Speakers

Klara Hlouchova (Charles University, Czech Republic)

Klara Hlouchova is an assistant professor at the department of cell biology at Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic). She is a PI of the Synthetic Biology group. She is interested in protein evolution crossing the boundaries of astrobiology, protein engineering, and synthetic life. Her research uses bioinformatics and experimental techniques to explore the structural potential of new sequence space, the effect of the amino acid alphabet on protein structure and function, and the determinants that modulated protein catalysis in early evolutionary stages.

She studied biochemistry at Charles University in Prague and spent her postdoc with Prof. Shelley Copley at University of Colorado Boulder, studying evolution of metabolic pathways.

Birte Höcker (University of Bayreuth, Germany)

Birte Höcker is professor for biochemistry at University of Bayreuth. After studying biology at the University of Göttingen and at Carleton University in Ottawa, she received her PhD in biochemistry at the University of Cologne. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow on computational protein design at Duke University Medical Center, USA. In 2006 she started her own research group at the MPI for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. In 2016 the group relocated to Bayreuth where they continue their work on the evolution and design of proteins and their functions.

William F. Martin (University of Düsseldorf, Germany)

William F. (Bill) Martin is professor of Biology. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Hannover in 1985 and his PhD from the University of Cologne in 1988. In 1989 he joined the Institute for Genetics at the University of Braunschweig where he worked on endosymbiosis and gene transfer. He has led the Institute for Molecular Evolution at the University of Düsseldorf since 1999. His research interest is focused on genome evolution, early evolution and the origin of microbial life.

Shunsuke Tagami (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Shunsuke Tagami is a Team Leader in RIKEN BDR. He studied structural biology in his Ph.D. research in the University of Tokyo. Then he joined MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and learned RNA/protein engineering. From October 2015 he has been heading his own laboratory, which aims to engineer functional bio-macromolecules applicable in medical science and also to understand the evolutionary pathway of natural bio-macromolecules.
https://www.bdr.riken.jp/en/research/labs/tagami-s/index.html

Yohei Yokobayashi (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Japan)

Yohei Yokobayashi is a Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) where he leads the Nucleic Acid Chemistry and Engineering Unit since 2015. After studying organometallic chemistry and peptide chemistry at the University of Tokyo (B.Eng. and M. Eng.), he received his Ph.D. from The Scripps Research Institute in 2001. After working as a postdoc at Caltech with Prof. Frances Arnold, he joined Department of Biomedical Engineering at University of California, Davis as a faculty member in 2004. Current research interests include design of functional nucleic acids at the interface of chemistry and biology.

Tobias Bollenbach (University of Cologne, Germany)

Tobias Bollenbach is professor of biological physics at the University of Cologne. He studied physics at the University of Gottingen and at Michigan State University. His PhD in theoretical biological physics at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden from 2002-2005 focused on the transport and gradient formation of signaling molecules in animal development. In 2006, he moved to the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School where he worked on the underlying mechanisms of drug interactions and identified general principles in bacterial gene expression responses to antibiotic combinations. Since 2010, the research of his group has focused on the dynamics of bacterial stress responses, drug resistance evolution, and related topics which he approaches using a combination of experimental techniques from microbial systems biology with theoretical approaches from physics.

Chikara Furusawa (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Chikara Furusawa received B.Sc degree in physics from the Meiji University in 1995 and M.Sc in biological physics from the University of Tokyo in 1997. He received Ph.D in biological physics from the University of Tokyo in 2000. He spent a year of postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Shin-ichi Nishikawa at RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology working on experimental analysis of stem cell differentiation. From 2003 to 2008, he was an associate professor in Osaka University working on theoretical biology and bioengineering. He was then appointed as a Team Leader at RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) and from 2018 until present, he is serving as a Team Leader at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR). His research activities included: Theoretical and experimental analysis of cell differentiation, adaptation, and evolution; Metabolic modeling for bioengineering; Experimental evolution of bacterial cells. He was awarded the Young Scientists' Prize from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (2011) and The 26th Nishinomiya-Yukawa memorial award (2011).

Wenying Shou (University College London, UK)

Wenying Shou’s lab is interested in discovering general principles that govern communities of interacting microbes. Wenying graduated from Pomona College, double majoring in molecular biology and mathematics. She then went to Caltech for her PhD, and studied how budding yeast finishes cell cycle. She did her postdoc work in a physics-biology lab at the Rockefeller University, in the hope to combine mathematics with biology. There, she became interested in microbial interactions and microbial communities. She is currently a professor in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment of University College London. Her lab has used engineered communities and in silico communities to understand for example how cellular cooperation can persist against cheaters, how community-level properties emerge from interacting individuals, and how to evolve communities with improved functionality.

