Board of Directors

Responsibilities Of The Elected Directors

The Society is led and operated through the voluntary efforts of the member-elected Board of Directors. Directors serve for two years when elected, and may stand for a second 2-year term if they desire. While this provides motivated individuals a fantastic opportunity to contribute to the activities, communications and ultimately growth of our metabolomics community, it requires a certain level of dedication and commitment on the part of each Director. Directors often face a time commitment of typically 2 hours per week, but sometimes this can be much larger for special activities such as helping organize the annual meeting or chairing a Committee (each Director is expected to serve on at least two committees or task groups, and in many cases to Chair such a group). In addition there are the bimonthly Board Meetings.

Board Member Benefits

The Society is led by a Board of Directors who volunteer their time to ensure the fulfilment of its mission. Directors are not paid, but their work is recognised by a small number of benefits listed here. Each Director is entitled to:

  • Free annual membership of the Society
  • Free registration at the Society’s annual conference
  • Free attendance at the annual dinner for Directors

Directors are eligible to receive all the usual benefits applicable to normal members of the Society. Directors are not entitled to any other benefits, such as free hotel or travel costs to the annual conference or any other meeting (unless through other mechanisms, e.g. as an invited plenary speaker). Depending on the conference budget, a free or discounted room at the conference may be provided to the President, in order to facilitate Society meetings.

Roy Goodacre

Roy Goodacre

University of Liverpool
UK
Email
  • Society President – Board of Directors
  • Chair – Data Analysis Task Group

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.

Trained as a microbiologist in Bristol, UK, he has a fascination with the microbial world.  Thus, 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 which can be used to generate chemical images of microbial cells.  Please see the wiki for more details.

Roy has published a substantial number of primary papers and reviews in metabolomics and data processing as well as Raman Spectroscopy, and if you like such metrics he has a H-index of over 100.

Outside of metabolomics, Roy is a proud Welshman and avid rugby supporter.  He is fascinated by the lunar landscape of Lanzarote and visits with the family as often as he can, where he loves to walk and visit the many charms that this volcanic island has to offer.

Fabien Jourdan

Fabien Jourdan

INRAE – French National Institute for Agricultural Research
France
Email

  • Society Secretary – Board of Directors
  • Chair – Nominations & Elections Committee

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 has been secretary since 2020.

Candice Ulmer

Candice Ulmer Holland

USDA Food Safety & Inspection Service
USA
Email

  • Society Treasurer – Board of Directors

Dr. Candice Ulmer, a native of South Carolina, graduated from the College of Charleston in 2012 with a B. S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry. While at the College of Charleston, Candice investigated the pharmaceutical photodegradation of NSAIDs using ESI-LC-MS/MS under the direction of Dr. Wendy Cory. Dr. Ulmer graduated (May 2016) with a PhD in Chemistry as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow from the University of Florida in Dr. Richard Yost’s research group. For her doctoral work, she applied UHPLC-HRMS techniques to profile the metabolome/lipidome of human cells and tissues to better understand the disease etiology of Type 1 Diabetes and melanoma skin cancer.

Dr. Ulmer’s research comprised experience with various modes of ionization (e.g., MALDI, ESI, APCI, DESI, FlowProbe, and DART). She also incorporated novel stable isotope labeling methodologies such as Isotopic Ratio Outlier Analysis (IROA) to aid in the identification of metabolites as compound identification is still considered a bottleneck in metabolomics studies.

In addition to her duties as a graduate student, she was an active researcher with the NIH-funded Southeast Center for Integrated Metabolomics (SECIM). Dr. Ulmer was a member of the Florida mass spec discussion group and the ASMS diversity committee in an effort to increase diversity at conferences and ASMS supported events.

Dr. Candice Ulmer was a NIST NRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate (June 2016 – August 2017) and was involved with multi-omic UHPLC-HRMS method development, the first lipidomics interlaboratory study, and experiments that monitored the effects of environmental exposures on human/marine life.

Dr. Ulmer was a Clinical Chemist Battelle contractor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA (National Center for Environmental Health, Division of Laboratory Sciences, Clinical Chemistry Branch). Her responsibilities included the accurate measurement of chronic disease biomarkers and the assessment of clinical analytical methods in patient care.

