracował w Instytucie Enzymologii Stosowanej w Wilnie. W 1993 roku odbył staż podoktorski w laboratorium laureata Nagrody Nobla, Roberta Hubera, w Instytucie Maxa-Plancka w Martinsried. Od 1995 profesor Šikšnys pracuje w Instytucie Biotechnologii na Uniwersytecie Wileńskim i kieruje Zakładem Oddziaływań Białko-DNA.

Profesor Šikšnys jest autorem ponad 100 artykułów naukowych. Za swoje osiągnięcia otrzymał szereg wyróżnień, w tym Litewską Państwową Nagrodę Naukową (2001 r.), Nagrodę Św. Krzysztofa za zasługi dla nauki przyznaną przez Radę Miasta Wilna (2015 r.), Nagrodę Fundacji Warrena Alperta (2016 r.) oraz Nagrodę Kavli w dziedzinie nanotechnologii (2018 r.).

Zainteresowania naukowe Virginijusa Šikšnysa dotyczą związków między budową a funkcją enzymów biorących udział w metabolizmie kwasów nukleinowych. Przez prawie dwadzieścia lat badał on endonukleazy restrykcyjne i rozwiązał około 15 struktur trzeciorzędowych tych enzymów. Od 2007 roku badania profesora Šikšnysa dotyczą bakteryjnych systemów przeciwwirusowych CRISPR-Cas. Jako jeden z pierwszych na świecie profesor Šikšnys opisał cięcie DNA przez białko Cas9.

Giulia Fontemaggi is a researcher at the IRCCS Regina Elena National Cancer Institute, Oncogenomic and Epigenetic Unit in Rome. She studied biology at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and received her Ph.D. degree in Oncology from the University of Perugia. 

Doctor Fontemaggi’s research focuses mainly on the functional characterization of non-coding RNA networks in breast and head/neck cancer. The aim of the research is the exploitation of ncRNAs as potential biomarkers and targets for anticancer therapy.

 

 

Mauro Giacca received his degree in medicine from the University of Trieste, Italy in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Genoa in 1989. He is a Professor of Cardiovascular Sciences at the School of Cardiovascular Medicine & Sciences, King’s College London. Until 2019, he served as the Director-General of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB). Since 2005, he has held the position of Full Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Trieste. 

Professor Giacca is President of the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR)-European Section. He is considered an expert in the generation of viral vectors for cardiovascular applications and the development of novel biologics for cardiac repair and regeneration. He has published over 370 papers, book chapters and textbooks. His research has been funded by numerous international grants, including two consecutive ERC Advanced Investigator grants.

Since March 2020, he has redeployed part of his group’s research to elucidate the mechanisms that regulate SARS-CoV-2 infection. These studies have led to the discovery of a new mechanism that regulates the function of the coronavirus spike protein and is involved in COVID-19 pathogenesis.

F. Xavier Gomis-Rüth graduated in 1989 from the Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona where he studied chemical engineering. From 1989 to 1992, he worked in the protein crystallography laboratory at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) in Martinsried, Germany, mainly on proteolytic enzymes, under the supervision of professors Wolfram Bode and Robert Huber. In 1992, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. As a PostDoc, he continued his structural studies on proteases at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, MPIB, and at the Molecular Biology Institute of Barcelona (IBMB), a part of Spain’s Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC). In 2000, he became an assistant professor at the IBMB and founded the Proteolysis Laboratory. Since 2008, he has been a full professor at the CSIC and, since 2014, he has been a Director of the Department of Structural Biology at the IBMB. 

Professor Gomis-Rüth is an author of over 140 publications. His scientific interests focus on the function and structure of proteins, mostly proteolytic enzymes and their inhibitors. 

 

Reimund Goss studied biology. In 1996, he received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of General Botany, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany. In 2005, he obtained his habilitation based on a thesis entitled Role of carotenoid molecules in the regulation of photosynthetic light utilization. He works at the Institute of Biology of Leipzig University.