Anthony A. Hyman (Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany)

Prof. Dr. Anthony Hyman is Director and Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. 1984 he received his BSc first class in Zoology from the University College in London. From 1985 to 1987 he wrote his PhD about “The establishment of division axes in early C.elegans embryos” under the supervision of Dr. John White at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC in Cambridge, England. After that he moved to San Francisco where he did his postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof. Tim Mitchison at the University of California investigating the mechanism of chromosome movement studied in vitro. 1993 he became Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, before he moved to Dresden in 1999 as a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, where he is currently managing director. He is best known for his work on the role of phase separation in formation of biological compartments.

Noboru Mizushima (The University of Tokyo, Japan)

Noboru Mizushima graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 1991 and finished the resident program in 1993 in the department of internal medicine at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Then he started his research career with studies on molecular immunology and received Ph.D. in 1996. He then moved to National Institute for Basic Biology and started works on autophagy in yeast and mammals in Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi’s laboratory. He moved to Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science in 2004 as a PI and started extensive studies on the physiological role of autophagy using mouse genetics, and molecular mechanisms of autophagy in mammals. He was promoted to Professor of Physiology and Cell Biology, in Graduate School and Faculty of Medicine at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 2006, and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Tokyo in 2012. His current research focuses on mechanisms and physiological roles of autophagy and other intracellular protein/organelle degradation systems.

Tatsuo Shibata (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Tatsuo Shibata is a team leader of Laboratory for Physical Biology at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), Kobe. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1999 for works in physics of complex systems. During his postdoctoral work at Kyoto university and Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, Germany, he conducted theoretical studies on stochastic processes of molecular motors and gene expressions. From 2002, he became a lecturer and then associate professor at Hiroshima university, where he studied stochastic process and self-organization of cellular signal transduction systems. From 2010, he joined RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) as a unit leader. His lab has been working on how cellular functions such as chemotaxis emerge from the self-organization of molecules and how tissue properties such as left-right asymmetry emerge from cellular and molecular properties, from both theoretical and experimental point of view.

Masashi Tachikawa (Kyoto University, Japan)

Masashi Tachikawa is an associate professor at the Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, Kyoto University. After receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Nagoya University, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on ERATO Complex Biology Project directed by Prof. Kunihiko Kaneko at The University of Tokyo. He engaged in mathematical studies for ecology and evolution of microbial system in the project. He then joined the Theoretical Biology Laboratory at Riken as a staff scientist and started physical model studies for the morphologies and behaviors of cellular organelle. After moving to Kyoto University, he continues to develop the coarse-grained simulation method for the endomembrane system and investigate how the complex organelle morphologies are generated, maintained, and deformed to promote cellular functions.

Min Wu (Yale University, USA)

Dr. Min Wu received her undergraduate degree from Peking University and Ph.D from Cornell University, both in chemistry. After her post-doctoral training with Pietro De Camilli at Yale, she started her independent career as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore and a principal investigator at the Mechanobiology Institute. In 2020, she joined the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine as an associate professor, where her laboratory is currently investigating the interplay of endocytic trafficking, cytoskeletons and lipid metabolisms in generating single cell oscillations and travelling waves. One of the long-term goals is to apply the framework of non-linear dynamics to understand the fundamental regulatory principles underlying cell growth and division.

Mototsugu Eiraku (Kyoto University, Japan)

Mototsugu Eiraku received his Ph. D. from The University of Kyoto in 2005, and joined the RIKEN Brain Science Institute as a research scientist that same year. In 2006, he joined the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB),Laboratory for Organogenesis and Neurogenesis, where he served as a research scientist until 2010. That year, he was promoted to Deputy Unit Leader of the Four-dimensional Tissue Analysis Unit within the Division for Human Stem Cell Technology, and in 2013 was appointed Unit Leader. From November 2014, he served as leader of the In Vitro Histogenesis Unit and from April 2015, he was appointed Team Leader of the same laboratory. In 2017, he became a professor at the Kyoto University. His current research focus is 1) Elucidation of self-organization phenomena in neural development and morphogenesis, 2) Development of novel technologies for in vitro formation of functional organ, 3) Molecular analysis of species-specific regulation for developmental timing and tissue size determination.

