Advisory Board and Editors Synthetic Biology
Edward A. Bayer
Professor, Wishner Chair of Bio-organic Chemistry. Early development of avidin-biotin technology. Co-discoverer of the cellulosome concept. Editor/Editoral Board: Biotechnology Advances, Biotechnology for Biofuels, Current Opinion in Biotechnology, Industrial Biotechnology. Member of Scientific Advisory Board, US-DOE BioEnergy Science Center (BESC). Sarstedt Research Award, The Ulitzky Prize, Fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology and European Academy of Microgiology.
Dario T Bonetta
Associate professor in Faculty of Science at Ontario Tech University. Co-founder Metasys Genomics Corp. Interests include: biologically based materials derived from plant and bacterial sources; plant and animal development; inter-kingdom signalling and cell communication.
Bettina Böttcher
Professor for Biochemistry with Focus on electron Cryo Microscopy at the Julius Maximilians University Würzburg
Saverio Brogna
Lecturer and principal investigator at the School of Biosciences of the University of Birmingham, UK. Interested in eukaryotic gene expression and particularly in understanding the links between RNA processing and translation.
At present his group research focuses on understanding nonsense mediated mRNA decay (NMD) and its links with pre-mRNA splicing.
Tanya Amanda Camacho-Villegas
Tanya Camacho-Villegas is a Researcher for Mexico in the Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Unit, CIATEJ, A.C., located in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (2014-present). She is a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers level I. She works in recombinant protein design, cloning, and production (batch and bioreactor scale). She specializes in phage display for isolating single-domain antibodies such as vNAR´s or peptide isolation with diagnostic applications. Recently, she used the vNAR as an immuno-carrier for NPs for theranostics applications for breast cancer and glioblastomas as models.
She has received a BSc in Biology from the Science Faculty, UABC (2004) and a Marine Biotechnology MSc in CICESE (2007) focusing on the selection and validation of vNARs with anti-cytokines properties as candidates for TNFalpha and VEGF165 neutralizing in humans disorders.
She has received a PhD in Molecular Ecology and Biotechnology from the Marine Science Faculty at UABC (2012). She received a distinction in the Ph.D. dissertation
and fellowships from CONAHCYT for MSc, Ph.D., and Postdoc studies. She was the leader of four projects related to biotechnology companies. She was the author of patents related to vNAR as anti-cytokines or immuno-carriers for drug delivery.
Albert Cheng
Albert Cheng obtained his BSc in Biochemistry and MPhil in Biology from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2005 and 2007, respectively. He studied neurotrophin signaling and C. elegans developmental genetics. He then pursued his PhD in Computational & Systems Biology at MIT in the labs of Profs Christopher Burge and Rudolf Jaenisch and worked on various topics on epigenetics, gene regulation and alternative splicing in stem cells, reprogramming, cancer metastasis, erythropoiesis and differentiation. Cheng and colleagues identified H3K27ac as a signature for active enhancers. He analyzed alternative splicing in epithetlial-mesenchymal transition, cancer metastasis as well as erythropoiesis and identified splicing factors regulating these processes. He constructed CRISPR-on, an artificial RNA-guided activator based on CRISPR/Cas. After graduating in 2014, he joined the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor, ME, as one of the first JAX scholars where he continued to work on understanding and improving the CRISPR/Cas technology. In July 2015, he started his own lab as an assistant professor at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine campus at Farmington, CT.
Christopher Cooper
Senior Lecturer in Biological Sciences at the University of Huddersfield, since 2015. Previously Junior Research Fellow, College Lecturer In Biochemistry and various postdocs at the University of Oxford (2013-15). Working on DNA replication, genome integrity and transcription factors in human cancers (and also in prokaryotes). Additional interests in phylogenomics and novel protein expression systems.