 

 

 

 

Andrzej Joachimiak studied chemistry at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1980 from the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Poznań. In 1991, he received his habilitation from the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Warsaw. 

From 1980 to 1993, he held a PostDoc position at the University of Chicago, USA, worked at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Poznań, and spent 3 years at Yale University. In 1993, he moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he is currently a director of the Structural Biology Center, a group of the X-ray Science Division. Since 2004, he has also been connected with the University of Chicago, where he is a professor and co-director of the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases. 

Professor Joachimiak’s research interests include enzyme specificity, protein-ligand interactions, protein-nucleic acid interactions, and molecular chaperones. He is a world-renowned expert in the field of synchrotron-based X-ray crystallography and structural biology.

Professor Joachimiak is an author of 400 publications and book chapters (> 29,000 total citations, H-index 84, > 2,700 structures in the PDB). He is an Associate Editor of Protein Science and Protein & Cell, a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the Polish Society of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the University of Chicago Award for Distinguished Performance and the Arthur H. Compton Award, Advanced Photon Source.

Jukka Kallijarvi is a principal investigator on the Stem Cells and Metabolism Research Program at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki and an administrative group leader at Folkhälsan Research Center. He studied biochemistry. In 2006, he received his Ph.D. degree in medical genetics from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. His group investigates mitochondrial respiratory chain complex III (CIII) deficiencies, particularly GRACILE syndrome, a severe multiorgan metabolic disease in newborn infants. As the main model, they use a patient mutation knock-in mouse and do pharmacological, dietary, and gene therapy interventions to find novel treatments and to understand mechanisms of pathogenesis.

 

 

Tomasz Kordula received both M.Sc. (1988) and a Ph.D. (1992) degrees from the Jagiellonian University. He completed postdoctoral training at the University of Georgia in Athens, USA. His first independent position was at Cleveland State University. He moved his laboratory to Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004 and currently holds the position of Professor and Graduate Program Director. 

Dr. Kordula is studying molecular mechanisms regulating both tissue-specific and inflammatory responses of astrocytes.

 

 

Danuta Kozbor is Professor of Oncology in the Department of Immunology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center (RPCCC) in Buffalo, NY, USA. She is a basic scientist with expertise in pre-clinical studies specializing in novel immunotherapeutic approaches to target the suppressive tumor microenvironment in platinum-resistant cancers. 

She has pioneered the development of oncolytic vaccinia viruses expressing therapeutic proteins to target the CXCL12 chemokine/CXCR4 receptor signaling pathway in combination with checkpoint inhibitors and elucidated their mechanisms of action for a broad applicability in the treatment of solid tumors.

 

Richard Lamont graduated with a B.Sc. (Honours) from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and completed his PhD in Bacteriology from the University of Aberdeen in 1985. 

He has held academic appointments at various universities in the USA, and currently holds the position of Endowed Professor and Chair of the Department of Oral Immunology and Infectious diseases at the University of Louisville. 

He is also a recipient of various awards, including IADR Distinguished Scientist Awards (1995, 2006), the MERIT award from NIH (2009), and the University of Louisville President’s Award for distinguished research (2016). He has authored over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and 5 books. He has been editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Oral Microbiology since 2015.

His latest projects focus on: periodontal disease pathogenesis, molecular and cellular interactions between Porphyromonas gingivalis and gingival epithelial cells, communications between microorganisms formulating plaque and Porphyromonas gingivalis.

Szymon W. Mańka graduated with MSc/MRes from the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology (WBBiB) at the Jagiellonian University in 2005, where he studied proteomes of S. aureus mutants in the laboratory of Professor Jan Potempa. In 2010, he was awarded a PhD from Imperial College London. In his thesis, Szymon proposed a mechanism of collagen degradation by prototypic human collagenase. In 2011–2019 he worked at the University of Oxford and at Birkbeck College London, where he specialised in structural biology and biophysics. Szymon collaborated with numerous laboratories in Europe and the US and presented his work on prestigious conferences around the World. He published a number of high-impact papers that shed light on molecular mechanisms of fundamental processes of multicellular life, such as cell division and organ development. In 2019, Szymon established a cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) laboratory at the UCL Institute of Prion Diseases (University College London). His current research focuses on near-atomic structure determination of authentic, highly infectious ex vivo prions.