Shuichi Onami (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Shuichi Onami earned his D.V.M. from The University of Tokyo (1994) and his PhD in Genetics from The Graduate School for Advanced Studies (1998). He was an associate professor at Keio University (2002 - 2006), joined RIKEN as a senior scientist at Genomic Sciences Center (2006), and became a team leader at RIKEN Advanced Science Institute (2008). He is currently a team leader at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research. He invented an automated 4D cell division dynamics measurement system for C. elegans embryos and pioneered quantitative modeling in C. elegans embryo. He also founded SSBD database, an integrated database for quantitative biosystems dynamics data and biological images. His current research interests include mathematical modeling of animal development, knowledge extraction from a large-scale high-dimensional biological data, and their applications to human biology.

Eric D. Siggia (The Rockefeller University, USA)

Dr. Siggia was trained as a physicist and worked in the areas of statistical mechanics of phase transitions, quantum magnetism, fluid mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. He moved to Rockefeller University from Cornell in 1998, and converted to biology. He collaborated on projects in the areas of protein trafficking, bioinformatics of gene regulation, evolution of antibiotic resistance, cell cycle in yeast. In the last decade he worked with Ali Brivanlou and others on dynamics of vertebrate signaling pathways and synthetic embryology using human embryonic stem cells.

Alexander van Oudenaarden (Hubrecht Institute, The Netherlands)

Prof. dr. ir. Alexander van Oudenaarden is director and group leader at the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) and professor of quantitative biology of gene regulation at the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Medicine at Utrecht University. His research group works with advanced (light) microscopy and sequencing technologies in order to study individual cells. Van Oudenaarden studied materials science and physics at Delft, where he also obtained his PhD in solid state physics. As a postdoc he worked at Stanford University collaborating with Steven Boxer and Julie Theriot. He was professor of physics and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2012 he moved to the Hubrecht Institute after 15 years in the USA. His group combines techniques – in part developed by themselves – from developmental biology, molecular biology, physics, mathematics and computer science. He was awarded the 2011 and 2016 ERC Advanced Investigator grant and in 2017 van Oudenaarden won the Spinoza Award.

Atsushi Iriki (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Atsushi IRIKI received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 1986. He held research associate positions at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and then at The Rockefeller University (USA). He joined the faculty of Toho University Medical School as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor in Physiology (1991-1999). In 1999, he returned to Tokyo Medical and Dental University as a full professor and chairman of Cognitive Neurobiology. In 2004, Atsushi IRIKI was appointed a head of Laboratory for Symbolic Cognitive Development at RIKEN Institute (first at its Brain Science Institute and then 2018 onward at Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research). He is currently a visiting professor of University College London (UK) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU, Singapore), an adjunct professor of Keio University, a research professor of Kyoto University, a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Canada), founding co-director of RIKEN-NTU Research Centres (Singapore & Japan), an overseas fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (UK).

Ryota Kanai (Araya Inc., Japan)

Ryota Kanai is the founder & CEO of Araya, Inc. After graduating from the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University in 2000, he received his PhD (Cum Laude) in 2005 from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he studied human visual information processing mechanisms. After working as a researcher at California Institute of Technology in the U.S. and University College London in the U.K., and as a JST PRESTO researcher and Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the U.K., he founded Araya, Inc. and worked full time there since 2015. He is engaged in research on the principles of consciousness in the brain and the implementation of consciousness in AI through the fusion of neuroscience and information theory. He has been also working on the practical application of AI and neuroscience in industry. He has received many awards, including the Young Scientist Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the JEITA Venture Award (2020), the ET/IoT Technology Award (2019) among others as Araya Inc. From 2020, he is working on the practical application of brain-machine interface as a project manager of the Moonshot Project in the Cabinet Office.

Catherine Tallon-Baudry (École Normale Supérieure, France)

Catherine Tallon-Baudry is a Cnrs senior researcher at Ecole Normale Supérieure, ParisShe studied biology and neuroscience in Lyon, where she obtained her PhD under the supervision of Olivier Bertrand in 1997, revealing the existence of gamma-band oscillations in humans and their role in visual cognition. After a post-doc in Bremen, Germany, she obtained a tenured Cnrs position and joined Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris. After discovering a double dissociation between spatial attention and visual consciousness, she moved away from cognitive accounts of consciousness to concentrate on consciousness core property, subjectivity. In 2012 she created a new research group at Ecole Normale Supérieure to propose and test the hypothesis that subjectivity relies on the constant monitoring of viscera signals by the brain.

