All members of the Metabolomics Society are welcomed and encouraged to participate in the 2022 Board of Directors election. Voting is open now through August 29, 2022, at 11:59pm USA CST. Complete details on elections can be found here.
This webpage contains a list of nominees as well as biographies and statements of interest regarding serving on the Board. Please take a moment to review this information before placing your votes.
Biography: Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Liverpool and a co-director of the Centre for Metabolomics Research. He helped to develop and establish long-term metabolomics which allows fusion of GC-MS and LC-MS data. These approaches have been used by his team and collaborators to profile health populations and investigate the frailty phenotype during the ageing process. In parallel, in order to understand metabolic flux on a single cell level for bacterial community analysis, his group are currently developing high spatial resolution photothermal infrared and Raman-based imaging methods. Roy has published a substantial number of primary papers and reviews in metabolomics and data processing as well as Raman spectroscopy (https://goo.gl/B3yWRC), and if you like such metrics he has a H-index of over 100.
Mission Statement: Roy helped establish the Metabolomics Society in 2005, chaired the Society’s conference in Manchester in 2007, was involved in the Society’s Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI) and acted as the chair for the MSI data analysis work group, a role he is currently revisiting. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Metabolomics Society for the last two years and would like to serve for a second term. With a track record in conference, committee organisation and delivering projects on time, he would be immensely honoured to serve the society. Roy believes that diversity and inclusivity are paramount in all organisations and would further embed this within the Metabolomics Society. He would support the further development of ECR training and activities, endeavour to promote metabolomics globally, as well as to encourage regional developments in this exciting field.
Biography: Matej Orešič holds a PhD in biophysics from Cornell University (1999; Ithaca, NY, USA). He is professor of medicine, with specialization in systems medicine at Örebro University (Sweden) and a group leader in systems medicine at the University of Turku (Finland). As of 2016, he became a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society. He is current member of the Board of Directors of the Metabolomics Society. He also previously served the Society in this role for two, consecutive terms (2008-2012). Prof. Orešič is one of the founders of the Nordic Metabolomics Society and its previous chair of the board. In 2019, he co-chaired the 1st Gordon Research Conference on ‘Metabolomics and Human Health’ (Ventura, CA). Previously, he also chaired the Keystone Symposium on Systems Biology of Lipid Metabolism (2015; Breckenridge, CO). Main research areas of Prof. Orešič include metabolomics applications in biomedical research and systems medicine. He is particularly interested in the identification of environmental exposures (exposome) and disease processes associated with different metabolic phenotypes and the underlying mechanisms linking these processes with the development of specific disorders or their co-morbidities. Prof. Orešič also initiated the popular MZmine open source project, leading to popular software for metabolomics data processing.
Mission Statement: With its rapid growth over the past decade, metabolomics, along with its various subfields such as lipidomics, fluxomics, and metabolic modeling, has become an essential tool in the life science and biomedical research, also playing a central role in shaping the emerging fields such as exposome, gut microbiome and systems biology research. At the community level, this growth can be observed as increasing participation in various metabolomics meetings, many new training opportunities for young scientists, the formation of many regional initiatives (some of which are already affiliated with the Metabolomics Society), as well as by increased efforts in data reproducibility and harmonized reporting. With such a rapid growth, there is risk of fragmentation of these important, nascent efforts of the community. In my role as member of the board, I will continue strengthening the efforts to realize the core mission of the Metabolomics Society, as being a global hub that supports these various initiatives and facilitates coordination between them when relevant or necessary. Specifically, this will include:
1) Stronger participation of regional metabolomics initiatives in annual meetings of the Metabolomics Society (e.g., workshops, receptions).
2) Strengthening ties with other scientific communities in subfields or related fields of metabolomics (e.g., exposome research, gut microbiome, lipidomics), including in efforts to develop good practices in the field and related dissemination.
3) Support for establishing metabolomics in high-profile scientific meetings such as at Gordon Research Conferences and Keystone Symposia.
