Plenary SPEAKERs

The organizers of Metabolomics 2022 are please to announce the following confirmed plenary speakers.


Asaph Aharoni
Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Asaph Aharoni earned his MSc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his PhD degree from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He performed his postdoctoral studies at the Plant Research International institute in Wageningen. He was from the first to apply DNA microarrays for large-scale gene expression analysis as well as pioneering the field of Metabolomics for comprehensive profiling and non-targeted metabolite analysis. His research interests’ center on uncovering the molecular mechanisms underlying the production of plant specialized/secondary metabolites and the role of these molecules in plant interactions with other organisms. His lab combines cutting-edge metabolomics with molecular genetics, biochemistry and computational biology to study specialized metabolism in plant development and stress. Moreover, the Aharoni team engages routinely with complex metabolic engineering projects and generating innovative, applications uses of plant natural products. Asaph has been the recipient of a number of awards, among them, the European Research Council (ERC) grant for both ‘starting’ (2007) and ‘advanced’ (2019) independent investigators, the ASPB Enid MacRobbie Corresponding Membership award and the Andre Deloro prize for a scientist doing particularly exceptional work in his or her field awarded by the Weizmann institute. Five start-up companies providing a myriad of solutions for the ag- and food industries emerged from his lab work in the past several years. 



Coral Barbas
Universidad San Pablo CEU, Spain

PROF.CORAL BARBAS is currently Full Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Pharmacy Faculty, Universidad San Pablo CEU, Madrid (Spain) and Director for the “Centre for Metabolomics and Bioanalysis” (CEMBIO). She is also Director for CEU International School of Doctorate (CEINDO); Visiting Professor at Imperial College London. She is the author of more than 300 papers, with current research interests in all the steps of multiplatform metabolomics (GC-MS, LC-MS, LC-IM-MS and CE-MS) in all kind of biological samples. 

Her awards include Angel Herrera Research and Teaching Award, the medal of Bialystok Medical University and the award of the Belgian Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences (BSPS 2018). She has received a Honoris causa doctorate in Bialystok Medical University. She is in the “world’s top 2% scientists list” of Stanford University.

Member of different boards of international Committees, President of the Madrid section of the Spanish Chemical Society, Vice-president of the Spanish Metabolomics Society and Editor for Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis until December 2021.



Ron Heeren
M4i, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Prof. Dr. Ron M.A. Heeren obtained a PhD degree in technical physics in 1992 at the University of Amsterdam on plasma-surface interactions. He was the research group leader at FOM-AMOLF for macromolecular ion physics and biomolecular imaging mass spectrometry in the period 1995-2015. In 2001 he was appointed professor at the chemistry faculty of Utrecht University lecturing on the physical aspects of biomolecular mass spectrometry. In 2014 he was appointed as distinguished professor and Limburg Chair at Maastricht University. He is scientific director of M4I, the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging institute on the Brightlands Maastricht Health campus. There, he heads the division of imaging MS. Currently he serves as the chair of the NWO research community “advanced methods, instrumentation and data analysis” for the life sciences. He was awarded the prestigious 2019 Physics Valorization prize by the Dutch organization for scientific Research, NWO and the 2020 Thomson medal of the international mass spectrometry foundation. In 2021 he was elected as a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, KNAW. His academic research interests are mass spectrometry based personalized medicine, translational molecular imaging and “omics” research, high-throughput bioinformatics and the development and validation of new mass spectrometry based molecular imaging techniques for the life sciences. He is actively involved in the development of molecular imaging education, instrumentation engineering and the improvement of the Dutch national large scale research infrastructure.



Nicola Zamboni
UTH Zurich, Switzerland

Prof. Nicola Zamboni obtained a PhD at the Institute of Biotechnology of ETH Zurich in 2003 with a dissertation on metabolic engineering. He then joined the Stanford Genome Technology Center as a postdoctoral fellow where he adopted CE-MS methods for the investigation of cancer metabolism. In 2005 he moved to the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology of ETH Zurich as an independent investigator. The research activities in his group pivoted on developing experimental and computational methods tailored to the study of metabolism and its regulation in cells and animals. Such methods include 13C-metabolic flux analysis, high-throughput metabolomics, approaches for multi-omics data integration, and techniques for compound identification by mass spectrometry. In 2018, he was appointed Adjunct Professor. In 2021, he won the Golden Owl of ETH for excellence in teaching. Since 2020, the Zamboni lab hosted the Clinical Metabolomics and Lipidomics Analysis Center (CMAC) of the ETH initiative on Personalized Health and Related Technologies (www.sfa-phrt.ch). As a technology and service provider, the Zamboni lab collaborates tightly with pharma and biotech, dozens of clinical groups, and mass spectrometry vendors.



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