Our Guest Speakers
The GGL is proud to announce this year's guest speakers for the annual conference. We are honoured to have them contributing to our conference and offer our sincere appreciation for their efforts.
Prof. Dr. Lars Bode (Section 1)
Division of Neonatology and Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, University of California, San Diego
Prof. Dr. Lars Bode is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Endowed Chair and Director of Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation Mother-Milk-Infant Center of Research Excellence. He earned his Master of Science degree in Nutritional Sciences from the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, determining structural differences in human and bovine milk gangliosides. For his PhD thesis he went to the Institute of Child Health at the University College London, studying the effects of Human Milk Oligosaccharides on selectin-mediated cell-cell interaction in the immune system. Since 2003 he has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California, where he got appointed as Staff Scientist in 2006. He made major contributions in elucidating the central role of heparan sulfate proteoglycans and heparin in pathogenesis and therapy of protein-losing enteropathy. Since April 2008 he is supported by an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award. In 2009 the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, recruited him as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in-residence in the Division of Neonatology and the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, where he is developing a new research program to elucidate functions and biosynthesis of Human Milk Oligosaccharides. In 2013 Prof. Dr. Lars Bode was promoted to Associate Professor, and in 2019 he was promoted to Professor. In 2016 Prof. Dr. Lars Bode was appointed as the first Director of the Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation Mother-Milk-Infant Center of Research Excellence (LRF MoMI CoRE) and in January 2017 he was appointed as the first Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation Chair of Collaborative Human Milk Research.
Prof. Dr. Lars Bode is a member of many scientific societies including International Society for Research in Human Milk and Lactation (ISRHML), American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), Society for Glycobiology, European Nutrition Leadership Programme (ENLP), American Society for Nutrition (ASN).
To read the abstract click here.
Prof. Dr. Jude Przyborski & Prof. Dr. Franco H. Falcone (Section 2)
Prof. Dr. Felix Engel (Section 3)
Department of Experimental Renal and Cardiovascular Research, University of Erlangen
Prof. Dr. Felix Engel has been professor for Experimental Renal and Cardiovascular Research in the Department of Nephropathology at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2012. He received his Diploma in Engineering from the Technical University Berlin in 1996 and completed his doctorate on cell cycle control of mammalian cardiomyocytes in 2001 at the Max Delbrück Centrum for Molecular Medicine, Berlin. During this time he founded with colleagues the company Biomedical Consulting & Development KG (predecessor of preclinics GmbH). Subsequently, he moved to Boston Massachusetts, where he began working as a postdoctoral research fellow in heart regeneration at the Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was promoted to Associate Scientific Research and Instructor in Pediatrics. Here, he was involved in the foundation of the company Hydra Biosciences. His work in Boston was awarded in 2006 with the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, which allowed him to set up his own research group for Cardiac Development and Regeneration at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim. He habilitated in Cell and Developmental Biology at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt in 2013 and was offered a position as W3 Professor for Developmental Biology at the University of Konstanz in 2018.
Prof. Felix Engel is a member of many scientific societies including Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie (DGZ) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kardiologie and he served as Nucleus Member of the Working Group on “Cellular Biology of the Heart” of the European Cardiac Society from 2012 to 2018. In addition, he served as research associate of the Biological Medical Section of the Scientific Council of the Max Planck Society and was the coordinator and spokesperson of the Emerging Field Initiative “CYDER: Cell Cycle in Disease and Regeneration”. Currently, he is the spokesperson of the Muscle Research Center Erlangen, MURCE.
To read the abstract click here.
Dr. Maximilian Reuter (Section 4)
Imperial College London
Maximilian Reuter is a research associate at the Imperial College London, working on DNA replication in yeast funded by a 2 year research fellowship (DFG).
Dr. Reuter was born in Regensburg, Germany. He studied Human Biology at the Philipps University of Marburg. He obtained his PhD in Biochemistry/Molecular Biology in 2015 from the Gene Centre of the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich for his work on the functional characterization of the first mRNP biogenesis factor involved in RNAPIII transcription in the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He joined the DNA Replication Group in 2016 as a postdoctoral fellow to work on the MCM2-7 complex in helicase activation and DNA repair.
He is a voluntary paramedic at the German Red Cross.
To read the abstract click here.
Dr. Jean-Christophe Delpech (Section 5)
NutriNeuro Lab, UMR1286 INRAe, Bordeaux INP, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France.