Biography: Fabien Jourdan is a senior research scientist at INRAE (the French National Research Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research) Toulouse, France. He graduated with a PhD in computer science at the University of Montpellier (France) in 2004, working on the premises of social networks, in particular studying their topology. He then shared his time between a software startup company and a research assistant position. In 2005 he was hired by INRAE (Toulouse, France) to develop computational solutions for metabolomics studies (mainly NMR). In 2006 he spent a year as a visiting researcher at the University of Glasgow working with Pr. Barrett on metabolic profiling (HRMS) of Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite and causative agent of sleeping sickness. Fabien Jourdan has pioneered bioinformatics methods to study Genome-Scale Metabolic Networks using metabolomics (and other omics data) to predict metabolic impacts associated with genetic or environmental perturbations. His research team is currently applying these approaches to food toxicology and more broadly in studying the link between metabolism and human health (e.g. cancer). Since 2009, Fabien Jourdan has led the development of MetExplore open access web server which is used by more than 800 users worldwide and maintained and developed by a group of 10 computational biologists. Since 2021, Fabien Jourdan is director of the French National infrastructure for metabolomics and fluxomics, MetaboHub. He was president of the French-speaking Metabolomics and Fluxomics Network (RFMF) from 2015 to 2019. He was elected on the board of the metabolomics society in 2019 and is secretary since 2020. .
Mission Statement: Serving as a board member and secretary since 2019 has been an honor. In addition to board activities, I worked on improving the award process. I would like to pursue my role as secretary by increasing the visibility of the awardees (invited talks during the conference). I was involved in the communication activities like revamping the website. I reactivated the tweeter account of the society (from 500 new followers per year to 900). With the president, we worked on the affiliations of regional networks (Latin America, Poland). Promoting them is essential since they are key in disseminating metabolomics and supporting young scientists worldwide. Beyond going further in my initiatives, if elected as secretary, I would like to be part of the effort to increase diversity in our community through support of regional societies and increase open online resources. I would also like to stay active in the digital transition which allows reducing financial barriers to access cutting edge science. I would like to pursue supporting EMN by providing more visibility through communication to facilitate kicking off young scientist careers. On a scientific point of view, one of the challenges I foresee is the interpretations of metabolomics data. We need to foster connections with data mining, visualization and network science. It would be an honor to continue serving as the secretary of the society. I would like to use my two years of experience to accompany the board in the implementation of ambitious projects for current and future Metabolomics Society members.
Biography: Dr. Candice Z. Ulmer is the Chemistry Branch Chief for the Eastern Laboratory of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) in Athens, GA. In her current role, she oversees the chemical residue, food chemistry, and nutritional testing of meat, poultry, egg, and fish products for the USA. Dr. Ulmer formally served as the Acting Chief of the Clinical Reference Laboratory for Cancer, Kidney, and Bone Disease Biomarkers in the Clinical Chemistry Branch of the CDC (Atlanta, GA). Her responsibilities included the accurate measurement of chronic disease biomarkers (e.g., steroid and protein hormones) and the assessment of clinical analytical methods in patient care using novel mass spectrometric methodologies and clinical analyzer platforms. Dr. Candice Ulmer began her scientific tenure at the College of Charleston where she graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry. While at the College of Charleston, she investigated the pharmaceutical photodegradation of NSAIDs using ESI-LC-MS/MS. Dr. Ulmer graduated with a PhD in Chemistry as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow from the University of Florida (Analytical Chemistry division). She secured her NIST NRC Post-doctoral Research Associate Fellowship at a NIST satellite location in Charleston, SC and was involved with multi-omic UHPLC-HRMS method development, lipidomics interlaboratory studies, reference material development, and environmental exposure monitoring on human/marine life. Her talents and contributions as a mass spectrometrist have been recognized in podcasts and magazine features such as The Analytical Scientist’s 2021 Top 100 Power List, “Mass Spec at the Analytical–Clinical Interface” in the March 2020 article highlight for The Analytical Scientist, and “Faces of Mass Spectrometry” in the June 2018 issue of JASMS. For the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS), Dr. Ulmer serves on the Board of Directors in the Member at Large (MAL) for Membership role as well as chair of the Diversity & Inclusion committee and co-chair of the clinical chemistry interest group. In addition, she assumes appointed/elected memberships in eleven committees for other scientific organizations that include the International Metabolomics Society, the Metabolomics Quality Assurance and Quality Control Consortium, Metabolomics of North America, the CLSI Expert Panel on Clinical Chemistry and Toxicology, and the American Chemical Society.
Mission Statement: If elected Treasurer, I will strive to maintain accurate and timely records of the following as an USA delegate for the MetSoc BOD: society transactions/monthly expenses, BOD member information, invoices, existing/expiring contracts, and all other reports. I will work with the current Society President and past-Treasurers to file the e-annual report with the State of Massachusetts as well as income taxes with the IRS. Lastly, I will work to issue reimbursements and reconcile expenses by any predetermined deadlines.