Ana E Escalante
Dr. Ana E. Escalante, a PhD in microbial ecology and evolution, has extensively studied microbial diversity and evolution in natural and engineered ecosystems. Since 2011, she has been at the National Laboratory of Sustainability Sciences (LANCIS), focusing on sustainability, particularly its implications for public policy and ecosystem management. With >50 scientific articles, numerous supervised theses, and teaching roles in multiple graduate programs. Since 2020 she serves as director of the Institute of Ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Mario Alberto Flores-Valdez
Dr. Mario Alberto Flores-Valdez is a Professor in the Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Unit, CIATEJ, A.C., Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (2007-present). He is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI), and a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He was a Stanford University Medical Center postdoctoral fellow (2004-2007), where he received a Dean's Fellowship Award (2006) to conduct research on Tuberculosis. He worked in UNAM as Research Assistant for Prof. Jaime Mora (2004) and Prof. Emundo Calva (2003). He has received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from UNAM (1999-2003), a M.Sc. in Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering from UANL (1996-1999) and a B.Sc. from Universidad de Sonora (1991-1996) in Chemistry and Biology. He received fellowships from CONACYT for M.Sc. and Ph.D. studies and in M.Sc. and B.Sc. has received Diplomas as Best Student. He has expertise in Tuberculosis, particularly in developing recombinant BCG strains. He has been PI for 7 grants from 2008 to date, focused in studies about tuberculosis vaccine development and basic aspects of mycobacterial physiology.
Shawn M Gomez
Professor and Associate Chair for Research in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNC-CH and NCSU and Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at UNC-CH. Previous Florence Gould Scholar and Pasteur Foundation Fellow. Current research interests in systems and synthetic biology, bioimage informatics, and network science applied to biology. Broader interests in translational medicine and the fostering of innovative solutions to problems in healthcare.
Henning Hermjakob
As co-founder of the HUPO Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI), Henning Hermjakob contributed to the development of a broad range of community data representation standards for proteomics and interactomics. Based on the trust and collaborative spirit built up in the development of data representation standards, he coordinated the next step, the intensive collaboration of proteomics and interactomics data resources globally in the IMEx [3] and ProteomeXchange [4] consortia, providing infrastructure support for the move towards an open data culture in proteomics. Building on his experience in interactomics, he is now co-PI of the Reactome Pathways database [1] and the BioModels resource of systems biology models [2]. Current research interests comprise distributed data resources (http://omicsdi.org) and complex data visualisation.
1. Fabregat A, et al. The Reactome pathway Knowledgebase. Nucleic Acids Res. 2016 Jan 4;44(D1):D481-7.
2. Chelliah V, et al. BioModels: ten-year anniversary. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015 Jan;43 (Database issue):D542-8.
3. Orchard S, et al. Protein interaction data curation: the International Molecular Exchange (IMEx) consortium. Nat Methods. 2012 Mar 27;9(4):345-350.
4. Vizcaíno JA, et al. ProteomeXchange provides globally coordinated proteomics data submission and dissemination. Nat Biotechnol. 2014 Mar 10;32(3):223-6.
5. Lander ES, et al. Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome.
Nature. 2001 Feb 15;409(6822):860-921.
Corey Nislow
Corey Nislow's laboratory develops and uses cutting edge tools to address this central question: how can we understand the biological commonalities in all of the life sciences; from embryonic development, to the spread of infectious diseases to better ways to treat cancer. Each of these disciplines can be explained in the context of competition, interaction and evolution. His lab studies the interface between genes and the environment using parallel genome-wide screens, high throughput cell-based assays and next generation sequencing. Most recently, he and his scientific partner, Dr. Guri Giaever, are exploring how laboratory experiments can co-opt evolutionary processes to understand drug action. He enjoys teaching all aspects of biotechnology, genomics and drug discovery. He got his PhD from the University of Colorado, worked at several Biotechnology companies and was at Stanford and University of Toronto before joining UBC in 2013. He has published 161 papers and run 19 marathons.