Silvia Radenkovic

Silvia Radenkovic

University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht
the Netherlands
Email

  • Chair – EMN Committee

After earning her PhD at the Metabolomics Expertise Center, KU Leuven Faculty of Medicine, Leuven, Belgium, and Mayo Clinic (visiting), Silvia completed her research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic Department of Clinical Genomics. She was also a part of the undiagnosed disease network (UDN) Mayo Clinic metabolomics core, whose focus was to help find diagnoses for undiagnosed patients using metabolomics. Currently, she is pursuing medical training in laboratory clinical genetics at University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht, the Netherlands. Silvia’s research focuses on inborn errors of metabolism, like congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG). Specifically, she is interested in the metabolic rewiring in CDGs focusing on the heart and brain. She holds expertise in laboratory clinical genetics, different omics techniques such as tracer metabolomics, and different disease models (e.g., patient fibroblasts, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), iPSC-derived brain organoids, iPSC-derived Cardiomyocytes, zebrafish). Finally, she is passionate about research, mentoring, teaching, and scientific communication and she is part of several initiatives for early career researchers including the EMN Metabolomics Society, Biochemical Society and Females in Mass-Spectrometry.

Natasa Giallourou

Natasa Giallourou

Metabolon
Cyprus
Email

  • Chair – Conference Committee
  • Co-Chair – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Group
  • Advisor – EMN Committee

Natasa Giallourou, PhD, holds the position of Field Metabolomics Specialist at Metabolon, USA. In her role, she provides scientific support for metabolomics applications in the BioPharma sector. 

Prior to joining Metabolon, Natasa served as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at biobank.cy. Her research projects involved integrating metabolomic data with other omics data in population- based studies, with a focus on identifying biomarkers for complex diseases. She also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Imperial College London, where she specialized in utilizing metabolic phenotyping to address global health challenges, particularly in the field of public health nutrition. In 2017, she obtained her PhD in Nutritional Metabolomics from the University of Reading. She holds an MSc in Nutrition and Health from Wageningen University and a BSc in Biology from the University of Leeds.

Natasa leads the Conference Committee and co-chairs the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Group of the Society. She has previously served as the Chair of the Early-career Members Network Committee which she now is an advisor to.

Kati Hanhineva

Kati Hanhineva

University of Turku
Finland
Email

Kati Hanhineva is professor in food development with special focus on Nordic foods and health effects at the University of Turku, Department of Life Technologies, Food Chemistry and Food Development unit since beginning of 2020. She also holds Research Director position at the School of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Eastern Finland, and is affiliated as visiting scientist (Marie Curie MoRE2020 Fellow) at the Division of Food and Nutrition Science, Department of Biology and Biological Engineering at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Hanhineva has completed PhD in biotechnology at the University of Kuopio 2008. During years 2008-2014 she conducted post-doctoral research at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition, at the University of Eastern Finland with several research visits to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Since 2014 she has been the principal investigator in food and nutritional metabolomics research group and led and participated in several national and EU-funded research projects including Academy of Finland Researcher Fellowship 2014-2019. Prof Hanhineva is also the founder and Chairperson of the start-up company Afekta Technologies focusing on developing and providing metabolic profiling analytics for industry and academia, especially within food and nutrition related applications.

María Eugenia Monge

María Eugenia Monge

CIBION – CONICET
Argentina
Email

  • Vice-chair – Lipidomics Task Group

Dr. María Eugenia Monge is an Independent Researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and works at the Centro de Investigaciones en Bionanociencias (CIBION). In 2006, she obtained her Ph.D. in analytical and physical chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. Between 2007 and 2014, she held postdoctoral positions in Italy, France, and the USA. In 2014, she was recruited by CONICET to set up a new laboratory in a new research center in Argentina.

She leads the Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Group and the Mass Spectrometry facility of CIBION. Her research group develops MS-based analytical methods using metabolomics and lipidomics approaches with applications in health and the environment. Her group’s initial efforts focused on clear cell renal cell carcinoma biomarker discovery and the understanding of disease physiopathology. As well, her team has contributed with pipelines for preprocessing LC-MS data for quality control procedures in untargeted metabolomics workflows. With the workflows and procedures developed in her group, she expanded into several metabolomics collaborations with numerous colleagues from Argentina and from abroad. She is co-author of >50 peer-reviewed publications.

Since 2014, she has coordinated metabolomics courses for South American students, and has participated in strengthening the Latin American scientific community through teaching in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina. Since 2021, she is a founding member of the Latin American Metabolic Profiling Society (LAMPS), and she has contributed to engage LAMPS as an international affiliate of the Metabolomics Society.

Since 2019, she has been a member of the Metabolomics Society, where she serves on the Membership Committee; and she is a member of the metabolomics quality assurance and quality control consortium (mQACC). She also served as guest editor for the journal Metabolites, and she is an editorial board member of GigaByte.

