Veronika Sexl, MD Rector, University of Innsbruck Prof. Dr. Veronika Sexl is a distinguished Austrian scientist and medical professional, with decades of expertise in pharmacology, cancer research, and translational medicine. Currently serving as the Rector of the University of Innsbruck, Dr. Sexl has a storied academic and research career, including leadership roles at the Medical University of Vienna and the Veterinary University of Vienna. Her research is internationally recognized, particularly her contributions to understanding the JAK-STAT signaling pathway, leukemia progression, and the novel regulatory role of CDK6 in tumor biology. She has supervised over 20 PhD students and published over 200 scientific papers with over 16,000 citations. As a member of the and numerous scientific boards, Dr. Sexl has helped advance hematology and oncology research globally. Her accolades include the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant, the Novartis Prize for Medicine, and membership in the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina”.  

Katharina Schmack received her medical and doctoral degrees from Charité, Berlin in 2008 and 2009, respectively. She then completed her postdoctoral training, clinical scientist fellowship and psychiatry specialization at Charité, Berlin.

In 2018, she moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, for a research fellowship. In 2021, she joined the Crick Institute as a Clinical Group Leader.

Her research focuses on psychosis. Her lab investigates the neural circuits and immune processes giving rise to hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms. Using a cross-species approach, her lab studies both patients and mice with behavioural tests, computational models, and in-vivo measures and manipulations. 

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.

Valerie O’Donnell completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Bristol, and post-doctoral fellowships in Switzerland and USA where she studied free radical biology and its intersection with lipid oxidation, inflammation and blood pressure regulation.   Her ongoing research focuses on applying mass spectrometry to the identification of new lipids that regulate innate immunity and inflammation, in particular families of oxidized phospholipids generated by enzymes that promote blood clotting and thrombosis.  With her colleagues, she has shown that enzymatic lipid oxidation through lipoxygenases and Lands cycle can form unique bioactive phospholipids in diverse blood cells that contribute to vascular inflammatory disease through driving clotting. She is also lead of LIPID MAPS, an ELIXIR Core Data Resource that houses the globally used LIPID MAPS Classification and Nomenclature for lipids as well as numerous informatics tools and educational resources for lipid researchers.

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/

Victoria Deneke is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Andrea Pauli at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP Vienna). Her research program within the Pauli Group focuses on uncovering the molecular mechanisms of vertebrate fertilization, utilizing the zebrafish as her main model organism. Victoria’s postdoctoral work has been supported by an HFSP Long-Term Fellowship and an FWF ESPRIT Fellowship. 

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.

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).

E. Ada Cavalcanti-Adam is a Full Professor for Cellular Biomechanics at the University of Bayreuth. Previously, she was Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg from 2017 until 2023.

Her interdisciplinary research integrates mechanobiology, cell-matrix interactions, and bioengineering approaches to study how physical and chemical cues at the cellular interface regulate adhesion, signaling, and force transmission. She holds an habilitation in Physical Chemistry and Cell Biology from Heidelberg University, and her academic path spans degrees and residencies in Dentistry and Orthodontics (Italy and USA), a PhD in Biosciences (Heidelberg), and international experience at institutions including the University of Pennsylvania and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

She is a fellow of the Max Planck School Matter to Life and associate editor at Science Advances. Her contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the UNESCO-L’Oréal Prize for Women in Science (2008), a Marie Curie Fellowship (2003), and multiple honors from the University of Pennsylvania and professional societies.

Bridging Physics and Biology to Understand Lipid and Organelle Function Trained as a physicist, I transitioned into the study of lipid and organelle biology through a multidisciplinary lens, integrating physical chemistry, cell biology, and biophysical techniques. My research focuses on developing and applying in vitro and ex vivo approaches to dissect the dynamic regulation of membrane-bound organelles. By exploring the kinetic and energetic principles that govern membrane-associated processes, my team investigates how these mechanisms shape organelle function and contribute to cellular organization and homeostasis across scales.

Philip Marx-Stoelting, Dr. rer. nat., ERT, is serving at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment as a scientific director heading the unit ‘Testing and assessment strategies’ in the pesticides safety department and the BfR working group on endocrine disruptors. He is involved in several large research projects on NAM development including PARC, where he is leading the work-package ‘hazard assessment’. He is also involved in several expert panels on EU and international (OECD) level and chairing the 3R working group of the German Society for Toxicology (GT).

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. 

Verena Ruprecht is Professor at the University Innsbruck (UIBK) Austria and Affiliated Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) Barcelona, Spain. She studied biophysics and completed her doctoral work in super-resolution microscopy and cellular biophysics at the Johannes Kepler University Austria. She continued her postdoctoral work in the field of cell and developmental biology at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria. Her laboratory studies single cell and multicellular dynamics during tissue development and homeostasis, with a focus on how mechanical forces regulate cell plasticity, multicellular self-organization and tissue clearance. Work of the lab further addresses cellular morphodynamics and cell fitness in the context of cancer metastasis. Her lab uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines quantitative methods from physics and biology and bridges in vivo model systems and synthetic bottom-up in vitro assays.

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.

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.

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.

Katia Cosentino studied Chemistry at the University of Calabria, Italy, and obtained a PhD from the same institution. During her doctoral studies, she spent time at ETH Zurich, where she developed a strong interest in biophysics and membrane biology. After completing her PhD, she joined the group of Ana Garcia-Sáez, first at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, and later as a Max Planck Fellow and senior scientist at the Institute of Biochemistry in Tübingen, Germany. In 2018, she was awarded a Baden-Württemberg Elite Program grant to establish her independent research group, and in 2019 she was appointed Junior Professor of Molecular Cell Biophysics at the University of Osnabrück. Since 2025, she has been based at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she leads the Cell Death Biophysics group.

Her research combines biophysics, biochemistry, cell biology and high-resolution fluorescence microscopy to investigate the molecular mechanisms of regulated cell death. Her current work explores the function of Gasdermin proteins and their role in membrane permeabilization during pyroptotic cell death.

In my research I use high-dimensional (spatio-)molecular data in combination with computational approaches to understand how cells work together efficiently in order to form multicellular organisms and what happens if they fail to do so in the case of diseases such as cancer. I am interested in molecular (epigenome, transcriptome, proteome) as well as evolutionary aspects of this fascinating phenomenon. I completed my undergrad studies in Biomedicine at the University of Würzburg in 2012 and my PhD studies in computational epigenomics and malignant disease at CeMM and the Medical University of Vienna in 2017. After a short postdoc phase, I moved to the Broad Institute in Boston for my postdoctoral research in computational (spatio-)genomics. In September 2021 I started my own lab for Systems Immunology at the Gene Center of the LMU Munich.

Peter Murray is a senior group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany (near Munich) where he moved in 2017 after 19 years at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He is also an Honorary Professor in the medical faculty at the Technical University of Munich. Murray’s laboratory is focused on immune regulatory events mediated by metabolic crosstalk. He is best known for work on macrophages, IL-10 and arginine metabolism in immunity. Current research is his laboratory centers on how the immune system control ferroptosis and more specifically anti-ferroptosis through regulated amino acid metabolism. An extension of this work concerns pro-cancer effects of the immune system that suppress ferroptosis in stressed malignant cells. Further information can be found: http://www.biochem.mpg.de/murray.