The Speakers
Teo Hebra is interested in the remarkable chemical diversity produced by metabolism and the discovery of new chemical scaffolds. He chose to study metabolomics during his doctoral studies, where he extensively used MS/MS molecular networking to characterize molecular diversity from microorganisms. Currently, Teo is refining his skills in molecular and synthetic biology as a postdoctoral researcher in metabolic engineering in Dr. Pluskal's laboratory focused on plant biochemistry.
Pascal De Tullio
Pascal de Tullio received his PhD in Science from the University of Liège in the field of drug discovery. He is currently Research Director of the Belgian Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Medicines (CIRM) of the University of Liège where he created and manage of the Clinical Metabolomics group and the NMR-Santé hub. His main research activity is focused on the application and the development of NMR-based metabolomics in the field of clinical, pre-clinical and personalized medicine. He is president of the Belgian National fund for scientific research NMR group and participated to the development and the promotion of metabolomics in Belgium through his implication in the board of the RFMF.
Julia Kuligowski
Julia Kuligowski finished her PhD in 2011 at the University of Valencia. Since finishing her PhD she has been working on liquid and gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry as well as vibrational spectroscopy. Currently, Julia Kuligowski works at the Neonatal Research Group, Health Research Institute La Fe (Valencia, Spain), where her main research topics are Metabolomics, Analytical Chemistry, Spectroscopy, and Biostatistics applied to the field of neonatology. Her current projects are focused on the study of neonatal asphyxia and brain injury, oxidative and nitrosative stress, as well as nutrition of preterm infants and the analysis of human milk.
Justin J.J. van der Hooft
Justin collaborated in the development of a topic modelling approach for unsupervised substructure exploration in metabolomics using a newly developed software tool MS2LDA. Justin has been working on metabolomics projects exploiting the information-rich fragmentation data that high resolution mass spectrometers generate and alleviate the bottleneck of metabolite annotation and identification in untargeted metabolomics approaches. He moved to the Wageningen University & Research for a shared Postdoc position with the group of Prof. Pieter Dorrestein at the University of California San Diego (USA) where he focused on how to combine workflows developed for genome and metabolome mining to aid in functional annotations of genes and structural annotations of metabolites. Afterwards, he took on his current position as Assistant Professor in Computational Metabolomics at WUR Bioinformatics.
Marta Cascante
Marta Cascante is Full Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biomedicine at Universitat de Barcelona (UB). Through the research team “Integrative Systems Biology, Metabolomics and Cancer” she leads, Marta Cascante has made an outstanding contribution to metabolomics and fluxomics through her pioneering work which is focused on developing experimental methods for metabolic flux analysis using 13C labelled substrates and software package to estimate dynamic metabolic flux distributions. The team is also interested in bioenergetics alterations related to cancer, COPD, diabetes and obesity. Marta Cascante has authored over 250 publications and supervised 30 PhD thesis. She is member of the Institute of Biomedicine of University of Barcelona (IBUB) and coordinator of the Spanish Network of Systems Medicine. She has been distinguished in 2010, 2015 and 2021 with ICREA Academia Prize and in 2015 with the Narcís Monturiol Medal of the Catalan Government for her scientific merits.
Vinny Davies
Vinny Davies is a statistician educated to Ph.D. level with an interest in creating statistical models for real health world problems. He has an in-depth knowledge of a variety of topics from statistics and machine learning, experience in working with non-statisticians and significant programming experience in R and other languages. He is currently a Research Associate in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow working on applications of Statistics, Machine Learning and Data Science to Metabolomics.
Nils Alexander Haupt (representing Sebastian Böcker's lab)
Nils Alexander Haupt is a PhD student at the lab of Sebastian Böcker. He studied bioinformatics for his bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Jena. After writing both his bachelor and master thesis in the group of Sebastian bocker, he decided to join them for his PhD in March 2023.
At EUSM, he will give a lecture on the use of SIRIUS for compound annotation.
Antonia Garcia
Antonia García is currently Senior Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry at the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department of the Faculty of Pharmacy at Universidad CEU San Pablo, Madrid (Spain). Co-founder of CEMBIO (Madrid, Spain) and head of the CEMBIO laboratory and MS service (REDLab 260). Her research is focused on all the steps of the metabolomics workflow based on multiplatform mass spectrometry and applied to diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, obesity, and neurodegenerative diseases, among many others. She authored more than 70 scientific articles in journals included in JCR and 7 book chapters. IP of four and collaborator in many competitive research projects, both national and international.
Ahmed Ali
Ahmed Ali is currently an assistant professor of Biomedical Sciences at LACDR, Leiden University, where he leads the single cell research in the Analytical Biosciences and Metabolomics group. In addition to his work at the LACDR, he is a visiting researcher at Shimizu’s group, BDR, RIKEN, Japan, and Misr International University, Egypt. His most recent work involves developing innovating analytical methods tailored for small-volume, or single cell analysis to enable metabolomics-driven systems biology in personalized health strategies. These methods are being developed by the combination of advanced sampling, and sample handling techniques, patient-derived organ on chip models, 3D organoids, mass spectrometry, and data analysis techniques.
Beyond
Breanna Dixon
Representative of the Metabolomics Society
Breanna is one of this year's new EMN committee members, which is part of the Metabolomics Society. She is a BBSRC funded third-year PhD student in Infectious Diseases at the University of Manchester and the NIHR Centre for Precision Approaches to Combatting AMR, United Kingdom. Her research utilises mass spectrometry and machine learning to examine metabolomics signatures of antimicrobial resistance.
Breanna holds a MSc in Forensic and Analytical Science from Kingston University London, United Kingdom and a BSc in both Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Neuroscience from the University of Western Australia, Australia.