About

Christoph Bock is a principal investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, professor of medical informatics and head of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the Medical University of Vienna. His research combines experimental biology (high-throughput sequencing, epigenetics, CRISPR screening, bioengineering) with computational methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) – for cancer, immunology, and precision medicine. Before coming to Vienna in 2012, he was a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (2008-2011) and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004-2008). Christoph Bock is also scientific coordinator of the Biomedical Sequencing Facility of CeMM and MedUni Vienna, member of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and elected board member of the Young Academy in the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has received important research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026), the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2009), the Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2017), and the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022).

Andreas Boland is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva. He studied Biology at the University of Jena and joined the lab of Dr. Elisa Izaurralde at the MPI in Tuebignen for his PhD work, where he discovered his passion for Structural Biology. In his PostDoc work with Dr. David Barford at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, he used cryoEM to investigate mechanisms that control cell division. His laboratory in Geneva uses structural, biochemical and biophysical methods. During cell division, each daughter cell needs to receive an identical set of sister chromatids. Duplicated chromosomes are held together by the ring-shaped cohesin complex. Separation of chromosomes at anaphase is triggered by separase, a protease that cleaves the cohesin subunit SCC1. The Boland lab studies separase regulation. Andreas has received Young Investigator Awards from the Helmut Horten Foundation and EMBO.

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Astrid Collingro is a senior scientist at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna. She studied microbiology at the Technical University of Munich and earned her PhD from the University of Vienna in 2004.

Astrid’s research focuses on obligate intracellular bacteria, with a particular emphasis on chlamydial symbionts of protists. She investigates the diversity and evolution within the chlamydial phylum to better understand what distinguishes symbionts of protists from human pathogens. One of her main goals is to expand the number of available isolates to further explore the wide range of chlamydiae-host interactions.

Following a research stay at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Astrid developed a strong interest in marine hosts such as corals, sponges, and algae, and the role chlamydiae play in their microbiomes. Currently, she is examining the environmental prevalence of chlamydiae and their influence on microbial eukaryotic hosts and, by extension, on microbial communities and the ecological processes they underpin.

Maria Hondele is a tenure-track assistant professor of Biochemistry at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland since 2020. Her lab investigates cellular self-assembly processes and the formation, regulation, and function of membraneless organelles, especially those associated with RNA processing. 

Dr. Hondele studied biochemistry at the University of Regensburg and trained at the University of Massachusetts on a Fulbright scholarship. She completed her PhD in chromatin biology at EMBL Heidelberg and the University of Munich with Prof. Andreas Ladurner, and conducted her postdoctoral research in RNA and condensate biology at ETH Zurich in the laboratory of Prof. Karsten Weis. 

Georg studied Molecular Biology at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and obtained a PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, working on epigenetics in the lab of Andreas Ladurner. From 2008 to 2020 he was a Postdoc in Juri Rappsilber’s proteomics group at the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology in Edinburgh, UK. In 2020 he established a research group at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of his lab is to understand, from a systems biology perspective, how cells regulate protein levels and how these processes are disrupted in cancer cells. The group addresses this question by combining wet-lab proteomics and computational approaches, including machine-learning.

Jonathan S. Lindsey (b. 1956) grew up in Indiana, did his undergraduate studies at Indiana University in Bloomington (1974–1978), and graduate and postdoctoral studies (1978–1984) at The Rockefeller University with Prof. David C. Mauzerall.  He was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University for 12 years before joining North Carolina State University in 1996.  His interests concern the science and creation of tetrapyrrole macrocycles (porphyrins, chlorins, bacteriochlorins) and their roles in photosynthesis-like phenomena.  A continual focus over the years has concerned synthetic methodology in the tetrapyrrole arena, which has in recent years been directed to gain access to natural members including chlorophylls and open-chain derivatives, the phyllobilins.  To advance the photosciences, he also has developed the PhotochemCAD program and spectral databases.

I am a Principal Investigator at CeMM - the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a Research Group Leader at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna, leading a research group on computational and molecular methods to study human aging and pathology.

My group develops computational methods for the analysis of spatial data (spatial transcriptomics, highly multiplexed imaging), and its integration with various modalities of molecular and clinical data of individuals along their lifespan. I am particularly interested in the organization of cells at the micro-anatomical level and understanding how this changes during the lifespan of individuals and at the onset of disease.

https://rendeiro.group/

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Professor Anne Simonsen leads the Autophagy research group at the Inst for Cancer Research, Oslo University Hospital, and is the co-director of the Centre of Excellence CanCell (Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming) at the University of Oslo, Norway. She received her PhD in 1996 and during her postdoc, she identified the FYVE domain as a specific PtdIns(3)P binding domain and EEA1 as a PtdIns(3)P and RAB5 effector protein important for endosome fusion.  She started her laboratory at the University of Oslo in 2009 where she became a full professor in 2011. The main objective of the Simonsen laboratory is to unravel the molecular mechanisms involved in selective types of autophagy and their role in normal health and disease. Specific focus areas include characterization of the role of hypoxia-induced mitophagy in cancer development and protein aggregate clearance in neurodegenerative disease. Her lab also has a continued interest in ALFY and other BEACH-domain-containing proteins. They use mammalian cell lines, various in vitro approaches, and zebrafish for their discoveries. She has authored more than 120 papers and has an H-index of 66. She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and an elected member of EMBO.