Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz
Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. She has pioneered the use of green fluorescent protein technology for quantitative analysis and modelling of intracellular protein traffic and organelle dynamics in live cells and embryos. Her innovative techniques to label, image, quantify and model specific live cell protein populations and
track their fate have provided vital tools used throughout the research community. Her own findings using these techniques have reshaped thinking about the biogenesis,
function, targeting, and maintenance of various subcellular organelles and macromolecular complexes and their crosstalk with regulators of the cell cycle, metabolism, aging, and cell fate determination. She is an elected member of the
National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Arts and Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization. She is also a Fellow of The Biophysical Society, The Royal Microscopical Society and the American Society of Cell Biology. Her awards include the E.B. Wilson Medal of the American Society of Cell Biology, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Van Deenen Medal, the Keith Porter Award of the American Society of Cell Biology, the Feodor Lynen Medal, and the Feulgen Prize of the Society of Histochemistry. She co-authored of the textbook “Cell Biology” with Tom Pollard and Bill Earnshaw and was President of the American Society of Cell Biology. Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz attended Swarthmore College, received her MS from Stanford University, and obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1986.
Doreen Cantrell
Doreen studied Zoology at The University College of Wales in Aberystwyth and then did a PhD in Cellular Immunology at the University of Nottingham. She had a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire to work with Kendall Smith on the control of T cell growth and proliferation by the cytokine Interleukin 2. A second postdoctoral fellowship with Michael Crumpton at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories (ICRF) in London launched her interest in biochemistry/signal transduction and provided the impetus for the establishment of the Lymphocyte Activation Laboratory within the ICRF. After 15 years as a Principal Investigator in ICRF, the award of a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship in 2002 provided the mechanism to move Doreen’s group to the University of Dundee, a world leading Centre for Life Sciences research. Doreen continues to work on the molecular mechanisms that control the function of T lymphocytes, key cells of the adaptive immune response. Outside the laboratory- three daughters, 5 grandchildren, 1 dog and cycling keep Doreen busy.
Ramanujan Hegde
Ramanujan Hegde earned his MD and PhD from UCSF in 1999, completing his thesis work in the laboratory of Vishwanath Lingappa. He then started his own laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health, rising to the position of Senior Investigator. In 2011, Hegde moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he is currently a Programme Leader and Head of the Cell Biology Division. Research in the Hegde lab is focused on understanding the molecular basis of intracellular protein organization. His current interests include the mechanisms underlying membrane protein biogenesis and the quality control of multi-subunit protein complexes. Hegde’s work has been recognized by several honours, including his election as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and Fellow of the Royal Society.
Olivier Duss
Olivier Duss studied Chemistry at the ETH Zurich. After traveling for 6 months, teaching Chemistry at a high school and doing a research stay with Kurt Wüthrich, he did a PhD in the group of Fred Allain at the ETH Zurich developing integrative structural biology approaches (combining NMR with electron paramagnetic resonance) for structure determination of dynamic protein-RNA complexes and investigating how bacterial non-coding RNAs regulate translation initiation (Duss, …, Alain, Nature, 2014). In 2014, he moved to California to do a joint-postdoc in the labs of Jamie Williamson at Scripps Research and Jody Puglisi at Stanford University where he developed single-molecule fluorescence microscopy approaches to study co-transcriptional ribosome assembly (Duss, …, Puglisi, Williamson, Cell, 2019). Since the end of 2020, he is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where he studies how RNA folds and how protein-RNA complexes assemble in context using a combination of single-molecule techniques, structural biology and biochemistry.
Elvan Böke
Elvan studied Molecular Biology & Genetics for her undergraduate degree in METU (ODTU) in her native Turkey. She was the valedictorian of her graduating class of 2008. Elvan then performed her PhD in Cancer Research UK – Manchester Institute (CRUK-MI) where she worked with Iain Hagan using yeast as a model system to understand aspects of mitotic exit (Grallert, Boke et al. 2015, Nature). Next, she moved to Boston, USA to work with Professor Tim Mitchison (Harvard Medical School) for her postdoctoral studies on the organisation of the cytoplasm in oocytes, female germ cells that become eggs (Boke et al., Cell, 2016). In 2017, Elvan started her own lab in CRG, Barcelona. Elvan’s lab studies strategies and mechanisms through which oocytes evade ageing for decades, and why these strategies eventually fail with advanced maternal age. Elvan is an EMBO Young Investigator (2021), and received two consecutive ERC Grants (Starting in 2017 and Consolidator in 2022).
