Speakers

Amanda Amodeo (Dartmouth College, USA)

Amanda Amodeo (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College. Her lab seeks to understand how cells and organs make the measurements that allow them to output the correct biological decisions. They use the early cleavage divisions of the Drosophila embryo to study how cell size and cell cycle coordinate developmental progression and differentiation. They have found changes in chromatin composition during zygotic genome activation and an unconventional role for histones as cell cycle regulators independent of chromatin incorporation at the Mid-Blastula Transition.

Ichiro Hiratani (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Ichiro Hiratani is a Team Leader of the Laboratory for Developmental Epigenetics in RIKEN BDR. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Tokyo for his work on Xenopus (African clawed frog) embryonic development with Masanori Taira. He moved to the United States for his postdoctoral training with David Gilbert (Florida State University) and pioneered genome-wide analysis of DNA replication timing to explore how chromosome architecture changes during stem cell differentiation. After a brief period as an assistant professor at the National Institute of Genetics (Mishima), he was appointed as Team Leader at the RIKEN CDB (now RIKEN BDR in Kobe) in 2013. Currently, his laboratory focuses on understanding the principles of the 3-dimensional organization of the genome during early mammalian development using cutting-edge single-cell genomics technologies.

Hiroshi Kimura (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)

Hiroshi Kimura currently serves as a professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, Tokyo Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Science from Hokkaido University in 1996 and started his research career as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford. After returning to Japan in 2002, he worked as an associate professor at several universities, and in 2014, was appointed as professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He specializes in cell biology, epigenetics, and gene regulation. To understand how transcription by RNA polymerase II is regulated by histone modifications and chromatin structure in vivo, he is tracking histone and RNA polymerase II modifications in living cells and organisms by developing new fluorescent probes.

Patrick O'Farrell (University of California San Francisco, USA)

Patrick O’Farrell is a developmental biologist recognized for his work exploring mechanisms controlling where and when cells divide during embryonic development.  He has a French-Canadian heritage and was raised in a peripatetic family with a father serving in the Canadian army.   He graduated with a B.Sc. in Genetics from McGill University in Montreal in 1969.  As a graduate student in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder he developed an influential method of high-resolution two-dimensional electrophoretic separation of proteins.  He was a post-doctoral fellow at University of California at San Francisco during the heyday of the development of recombinant DNA technology.  He joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, at UCSF in 1979.  There, he has led a research group that has explored a variety of questions in embryonic development.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences

Juanma Vaquerizas (Imperial College London, UK)

Juanma Vaquerizas is MRC Investigator at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and Chair of Developmental and Regulatory Genomics at Imperial College London, UK. Juanma received his PhD (2008) from the Spanish National Cancer Centre and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid where he worked on the characterisation of the human transcription factor repertoire. After postdoctoral training with Nick Luscombe at EMBL–European Bioinformatics Institute, focusing on the study of dosage compensation in Drosophila, Juanma was awarded a Max Planck Research Group at MPI-Muenster in 2012. Since 2019, Juanma is Programme Leader at the London Institute of Medical Sciences and Academy of Medical Sciences Professor. Juanma has a long-standing interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms that allow cells to use their genetic information to perform normal cellular and physiological functions, such as development and differentiation, and how the mis-regulation of these mechanisms leads to disease, such as cancer.

Fred Chang (University of California San Francisco, USA)

Fred Chang is a Professor of Cell and Tissue Biology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is a second generation Chinese American and grew up in California. He obtained his AB degree from Princeton University and MD PhD degrees at UCSF. In his PhD he worked with Ira Herskowitz on yeast cell cycle control, and for his postdoc he worked with Paul Nurse and David Drubin on cytokinesis in fission yeast. He started his lab at Columbia University in 1997 and moved to UCSF in 2016. His lab studies fundamental processes that dictate aspects of cell size, shape and division using primarily the fission yeast S. pombe as a model system. Currently, his lab focuses on physical properties of the cytoplasm and their effects on intracellular processes such as nuclear size control and the cytoskeleton. He has been the recipient of multiple awards and was recently recognized as an ASCB fellow.

Carl-Philipp Heisenberg (Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Austria)

Carl-Philipp Heisenberg (born 1968) is a developmental biologist who studied biology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and completed his doctorate in the group of Nobel laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max-Planck-Institute for developmental biology in Tübingen in 1997. In 2001, he became research group leader and Emmy Noether Junior Professor at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. In 2010, he started as a Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in Klosterneuburg. Heisenberg received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017 from the European Research Council and, in the same year, the “Würdigungspreis” from Lower Austria. Since 2015 he has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2018, he joined the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and, in 2019, received the Carus Medal from the Leopoldina.

