Dr. Pragyan Acharya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India. The major interests of her laboratory is in understand immune dysregulation in liver diseases and understanding the interaction of the immune system in tissue injury and infection. Towards this, she combines studies on clinical samples, in vitro cultures and animal models of liver disease. She is specifically studying non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) using proteomics and cell biological approaches. Work carried out in her laboratory has led to the identification of the importance of the CD177+ neutrophil sub-population in ACLF and its association with patient outcomes.
Dr. Faheem Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology and Nematology in the Department of Botany at Aligarh Muslim University, India. Author of over 40 peer-reviewed publications, his research interests include plant-nematode interaction, mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, nematode management and nematicidal bioagents.
I'm currently a Senior Research Scientist in the Physiology & Health Team at AgResearch Limited, one of New Zealand's Crown Research Institutes (CRIs). I'm based at the University of Auckland's Liggins Institute, being involved in several projects investigating the importance of nutrition for health throughout life. The primary focus of these projects is intestinal health, but I'm also interested other aspects of human health, including cognition and mobility.
I graduated from The University of Auckland in May 2005 with a PhD in Biological Sciences. My thesis research focused on the importance of a mother’s diet during gestation and lactation on the risk of type-2 diabetes in her offspring. Since 2001 I've worked for AgResearch in a range of roles (including Research Associate, FRST Postdoctoral Fellow, and Research Scientist) and on a variety of topics. I was part of the Nutrigenomics New Zealand collaboration from 2004-2014, working on understanding how our diet and genome interact to influence health with a particular focus on intestinal function.
I was the Section Editor (Nutrigenomics) for the European Journal of Nutrition from 2014 to 2019.
Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah.
Director, Colorado State University Proteomics and Metabolomics Facility.
Degrees M.D.: University of Catania (Italy), 1974-1980. Specialist in Neurology: University of Catania, 1980-1984. Ph.D. in Medical Biochemistry and Biology: University of Bari and Catania, 1984-1986.
Professional positions: 2001- today: Full professor of Biochemistry, School of Medicine, University of Catania; 1988-2000: Associate Professor of Biochemistry, University of Catania;. 2005-2009: Director of the School of Clinical Biochemistry; 2007-2013 coordinator of the PhD School in Translational Biomedicine.
Scientific publications.
1981-2018: 134 scientific papers in international peer-reviewed journal and 25 book chapters. Citations (years 1985-2018): 4612; without self-citations: 4367 (Web of Science, ISI); h-index 40
Research training abroad: 1983: Research associate at the MRC Developmental Neurobiology Unit. London (Dir.: Prof. R. Balazs); 1989-1990: Research associate at the Neurobiochemistry Group of the Mental Retardation Center, UCLA, Los Angeles (Dir.: Prof J. De Vellis)
Research interests: Neurotransmitter and neurotrophin receptors in glial cells; structure and expression of the glial fibrillary acidic gene; molecular biology of neuronal connexins; Experimental therapy of glioma tumors; Cancer genomics; Transcriptomics.
Council of International Scientific Societies:
2000-2004: elected member of the Council of the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience. 2007-2011: elected member of the Council of the International Society for Neurochemistry.
I am an Assistant Professor in Plant Molecular Genetics at the "Luiz de Queiroz" College of Agriculture, University of São Paulo, Brazil. My main interests are devoted to understanding gene and genome evolution in plants, working on genome-wide analyses, including transcriptional analyses of gene families relevant to plant metabolism, RNA-seq analyses in plants, as well as studies on non-coding RNAs and transposable elements.
I am a Senior Scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, involved in pursuing basic and applied research in the field of Nematology and Entomology.
As an alternative to Bt Cry toxins for insect pest management, a number of novel bacterial protein toxins (Txp40, TcaB) derived from an insect-parasitic bacterium Photorhabdus akhurstii (symbiont of nematode Heterorhabditis indica) were characterized. The mode of action and pathogenesis process of these toxins were investigated in different lepidopteran insects including Galleria mellonella, Helicoverpa armigera, Spodoptera litura and S. exigua. The potential receptor proteins and their binding sites for these toxins were unravelled from the insect midgut epithelial cells.
My other research interests include molecular basis of plant-nematode interaction. Using RNAi, functional analysis of several plant parasitism processes was deciphered including the role of Mi-cpl-1 in metabolic process, FLP and NLP neuropeptides in neuromusculation process, ODR and TAX proteins in chemotaxis process, cell wall degrading enzymes and various MSP effectors in infection process of plant nematodes. I have contributed in understanding the genetic basis of nematode resistance in rice via genome-wide association mapping coupled with omics-driven strategies. I am currently pursuing genome editing research for developing nematode resistance by adopting CRISPR-Cas9 strategy in Arabidopsis, rice and tomato.
Specializing in metabolomics, natural products chemistry, and plant biochemistry, Mohamed A. Farag completed his PhD at Texas Tech University, USA, in 2003.
Since 2009, Dr Farag has been working as a part time visiting professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, to participate in teaching plant metabolomics and chemomterics modelling for master students, and in 2009–2010 he held the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry, Germany. Dr Farag now works full time as a professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) where his research work focuses primarily around applying innovative biochemical technologies (metabolomics) to help answer complex biological questions in medicine, herbal drugs analysis and agriculture.
Dr. Farag has been recognized with several awards, including Abd el Hameed Shoman award (2016), Egypt Higher State Incentive Award (2012), TWAS award in science diplomacy (2014), and the Mass Spectroscopy Performance Award, TTU, USA (2004). For his highly cited publications of 100 scientific papers with close to 3500 citations and an H index of 26, Dr. Farag was selected as a top researcher in the field of plant biology in Africa by the American society of plant biology, USA.
Carlos F. Marcos holds a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Santiago of Compostela, where he specialized in chemistry of heterocycles and total synthesis of natural products. He completed his training on the chemistry of the organometallic compounds at the University of Milan and at the Imperial College London, where he was awarded with a grant of the Human Capital and Mobility programme of the European Community.
In 1996 he joined the University of Extremadura, where he started a line of research on new sulfur heterocyclic materials, in collaboration with professors Charles Rees (Imperial College) and Tomás Torroba (UEx). From 2002, he leads a research group involved in the development of new synthetic methodologies. Throughout his career, he has supervised many research studies and has more than 50 publications indexed in frontline scientific journals. He has also made several stays as visiting professor in prestigious American and European research centres. From 2016, it holds a position as Full Professor at the University of Extremadura.
In recent years his research has focused in the chemistry of isocyanides, and especially their use to develop new tandem and multi-component processes. These synthetic strategies have proved to be a very advantageous approach to obtain organic materials with new properties, as well as compounds with biomedical interest.
Dr. Carlos Fernandez-Lozano is an Associate Professor at the University of A Coruña (UDC). He is a biomedical data scientist with a deep interest in discovering the complex relationships between different biological levels. His research track is multidisciplinary as he is trained in computer science, machine learning, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. His research line is focused on how biological interactions are manifested at the disease level through the use, development, and application of kernel-based computational approaches that integrate different levels of biological data on the microorganism, gene, protein, and medical imaging axis.
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) Public Health and Environment researcher. Biologist and Master and PhD in Sciences - Analytical Chemistry. Her lines of research include Science Education, Environmental Chemistry, Ecotoxicology, Oxidative Stress and Proteomics and Metalloproteomics applying Bioanalytical techniques.