Alistair McCormick is a Reader in Plant Molecular Physiology and Synthetic Biology and the Director of Edinburgh Plant Science. 

His group focuses on enhancing photosynthetic efficiencies in plants and the development of cyanobacteria as bio-platforms for producing high value products. A standardized MoClo system developed by his group for rapidly engineering cyanobacteria (CyanoGate) is the basis of an ambitious, collaborative ‘big data’ project to generate the first genome knockout library of the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. 6803.

 

 

Marta Miączyńska is the Director and the head of Laboratory of Cell Biology at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. She graduated in molecular biology from the Jagiellonian University and received her PhD in genetics from the University of Vienna. She did postdoctoral work at the EMBL Heidelberg and at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. 

As a cell biologist she studies the molecular mechanisms integrating membrane transport, in particular endocytosis, with intracellular signaling pathways, also in the context of oncogenesis. She discovered a distinct population of early endosomes in the cell, so called APPL endosomes. Co-author of over 50 publications cited >3000 times. She received fellowships from Austrian Science Fund, Human Frontier Science Program Organization and L’Oreal Poland for Women in Science. Laureate of prestigious national and international grants. Panelist of granting agencies, including ERC. Member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), Academia Europaea, Polish Academy of Sciences, EMBO Council and Council of the National Science Center (2016–2018).

Vivek Sharma is Sigrid Jusélius senior researcher and principal investigator at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Finland. He completed his doctoral degree in the group of Mårten Wikström studying cbb3-type cytochrome oxidases, and received postdoctoral training in Ilpo Vattulainen's group at Tampere University, Finland. 

His research focuses on the molecular mechanism of respiratory complexes, which he studies with multiscale computational methods.

 

 

Paul J. Smith studied medical microbiology at Bristol University and received his Ph.D. from Manchester University in 1977. 

Professor Smith has been active in the fields of DNA repair, drug development, cytometry and imaging technologies for more than 30 years. After postdoctoral National Engineering Council fellowships positions in Canada at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, including support by the US National Cancer Institute, he returned to the UK becoming a senior non-clinical scientist with the UK Medical Research Council in Cambridge. There he developed a programme focused on anticancer drug resistance and co-established the Hoechst dye spectral shift methodology, later exploited by others for stem cell isolation. In 1995 he was appointed to the Chair of Cancer Biology at Cardiff University (Emeritus Professor July 2013 to present).

His research expertise and patents encompass the cell cycle, DNA topoisomerases, biophotonics and anticancer drugs – deploying imaging and flow cytometry technologies. He is a Past President of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry. Professor Smith is a co-founder and director of the molecular probe company Biostatus Ltd and the spin-out Oncotherics Ltd currently developing novel hypoxia targeting anticancer drugs. 

Jakub Tomasik holds a M.Sc. degree in Biotechnology from the Jagiellonian University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. He worked at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, and for the diagnostics company Psynova Neurotech Ltd. He is currently a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge.

His research focuses on improving current approaches in the diagnostics and treatment of major neuropsychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia using biomarkers and digital data.

 

 

Guillem Ylla received his bachelor's degree in Biotechnology and a master's degree in Omics Data Analysis from the University of Vic (Barcelona). Guillem did his Ph.D. studying the genomic and transcriptomic basis of the origin and evolution of insect metamorphosis in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology of the Pompeu Fabra University and Spanish Research Council. Subsequently, he moved to the USA as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida where he worked developing computational tools to study microRNAs and alternative splicing. Then, he moved to Harvard University, to study arthropod genomics and evolution in the Extavour lab. Currently, he is establishing his laboratory on "Bioinformatics and Genome Biology" at the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology of the Jagiellonian University where he will use bioinformatics approaches to study multiple aspects of genomes and their regulation.