Ulrike Kutay
Ulrike Kutay studied Biochemistry in Berlin. Following her PhD on membrane integration of tail-anchored proteins (in the Rapoport lab in Berlin and in Boston), Ulrike joined the Görlich lab in Heidelberg where she investigated nucleocytoplasmic transport of proteins and RNA as a post-doc. She identified and characterized various RanGTP-controlled exportins which helped to reveal the principles that govern the directionality of nuclear transport. In 1999, Ulrike became Assistant Professor at the ETH in Zurich in 1999, where her lab initially characterized various nuclear transport pathways, such as the export of miRNAs and ribosomal subunits. After tenure in 2006, Ulrike started to explore new research areas. Work of her team helped to unravel the mechanisms of nuclear envelope breakdown for open mitosis, membrane protein targeting to inner nuclear membrane, biogenesis and organization LINC complexes and the assembly of ribosomal subunits in human cells.
Francesca Ester Morreale
Dr Francesca Ester Morreale is a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute (London, UK) studying proteolytic complexes of different pathogenic bacteria to enable the discovery of new antibiotics by targeted protein degradation. Ester obtained her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2014 from the University of Messina (Italy). She later joined Prof. Helen Walden’s research group at the MRC PPU (Dundee, UK) for a first postdoc, co-supervised by Prof. Alessio Ciulli. In 2017 she moved to Vienna (Austria), starting a second postdoc in Dr Tim Clausen’s group at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP). In 2023, Ester joined the Francis Crick Institute as a Group Leader.
Gilles Laurent
Gilles Laurent was born in 1960 in Casablanca, Morocco. He obtained a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from the National School of Veterinary Medicine (Toulouse, France) and a Ph.D. in Neuroethology from the Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France), both in 1986. He went on to become a Postdoctoral Fellow and Locke Research Fellow of the Royal Society at the University of Cambridge, UK, from 1985 to 1990. In 1990, he was appointed to Caltech’s Division of Biology and Computation and Neural Systems Program as Assistant (1990-1995), Associate (1996-2000) and Full Professor (2000-2002), and Lawrence Hanson Professor (2002-2011). In 2009, he moved to Frankfurt, Germany, together with Erin Schuman, where they became founding directors of a new Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
Annette Oxenius
Annette Oxenius received her university degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Zurich in 1993 and in 1997 she completed her PhD in immunology at the Institute of Experimental Immunology at ETH Zurich. After a postdoc at the University of Oxford, UK, she was elected assistant professor for immunology at the Institute of Microbiology of the ETH in 2002, was promoted to associate professor in 2007 and to full professor in 2012. Her research focuses on the regulation of immune responses in the context of acute and persistent viral infections in experimental mouse models.
Peter Rosenthal
Peter Rosenthal is Principal Group Leader at The Francis Crick Institute and leads the Structural Biology of Cells and Viruses Laboratory. Peter studied physics at Harvard College and then obtained a PhD in the Harvard biophysics programme working on X-ray crystallography of influenza virus surface glycoproteins with Don Wiley. He moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge to work with Richard Henderson on structure determination by single particle electron cryomicroscopy. He became a Programme Leader in the Division of Physical Biochemistry at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, London and his laboratory joined the Crick Institute in 2015.His research applies cryo-EM from the molecular to the cellular scale with a major focus on lipid-enveloped viruses.
David Haselbach
David Haselbach studied biochemistry, molecular biology and physics at the universities of Potsdam and Göttingen. After his Master’s Thesis in single-molecule biophysics at TU Munich, he became fascinated by electron microscopy. Thus, he joined the lab of Holger Stark at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen where he developed tools for cryo-EM sample preparation, solved several structures. During a short postdoc in the same lab, he focused on analysing conformational dynamics and applied new workflows on the proteasome and the spliceosome. In 2017, he joined the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna to work on the ubiquitin-proteasome system, first as a Fellow for electron microscopy, and since 2020 as a group leader. His lab combines structural biology and biophysical methods with genetics and cell biology.