Kinneret Keren (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)

TBA

Yu-Chiun Wang (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Yu-Chiun completed his B.Sc. and M.S. at National Taiwan University, Taiwan, and received his doctorate in 2006 from the University of Chicago, U.S.A. under supervision of Prof. Edwin Ferguson. His Ph.D. work on the regulation of BMP signaling during dorsal-ventral patterning in the Drosophila was awarded the 2007 Larry Sandler Memorial Award for best dissertation of Drosophila research. In 2007, he joined Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Eric Wieschaus with support from the postdoctoral research fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation where he sought to understand the mechanisms of the formation of the cephalic furrow and dorsal transverse folds during Drosophila gastrulation. He was appointed Team Leader of the Laboratory for Epithelial Morphogenesis at RIKEN CDB in 2013 and RIKEN BDR in 2018, where he continues to explore the molecular and mechanical mechanisms underlying epithelial cell and tissue deformation.

Liam Holt (New York University School of Medicine, USA)

TBA

Moritoshi Sato (The University of Tokyo, Japan)

Moritohi Sato is Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2001. He was appointed as Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo in 2000 and promoted to Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor in 2005, 2007 and 2017, respectively. He is also the project leader of Kanagawa Institute of Industrial Science and Technology (KISTEC). His recent research focuses on the development and application of new tools for optical manipulation of molecular processes in the cell.

Geoffrey Schiebinger (The University of British Columbia, Canada)

Geoffrey received his PhD in Statistics in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley, and pursued postdoctoral studies from 2016-2019 with joint positions at the MIT Center for Statistics and Data Science and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he worked with Professors Lander, Regev and Rigollet. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia, where he is a member of the Math of Information group, the Mathematical Biology group, and the Probability group. He is also an Associate Member of the School of Biomedical Engineering.
Geoffrey has won numerous awards including a 2021 Maud Menten Prize in Genetics and a 2018 Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

Yoshihiro Shimizu (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Yoshihiro Shimizu is a Team Leader in RIKEN BDR. He developed a reconstituted cell-free protein synthesis system (PURE system) in his Ph.D. research in the University of Tokyo. After supporting the commercialization of the PURE system in a startup company, he became an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo and continued his research for the development of applied techniques using the PURE system. In 2010, he started his own research groupe in RIKEN which aims to further apply the cell-free system for the field of synthetic biology and proteomics study.

Ben Hogan (The University of Melbourne, Australia)

Ben Hogan is a Professor at the University of Melbourne and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Australia) where he is Co-Head of the Program in Organogenesis and Cancer and runs the laboratory of Vascular Cell and Developmental Biology. Ben performed his PhD in myelopoiesis at the Ludwig Institute (2005, Australia) before a postdoc at the Hubrecht Institute (2006-2009, The Netherlands) where he performed the first forward genetic screens in lymphangiogenesis using zebrafish. He became a group leader in 2010 at the University of Queensland before moving to Melbourne and being promoted to Professor in 2019. Ben has been previously supported by fellowships from EMBO, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia). His work has uncovered new components and effectors of the CCBE1-VEGFC-VEGFR3 signalling pathway that controls lymphangiogenesis in development, cancer and lymphatic disease in humans. His lab currently uses live imaging of vascular development, zebrafish and mouse genetics, functional and single cell genomic approaches and is exploring lymphatic vascular development and the formation of the blood brain barrier.

Kazu Kikuchi (National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center, Japan)

Dr. Kazu Kikuchi graduated from the Tohoku University School of Medicine (Japan) and completed his Ph.D. at the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine in 2003. Kazu studied lymphocyte development as a post-doctoral fellow in Motonari Kondo’s Lab at Duke University (USA) and later studied organ regeneration in Ken Poss’ lab, also at Duke University. He joined the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (Australia) in 2011 as Head of the Cardiac Regeneration Laboratory in the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Division. Kazu moved to the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center (Japan) as Director of the Cardiac Regeneration Biology Department in 2019. Kazu Kikuchi’s Lab investigates cellular and molecular mechanisms of myocardial regeneration using zebrafish to find new insights for repairing damaged muscle in the human heart.