 

 

Luigi Zecca heads the Laboratory of Aging and Neurodegeneration at the Institute of Biomedical Technologies in Milan, Italy and is currently a Visiting Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University (New York, NY, USA).

From 2001 to 2007, Professor Zecca was a Director of Research at the Institute of Biomedical Technologies, before subsequently being appointed Director of this Institute (from 2008 to 2015). Since 2018, he has been a Member of the Steering Committee of the National Institute of Research and Care of Aging in Ancona, and a Committee Member of the Department of Biomedical Sciences, National Research Council of Italy.

Professor Zecca is recognized as a leading scientist in neuromelanin research. Together with his coworkers, he described the key aspects of neuromelanin structure, synthesis, and interaction with metals. He also showed that neuromelanins are ubiquitous in the human brain, occur in special autolysosomes, accumulate with aging, and affect neurodegeneration. 

 

 

Claudine Kieda. As a research director at the CNRS Center for Molecular Biophysics in Orleans, France and presently developing a research laboratory devoted to Molecular Oncology and Innovative Therapies in Poland, Claudine Kieda has been focusing on the glycobiology. She is also involved in developing therapies against hypoxia-dependent diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, heart failure, neurodegenerative diseases, and, presently, CoViD-19. 

In addition to international cooperation with the USA (NIAID, NIH, Bethesda, Tuft University in Boston) and Israel (Biophysics Department of the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot), a large proportion of Prof. Kieda’s career was dedicated to joint research activity conducted in collaboration with the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology of the Jagiellonian University.

She has been awarded the Merentibus medal of the Jagiellonian University in 2006 and the Nicolaus Copernicus medal of Polish Academy of Sciences in 2009. Professor Kieda was instrumental in the establishment of the International Associated Laboratory (LIA) between CNRS and the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology.

Patrick Midoux is Emeritus research director at INSERM. He was team leader at the Center for Molecular Biophysics in Orleans, France. He focused his research activities on the delivery of nucleic acids into cells, with particular emphasis on the design of synthetic vectors. He has developed histidinylated polymers and imidazole liposomes which have the particularity of promoting the destabilization of endosomes and the delivery of nucleic acids into the cytosol. 

Since 2006, together with Dr. Chantal Pichon, he has developed prophylactic and therapeutic mRNA-based vaccines using an original delivery system called lipopolyplexes. The system is based on histidinylated polymers and imidazole liposomes equipped with tri-mannose moieties. Patrick Midoux (h index of 45) has published 142 papers in peer-reviewed journals and filed 13 patents. He was a Co-founder and is currently the CEO of Polytheragene.

Chantal Pichon is a Full Professor at the University of Orléans. She conducts her research activities at the Center for Molecular Biophysics of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Orléans, France, where she leads the Innovative Therapies and Nanomedicine team. Chantal Pichon has over 15 years of professional experience in the development of nucleic acids therapeutics delivered by non-viral systems. Lately, she has been focusing on messenger RNA delivery and bio-production. She has published about 160 peer-reviewed articles and has been a principal investigator on 15 grants (French and European research grants, as well as grants from industry and charities).

 

 

Tomasz Róg graduated in Biology with a specialization in Biophysics in 1996, and received Ph.D. in Biophysics in 2000, both from the Jagiellonian University. In 2002 and 2003, he was awarded a fellowship by the Foundation for Polish Science, and in 2005–2007 he worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at Helsinki University of Technology. From 2008 to 2013, he was awarded the 5-year Academy Research Fellow project by the Academy of Finland, which he carried out at Tampere University of Technology. Since 2016, he has worked at the University of Helsinki.

 

 

Artur Sabat graduated from the Institute of Molecular Biology at the Jagiellonian University in 1994. He received a Ph.D. degree in biological sciences in 2003 from the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology. He obtained his habilitation in 2018. Since 2007, he has been working in Medical Microbiology Department at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands, where he is a Senior Researcher. His scientific interests cover the application of genomics and transcriptomics in medical microbiology to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that lead to infections and the spread of diseases.