KEYNOTE SPEAKERs
The following have been confirmed as Session Keynote Speakers. More Session Keynotes will be posted as they are confirmed.
Mónica Cala Molina
MetCore, Universidad de los Andes, ColombiaDr. Mónica Cala is the Head of the Metabolomics Core Facility – MetCore (https://metcore.uniandes.edu.co/) at Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia, and a founding member of the Latin American Metabolic Profiling Society – LAMPS (http://lamps-network.org/). She received her B.Sc and MSc. in Chemistry from the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia, and in 2017 she obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the Universidad de Los Andes. Between 2006 and 2011, she contributed in the research for secondary metabolites with antioxidant properties in Colombian aromatic plants using GC-MS, LC-MS, and CE-MS. Since 2012, she has applied high-resolution mass spectrometry-based non-targeted metabolomics and lipidomics in different research areas, including biomedical application in breast cancer. In 2015, she was awarded the Banco Iberoamericano, Jóvenes Profesores Investigadores 2015 grant to conduct a research stance in the Centre of Metabolomics and Bioanalysis (CEMBIO) led by Prof. Coral Barbas at CEU-San Pablo University, Spain. During her stay in Spain, she applied a multiplatform metabolomics approach to unveil metabolic alteration in cachectic patients aiming to shed light on its pathophysiology.
In 2017, she created the Metabolomics Core Facility – MetCore under the Vice presidency of Research at Uniandes; the first Metabolomics Center in Colombia. Since then, she has participated in promoting awareness of metabolomics in Latin America. At MetCore, she leads research projects applying non-targeted and targeted metabolomics in health, nutrition, and agriculture. MetCore aims to provide access to cutting-edge technology implemented in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics using GC-MS, CE-MS, and UHPLC-MS, to conduct innovative and multidisciplinary research projects and provide metabolomic services in Colombia and the Latin American region.
Young Hae Choi
Natural Products Laboratory, Leiden University, The NetherlandsYoung graduated from College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University in 1992. In 2000, he received a PhD diploma from the same university. The title of his PhD thesis is ‘Supercritical Fluid Extraction of Nitrogen-Containing Natural Products’. After two years of post-doc experience working on the application of mass spectrometry to the identification of natural products, he moved to Leiden University, the Netherlands (the present position). In the last 20 years, he developed diverse metabolomics methods of plant and microorganisms. Using the developed methods, a wide range of biological model systems were investigated for the research questions related to biology, physiology, and ecology. Some of his representative metabolomics research can be exemplified with tobacco–TMV (tobacco mosaic virus), Brassica–herbivores, Senecio– thrips, Brassica and Arabidopsis treaded with signal molecules (salicylic acid, jasmonate, and benzothiadiazole), Catharanthus–phytoplasma and some chemo-taxonomical applications for Ilex and Cannabis. And many traditional medicines were used for metabolomics. On top of the research field of metabolomics he has also focused on green technology using natural deep eutectic solvents and supercritical fluids. Based on the research career, so far, he has published more than 280 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been cited over 18,000.
Maria Fedorova
TU Dresden, Germany
Maria Fedorova studied Biochemistry at Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia and obtained her PhD at Faculty of Chemistry and Mineralogy, Leipzig University, Germany. She worked as a group leader at the Institute of Bioanalytical Chemistry, Faculty of Chemistry and Mineralogy, at the University of Leipzig. In August 2021 Maria group moved to the Center for Membrane Biochemistry and Lipid Research, TU Dresden. Her research is focused on development and implementation of lipidomics and bioinformatics solutions to address complexity and plasticity of lipid metabolism in variety of biological systems. In particular, Maria aims for a deeper understanding of pathophysiology of metabolic and inflammatory disorders, including obesity, insulin resistance, type II diabetes and cardiovascular disorders.
Facundo Fernández
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Prof. Facundo M. Fernández was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his MSc in Chemistry from the College of Exact and Natural Sciences, Buenos Aires University in 1995 and his PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the same University, in 1999. In August 2000, he joined the research group of Prof. Richard N. Zare in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. His work focused on several aspects of Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry with an emphasis on capillary-format separation methods. In 2002, he joined the group of Prof. Vicki Wysocki in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona to develop surface-induced dissociation for gas-phase peptide ion studies. In 2004 he joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he currently holds the position of Vasser-Woolley Professor in Bioanalytical Chemistry and Associate Chair for Research and Graduate Training. He is the author of over 185 peer-reviewed publications and numerous invited presentations at national and international conferences. He has received several awards, including the NSF CAREER award, the CETL/BP Teaching award, the Ron A. Hites best paper award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and the Beynon award from Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, among others. He serves on the editorial board of The Analyst and as an Associate editor for the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. His current research interests include the field of metabolomics and the development of new ionization, imaging, machine learning and ion mobility spectrometry tools for probing composition and structure in complex molecular mixtures.
Julijana Ivanisevic
Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Julijana Ivanisevic is a Metabolomics and Lipidomics group leader and Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Julijana joined UNIL in 2015 following a postdoctoral training at The Center for Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California (led by Prof. Gary Siuzdak). She received her PhD in chemical biology at the Aix-Marseille University, France, in 2011.
The focus of Metabolomics team at UNIL is to advance the knowledge on molecular mechanisms that underlie metabolic health and onset and progression of acquired cardiometabolic disorders. To this end, the team is applying high-coverage quantitative MS-based approaches to metabolic phenotyping of human populations (CoLaus, Complete Health and Heart cohort) in collaboration with clinicians and statistical geneticists. Longitudinal metabolome-wide association studies with cardiometabolic risk factors as health outcomes and gene variants as instrumental variables, are applied to provide insights into metabolite role in disease etiology.
Hiroshi Tsugawa
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan
I am an Associate Professor, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan. To date, I have worked on a field of research, computational mass spectrometry (CompMS), to deepen the understanding of complex biological system of interest (Nature Methods 2015, 2018, 2019 & Nature Biotechnology 2020). Especially, my aim is (A) to develop a data processing pipeline for complicated MS data and (B) to study mass fragmentation computationally to elucidate unknown metabolites with the proposed fragmentation theories, achieving the global identification of metabolomes including bacterial, plant, human host, microbiota, and exposome compounds.
CompMS is an omics data science that aims to elucidate the complex biological systems using the comprehensive profile of metabolome, proteome, and glycome by converting mass spectral data to chemical structures. Importantly, MS is an essential technique for various omics sciences including metabolomics, lipidomics, proteomics, glycomics, and small RNA analyses. Thus, the innovation of CompMS has a substantial impact to various life science- and medical applications. My aim from now on is to accelerate the CompMS sciences integrating various omics layers data and imaging MS, and to conduct research from basic biology to industrial application linking MS data to IoT society.
Jianguo Jeff Xia
McGill University, CanadaDr. Xia is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (bioinformatics and big data analytics) at McGill University, Quebec Canada. His research explores innovative and practical ways to address the current challenges in big data analytics arising from biomedical and environmental research, focusing on metabolomics, transcriptomics, microbiomics and multi-omics integration. His group has developed many popular tools (xialab.ca/tools.xhtml) including the MetaboAnalyst platform for comprehensive metabolomics data analysis and interpretation. To date, Dr. Xia has authored >78 journal publications and 8 book chapters. He was the recipient of the 2019 McGill Principal’s Prize for Outstanding Emerging Researchers. Since 2019, he has been ranked as Global Highly Cited Researchers (citations: >25,000, H-index: 45).
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