Lucy O'Brien (Stanford University School of Medicine, USA)

Dr. Lucy Erin O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University and a member of the Stanford Institute for Stem Biology and Regenerative Medicine. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Biochemistry from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco, studying epithelial cell organoids with Professor Keith Mostov. Dr. O'Brien next performed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Drosophila intestinal stem cells with Professor David Bilder. Dr. O'Brien was a Genentech Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation and a Research Scholar of the American Cancer Society; she is currently a Next Generation Leader of the International Society of Stem Cell Research, a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and an editor of eLife, Cells & Development, and Stem Cell Reports. Her research uses the adult Drosophila intestine to ask fundamental questions about how stem cells work together for healthy organ function over an animal’s lifetime. Dr. O'Brien and her team have pioneered imaging methodologies to watch single cells and whole organs in live animals over multiple days and have developed new genetic and analytical platforms to monitor stem cell behaviors in space and time.

Li-Kun Phng (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Li-Kun Phng is a Team Leader at RIKEN BDR where she heads the Laboratory for Vascular Morphogenesis. She obtained her PhD in 2009 from CRUK London Research Institute/University College London for her work on Notch signaling in sprouting angiogenesis. Supported by fellowships from EMBO, HFSP and JSPS, she performed her post-doctoral research in EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany), VIB/KU Leuven (Belgium) and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center (Osaka, Japan). During this period, she unravelled how diverse actin structures control distinct steps of vessel morphogenesis. In October 2016, she started her own research group at RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology. Her current research is aimed at understanding mechanisms regulating endothelial cell morphogenesis and the interplay between haemodynamic forces and endothelial cell mechanoresponse.

Hanh Vu (EMBL Heidelberg, Germany)

Hanh recently started her group in the Developmental Biology unit at EMBL Heidelberg. She grew up in Vietnam and did her undergraduate training in chemical engineering at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology. Next, she moved to the US and did her PhD in Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah. There, she ended up joining the laboratory of Dr. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado to work on the evolution of organ system using planarian flatworms as model system. Hanh discovered that the planarian excretory system is molecularly, structurally and functionally similar to the mammalian kidney and, in doing so, established planarians as a powerful new system for modelling human kidney disease. Very much in love with planarians but motivated to switch research question and environment, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Jochen Rink at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden to tackle a problem that motivates her work until this day: how do animals get to their characteristic size, and then stop growing?

Koji Atarashi (Keio University, Japan)

Koji Atarashi is an Associate professor at Keio University School of Medicine. He obtained his Ph.D. from Osaka University in 2009. He was working as an Assistant Professor at Osaka University and the University of Tokyo and a Senior Scientist in RIKEN IMS, and then he was appointed as an Assistant Professor at Keio University in 2014 and promoted to a Lecturer, an Associate Professor in 2015 and 2017, respectively. He studied the relationship between gut microbiota and host immune system. He has been identified the bacterial consortia that can induce development and activation of intestinal T cell subsets. He is now working on the relationship between gut microbiota and host metabolism.

Wataru Kimura (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Wataru Kimura is a team leader at RIKEN BDR. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Nagoya University in 2002, and his PhD in Developmental Biology from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 2007. He did his postdoc at Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, and then moved to UT Southwestern Medical Center and started working on heart regeneration. In 2017, he joined RIKEN BDR as a team leader to pursue his research interest in mammalian heart regeneration, especially in relation to the regulation of cellular metabolism. His lab also studies cardiac aging and stress response.

Irene Miguel-Aliaga (Imperial College London, UK)

Irene Miguel-Aliaga is Professor of Genetics and Physiology at Imperial College London, and MRC Investigator at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences.
Irene has an interest in the crosstalk between organs – in particular, how and why the intestine communicates with other organs, such as the brain. Her lab was one of the first to tackle the study of the brain-gut axis using the powerful genetics of Drosophila: work that they have now extended to mouse and human models.

Irene and her team discovered that the brain-gut axes of males and females are very different, and that these intestinal sex differences impact food intake, gamete production and tumour susceptibility. They have also investigated how the intestine senses nutrients, revealing unexpected roles for metal sensing in the regulation of feeding and growth.

Irene trained as a biochemist in Barcelona, Spain and she received her PhD in Genetics from the University of Oxford (UK). She investigated how neurons develop during postdoctoral work at Harvard (USA), Linköping University (Sweden) and NIMR (now Crick Institute, UK).

Irene was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant and currently holds an ERC Advanced Grant. She was elected to the EMBO YIP programme in 2012, to EMBO in 2017 and to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2019. She was also awarded a Suffrage Science Women in Science award in 2018, and the Genetics Society Mary Lyon Medal in 2022.

Hidenobu Miyazawa (EMBL Heidelberg, Germany)

Hidenobu Miyazawa is a research staff scientist at EMBL Heidelberg. Hidenobu received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2016 for his work describing spatiotemporal changes of cellular metabolism in mouse organogenesis-stage embryos. He then joined the lab of Alexander Aulehla at EMBL Heidelberg as a postdoc to study the signaling role of cellular metabolism during embryonic development. His current research focuses on understanding the mechanism and function of glycolytic flux-signaling in mouse presomitic mesoderm development.        