Dr. Jean-Christophe Delpech is a principal investigator at NutriNeuro Lab in Bordeaux, France. His main interests are in relation to microglia, early life adversities and Alzheimer disease. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Bordeaux, he developed a very strong knowledge of the central immune system and microglia, the primary effectors of innate immune system in the brain. He was also contributing to a project looking at the beneficial effect of a long-lasting balanced omega3 diet on depressive-like symptoms linked to age, introducing him to the age-related pathologies. At the psychiatry department at Yale University, he strengthened his knowledge of microglia and early life adversity. As a postdoctoral fellow, he continued working on microglia and applied acquired knowledge to the context of brain development in a situation of stress. In addition, he conducted behavioral tests to characterize the consequences of several early life stress rodent’s models on anxiety and memory abilities at adulthood and contributed to establishing the link between cerebral hyperconnectivity, stress and anxiety-like disorders. In Dr. Ikezu’s laboratory, he worked on a project aiming at better understanding the effect of MIA on the prefrontal cortex development linked to abnormal behavioral abilities. In addition, he worked on questions related to tau propagation in Alzheimer's disease and how exosome can participate in tau spread.
Dr. Delpech is a Member of the French society for Neuroscience, a Member of the Federation of European Neuroscience (FENS), and a Member of the Society of Neuroscience (SFN).
To read the abstract click here.
PD Dr. Jennifer Schön (Section 6)
Institute of Reproductive Biology, Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN)
Among the research interests of Dr. Schön are Gameto- and Embryo-Epithelial Interactions; Innovative Cell Culture Models; and Regulation of Spermatogenesis.
Upon completion of her PhD in 2004 at the Leibniz-Institute for Zoo- und Wildlife Research in Berlin, Dr. Schön proceeded as Postdoc and Senior Scientist in 2012 at Institute of Veterinary Biochemistry at Freie Universität Berlin, having worked as a guest scientist from 2007 to 2008 at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Chile. From 2013 to 2014, she was a coordinator and a coach in BioThinking Program for Collaborative Research at Berlin-Brandenburg School for Regenerative Therapies in Berlin. After that until present she is the Head of the Reproductive Cell Biology Unit at Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf.
To read the abstract click here.
Dr. Samina Mehnaz (Section 7)
School of Life Sciences, Forman Christian College (A Chartered University), Lahore, Pakistan
Dr. Samina Mehnaz has teaching experience for over 28 years in Pakistan, North America and Europe. Her research interests include Microbial Ecology, Microbial metabolites, Bioformulations. She has served as a junior and senior level researcher for 10 years at NIBGE, Faisalabad; 8 years of Pre and Post Doctorate Fellowships in USA, Canada, Belgium and Germany. Furthermore, she has served as lecturer for 4 months at the Institute of Agriculture at the Punjab University; 3 years as Assistant Professor at the School of Biological Sciences (Punjab University); 2 years as Associate Professor at Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (Punjab University). She has been serving as a Professor since 2012 at FCC university and as Chairperson of School of Life Sciences, FCC since 2015. She also supervised research in microbial metabolites and microbial ecology of plant associated bacteria.
Dr. Samina Mehraz is an editor of Archives of Phytopathology and Plant Protection and a co-editor of Environmental Sustainability (Springer), as well as a reviewer for 58 International Journals. Dr. Samina Mehraz is a member American Society of Microbiology (ASM), a Lifetime member of Pakistan Biosafety Association (PBSA). She is also a Humboldt Ambassador Scientist, a representative of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, since 2016.
To read the abstract click here.
Dr. Jens Riedel (Section 8)
Sanofi -Aventis GmbH Frankfurt
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Prof. Dr. Feike Dijkstra (Section 9)
School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Sydney Institute of Agriculture, Sydney, Australia
Dr. Feike A. Dijkstra is an associate professor at The University of Sydney, Australia. Research in our group is focused on carbon, nutrient (mostly nitrogen and phosphorus) and water dynamics in grasslands, forests and agro-ecosystems.He is a biogeochemist with a research focus on plant-soil interactions affecting carbon and nutrient cycling, in relation to environmental change and management, including impacts of climate change. After finishing his PhD at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, in 2001, he worked in the USA for 10 years (University of Minnesota, University of California Santa Cruz, US Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service) and then moved to Australia where he has been working at The University of Sydney for the last 10 years. From 2010-2014 he was awarded with the prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, including in Nature, Ecology Letters, and Global Change Biology, with over 6000 citations. He currently is an associate chief editor for Soil Biology and Biochemistry and section editor for Plant and Soil.
To read the abstract click here.
Dr. Herbert Schiller (Section 10)
Helmholtz-Zentrum München, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt
Dr. Herbert Schiller heads the junior research group “Systems Medicine of Chronic Lung Diseases” at the Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) of Helmholtz Zentrum München and at the German Center for Lung Research (DZL). He is seeking to find out how lung tissue heals after injury and how cancer metastases develop in the lungs. His goal is to find new approaches for treatment of chronic lung diseases.
Schiller focused on cell biological aspects already as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) in Martinsried, where he worked as a postdoc with Prof. Dr. Reinhard Fässler, one of the leading experts for extracellular matrix and cell adhesion research. He did research for another three years at the MPIB in the department of Prof. Dr. Matthias Mann, one of the world’s most cited scientists and a proteomics pioneer.