Speaker Profiles

John C. Achermann is a Wellcome Trust senior researcher and he is working for UCL GOS Institute of Child Health in London, United Kingdom.
Principal interest(s): Human adrenal and reproductive biology, nuclear receptors, transcriptomics
Area(s) of research: Adrenal and gonad development, somatic regulation of development, sex differences

Diana Bianchi is a adjunct investigator at the National Institutes of Health, NHGRI in Bethesda, MD, USA.
Principal interest(s): Reproductive genomics
Area(s) of research: Prenatal testing, prenatal treatment of down syndrome

Laura Cancedda is a senior researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia & Istituto Dulbecco Telethon in Genova, Italy.
Principal interest(s): Neurodevelopment and developmental disorders

Alta Charo is working for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, USA.
Principal interest(s): Bioethics and Law

Elfride De Baere is a professor at the at the Center for Medical Genetics at Ghent University and Ghent University Hospital in Ghent, Belgium.
Principal interest(s): Molecular and physiopathological basis of rare monogenic diseases, ophthalmic genetics, developmental genetics and gene regulation.
Area(s) of research: Human molecular genetics and medical genomics

Helen Firth is a consultant clinical genetics at the Cambridge University Hospitals and a hon faculty member of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Principal interest(s): Clinical genomics & Mapping the clinical genome
Area(s) of research: Paediatric genomics & data-sharing

Jan Hoeijmakers is a professor at Erasmus MC at the department of molecular genetics in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Principal interest(s): DNA damage, repair, genome instability, cancer, aging
Area(s) of research: Molecular genetic, cell biology, mouse models, human disease

Anshul Kundaje is an assistant professer in genetics and computer science at the Stanford University in Stanford, CA, USA.
Principal interest(s): Computational Genomics
Area(s) of research: Machine learning and statistical approaches for regulatory genomics

Emma Lundberg is an associate professor in Stockhol, Sweden.
Principal interest(s): Spatial single cell biology
Area(s) of research: Proteomics, spatial single cell biology and citizen science

Mats Nilsson is a professor at the Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden.
Principal interest(s): Molecular analysis technology

Wolf Reik obtained his MD from the University of Hamburg. He did his thesis work with Rudolf Jaenisch, and postdoctoral work with Azim Surani in Cambridge. He became a Fellow of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine at Cambridge and subsequently the Head of the Epigenetics Programme at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge and its Associate Director. He is honorary Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge and Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he is a founding member of the Centre for Single Cell Genomics. He is a Member of EMBO, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the Academia Europaea.

His research interests are in epigenetics, particularly in epigenetic reprogramming during mammalian development and its role in stem cell biology and inheritance. His current work addresses the mechanisms of genome-wide demethylation in the mammalian germ line, links between reprogramming and pluripotency, epigenetic regulation of cell fate decisions in early development, and the role of epigenetic mechanisms in experimental reprogramming and in ageing. His lab also develops new epigenomics technologies especially in single cells. He has published 241 research papers with an h-index of 109.

Heribert Schunkert is a professor for cardiology and the director of the cardiology department at the German Herat Centre Munich in Munich, Germany.
Principal interest(s): Coronary heart disease / myocardial infarction
Prof. Schunkert conducts research in molecular biology and genetics of multifactorial cardiovascular disease. In his initial scientific career he focused on the functional implications of tissue renin-angiotensin systems. His current major topic is to identify and functionally characterize the genetic roots of myocardial infarction.

Michael Speicher is a professor of human genetics at the Medical University of Graz in Graz, Austria.
Principal interest(s): Human Genetics
Area(s) of research: Hereditary tumor syndromes and liquid biopsies

Miikka Vikkula is a professor of human molecular genetics at the de Duve Institute in Brussels, Belgium.
Principal interest(s): Understanding the molecular mechanisms that underlie a variety of disorders of the cardiovascular and skeletal systems, as well as certain cancers. We specialize in evaluating the contribution of genetic variation to human disease and in vivo studies using genetically manipulated mice. Also interested in developing novel therapeutic approaches.
Area(s) of research: Our laboratory combines a large bio-bank of patient blood and tissue samples associated with extensive clinical data, with large-scale genotyping data generated using cutting-edge Next Generation Sequencing techniques and a state-of-the-art data analysis pipeline developed in-house. Gene-discovery is followed by the generation of cell and animal models in which disruption of the culprit gene is used to recapitulate features of the human disease. These models are then used to study the molecular and biological consequences of disease causative genetic changes, as well as to test potential therapeutic solutions. All of our research begins with samples obtained from patients, and we aim to go full circle: from bed to bench-side back to bed, providing patients with viable and tangible knowledge-based improvements in their health-care.
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Neville Sanjana is an assistant professor and in the core faculty at the New York Genome Center and NYU in New York, NY, USA.
Principal interest(s): Genome engineering, functional genomics
Area(s) of research: New York Genome Center and NYU