Emi Nishimura (The University of Tokyo, Japan)

Dr. Emi Nishimura obtained her M.D. in 1994 and her Ph.D in 2000 at Kyoto University and did her post-doc training at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. She started her own group in 2004, became Professor at Kanazawa University in 2006 and then at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 2009. She is currently a Professor at Medical Science Institute of the University of Tokyo. She identified melanocyte stem cells in 2002. She discovered that stem cell depletion/exhaustion underlie hair follicle aging in 2004 and 2016 and demonstrated that stem cell competition orchestrates skin homeostasis and aging in 2019. Her group is studying mechanisms of mammalian aging, regeneration and cancer development.

Masayuki Oginuma (Osaka University, Japan)

Masayuki Oginuma is an Associate professor at Osaka University. He studied developmental biology using mouse genetics in his Ph.D. research at the National institute of genetics in Japan. Next he joined Institut de génétique et de biologie moléculaire et cellulaire (IGBMC) and Harvard medical university working as a postdoc, and started studies combining developmental biology and metabolism studies. Now he is studying embryonic diapause of turquoise killifish, by using an approach, combining developmental biology and metabolism studies.

Nathalie Rochefort (The University of Edinburgh, UK)

Nathalie Rochefort is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, investigating the neural basis of visual perception. As an undergraduate, she studied Biology and Epistemology (ENS, Paris). She then obtained a PhD in Neuroscience from the University Paris-VI and the Ruhr-Universität-Bochum and did her post-doctoral training at the Technical University in Munich. Her work has contributed to a new understanding of how neurons acquire their functional properties in the mouse visual cortex. This work also led to the development of in vivo two-photon calcium imaging, a powerful technique now widely used by neuroscientists. By using two-photon calcium imaging combined with electrophysiological recordings in awake behaving mice, current projects from her research group investigate: how visually-guided behaviour modulates neuronal activity in the visual cortex and how cortical information processing is impacted by metabolic state. She has won various honors and grants including the prestigious Bernard Katz Lecture Award, the Schilling Research Award of the German Neuroscience Society, the Sir Henry Dale fellowship (Wellcome Trust and Royal Society), the EMBO Young Investigator award and the ERC Consolidator grant.

Asya Rolls (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)

Asya Rolls is Prof. at the Rappaport Medical School, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She is also an International Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)-Wellcome investigator. Rolls studies the physiological mechanisms whereby emotions and thoughts affect physical health. Her laboratory uses chemogenetic, optical, and behavioral approaches to investigate how specific brain activity affects the immune response. By deciphering the neuronal pathways mediating brain-immune signals, her work aims to harness the brain’s therapeutic potential.

Genshiro A. Sunagawa (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Genshiro A. Sunagawa is a Team Leader at RIKEN BDR, directing the Laboratory for Hibernation Biology. He received his M.D. degree at Kyoto University in 2001 and worked as a resident and a pediatrician from 2001 to 2006. During his residency, he noticed that synthetic hibernation might solve some clinical issues and decided to enter the basic research field to develop synthetic hibernation for humans. In 2006, he entered the Graduate Scholl of Medicine Kyoto University and received his Ph.D. in 2013 by developing an unsupervised fully-automated sleep staging method for mice. In 2015, he moved to Dr. Masayo Takahashi’s laboratory, the Laboratory for Retinal Regeneration, RIKEN CDB as a research scientist and started investigating the mechanism of active hypometabolism in mammals. Since then, he has been investigating daily torpor in mice, and in 2020, he and his collaborator Dr. Takeshi Sakurai discovered a method to induce a hibernation-like state, the QIH (Q neurons–Induced Hypometabolism), in mice. In 2022, he became a Team Leader at BDR. His team is challenging to understand the mechanisms of active hypometabolism in mammals.

Sae Tanaka (The Exploratory Research Center on Life and Living Systems, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan)

Sae Tanaka is a Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Exploratory Research Center on Life and Living Systems. She received her Ph.D. degree in biological science from the University of Tokyo in 2015. She joined Keio University School of Medicine as an assistant professor, and studied the near-infrared spectra of glucose solutions from 2015 to 2020. In 2020, she started a project to elucidate the molecular mechanism of anhydrobiosis in tardigrades with Prof. Kazuharu Arakawa, and then she developed a tardigrade-specific in vivo expression vector, TardiVec, which enables the expression of exogenous genes in tardigrades.