Anna Wang Roe (Zhejiang University, China)

Anna Wang Roe (B.A. Harvard University 1984, Ph.D. MIT 1991) is a Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology at Zhejiang University, which she established in 2014. Her doctoral work on the 'rewired ferret' preparation is a well-known paradigm for studying brain development and plasticity. Following postdoc and research positions at Rockefeller University, Baylor College of Medicine, and Queensland University in Australia, she has held faculty positions at Yale University, Vanderbilt University, and Oregon National Primate Research Center. She is known for her studies in visual and somatosensory processing in primate cerebral cortex and for development of optical and MRI technologies. In recognition for her contributions in science, she has been recognized as a Sloan, Packard, SPIE, and AAAS Fellow. She is a strong believer in interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems, an approach which she brings to unravelling the architecture of mesoscale neural circuitry underlying intelligent information processing systems. Mostly recently, she has developed a whole-brain scale network mapping method called laser-fMRI, and is generating a functional mesoscale connectome in macaque monkey.

Fernando E. Rosas (Imperial College London, UK)

Fernando Rosas received the B.A. degree in music composition and philosophy (Minor), the B.Sc. degree in mathematics, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He worked as Postdoctoral Research Assistant with the Departement Elektrotechniek (ESAT) of KU Leuven, as Postdoctoral Fellow with the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering of the National Taiwan University, and as Marie Curie Research Fellow with the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He is now a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Department of Brain Sciences and the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London, and an incoming Lecturer with the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex. His research is focused on leveraging tools and frameworks from complexity science to advance our understanding of high brain functions.

Markus Covert (Stanford University, USA)

Markus Covert is a Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Over the course of his career, his lab has generated several new exciting technologies to measure, analyze, and mathematically model the behaviors of individual cells. The lab is probably best known for constructing the first "whole-cell" computational model, which explicitly represents all known gene functions and molecules in a bacterial cell - an advance which was highlighted by the journal Cell as a highlight publication of the 40-year history of that journal. Dr. Covert is grateful for funding mechanisms that have supported his efforts to develop new technologies, in particular the NIH Director's Pioneer Award and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation Distinguished Investigator and Discovery Center awards. He has also consulted in industry, including on the scientific advisory board of Emerald Cloud Labs, and as an inaugural Ambassador at X Labs, (previously Google [X]).

Ross King (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

Ross D. King has joint positions at the University of Cambridge, and Chalmers Institute of Technology, Sweden. He is one of the most experienced machine learning researchers in Europe. His main research interest is the interface between computer science and science. He originated the idea of a ‘Robot Scientist’: integrating AI and laboratory robotics to physically implement closed-loop scientific discovery. His Robot Scientist ‘Adam’ was the first machine to autonomously discover scientific knowledge. His Robot Scientist ‘Eve’ is currently searching for drugs against neglected tropical diseases, and covid. This research has been published in top scientific journals, Science, Nature, etc. and has received wide publicity. He is currently developing ‘Genesis’ a Robot Scientists designed to run ten thousand cycles of hypothesis-led experiments in parallel. His other core research interest is DNA computing. He developed the first nondeterministic universal Turing machine, and is now working on ‘DNA supremacy’: a DNA computer that can solve larger NP complete problems that conventional or quantum computers. He is also very interested in automatically discovering one million new insect species.

Masayo Takahashi (Vision Care Inc. / RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Dr. Masayo Takahashi joined the former RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) as a Visiting Scientist and Team Leader of the Lab for Retinal Regeneration in 2006. In 2013, her team launched a pilot clinical study of autologous iPS cell-derived RPE cell sheets for exudative aged-related macular degeneration (AMD), and performed the first RPE cell sheet graft transplantation in September 2014. In August 2019, she started a new carrier as a president of start up company; Vision Care Inc. (VC’), that will collaborate with RIKEN and Kobe Eye Center with the ultimate goal of bringing stem cell therapies to patients. Dr. Takahashi is the recipient of numerous awards including a Development Category, Prizes for Science and Technology, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, a 1st Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize, a End Blindness 2020, a Akebono award, Kyoto prefecture, and the rank of Chevalier dans l'Ordre national du Mérite (Knight of the French National Order of Merit).

Si Wu (Peking University, China)

Dr. Si Wu is Professor in School of Psychology & Cognitive Science, Principle Investigator in McGovern Institute for Brain Science, and Principle Investigator in PKU-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Peking University, China. His research areas are Computational Neuroscience and Brain-inspired Computing. He is particularly interested in elucidating the general principles of neural information processing, and based on which to develop brain-inspired computing algorithms.