In 2022, she was awarded the Metabolomics Society Medal.

Tomáš Pluskal

Tomáš Pluskal

Czech Academy of Sciences
Czech Republic
Email

I am a Junior Group Leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. My laboratory develops new computational and experimental approaches for connecting plant natural products to their biosynthetic enzymes, and for engineering novel biosynthetic circuits using synthetic biology tools. Presently I am supervising 4 Ph.D. students and 4 postdocs with both computational and experimental expertise. I myself have an interdisciplinary background in computer science (MSc) and molecular biotechnology (Ph.D.). I first started working in metabolomics in 2006 during my PhD in Japan, where I developed the complete workflows for LC-MS analyses of fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe). At the same time, I started developing the MZmine software for mass spectrometry data processing, which has become one of my signature projects. During my postdoc at the Whitehead Institute (MIT) in the U.S., I studied the biosynthesis of psychoactive molecules in the kava plant (Piper methysticum). I am fascinated by the complex chemistry and molecular interactions that we can observe in nature, and in my own lab I am trying to apply diverse approaches to address this complexity.

Stacey Reinke

Stacey Reinke

Edith Cowan University
Australia
Email

  • Chair – Education & Training Committee

Stacey Reinke is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Statistics and Computational Biology at Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia). She completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Alberta (Canada) in 2011. Her early research investigated mitochondrial dysfunction in model systems, which expanded to investigating energy metabolism dysregulation in inflammatory diseases in her first postdoctoral position. During this time, Stacey worked closely with David Broadhurst which fostered her interest in design of experiments, statistics, and data science.

Upon receiving a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Fellowship in 2014, Stacey relocated to the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) where she worked under the mentorship of Craig Wheelock. Here, she played a key role in developing large-scale clinical metabolomics workflows for as part of the EU-wide UBIOPRED asthma project. In 2016, Stacey was recruited to Perth (Australia) as part of a state-led initiative to enhance clinical metabolomics capacity in Western Australia.

Stacey’s applied research primarily focusses on using metabolomics to investigate the underlying mechanisms of respiratory diseases. As a teaching-research scholar and biochemist turned computational biologist, Stacey is also passionate about improving data literacy for biologists. This is reflected in her methodological papers and her involvement in the Society’s Education & Training Committee.

Fidele Tugizimana

Fidele Tugizimana

University of Johannesburg
& Omnia Group Ltd
South Africa
Email

  • Chair – Society Strategy Task Group
  • Chair – Membership Committee

Originally from Rwanda (and currently living in South Africa, SA), Fidele Tugizimana holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry (University of Johannesburg, SA), After the completion of a B.Phil. degree in Philosophy (Urbaniana University, Rome), Fidele Tugizimana enrolled in a B.Sc. Biochemistry-Chemistry degree at the University of Johannesburg; and completed a M.Sc. degree in Biochemistry in 2012. He has received different non-degree purpose training in Advanced Mathematics (UNISA) and in Metabolic modelling, Pathway and Flux analyses (Wageningen University, Netherlands).

Currently, Dr. Fidele Tugizimana is a specialist scientist in the International R&D Management of the Omnia Group Ltd. SA, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Johannesburg, a scientific consultant in the L.E.A.F. Pharmaceuticals LLC (USA & Rwanda). He applies metabolomics approaches in interrogating cellular biochemistry at global level, specifically in plant-environment interactions, plant biostimulants and in the natural products research. His research interests include metabolomics, host-pathogen interactions, immune response (at molecular level). Furthermore, He is involved in driving the implementation of tools and workflows developed and used in extracting information from metabolomics data, exploring 4IR technologies in metabolomics, the use of machine learning and integrated novel computational frameworks (e.g. GNPS) in mining and interpreting metabolomics spectral data.

Dr. Fidele Tugizimana was involved in setting up the metabolomics group at the University of Johannesburg. He is involved in metabolomics training in SA, and had been involved in the establishment of the Metabolomics South Africa (MSA), an affiliate to the Metabolomics Society since June 2018, and he is currently the president of MSA. Dr. Tugizimana is an author/co-author of several metabolomics papers in leading peer-reviewed international scientific journals; and he serves as a guest editor and a reviewer for scientific journals such as Metabolomics, Frontiers in Plant Science, Metabolites, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.

Lynn Vanhaecke

Lynn Vanhaecke

Ghent University
Belgium
Email

Lynn Vanhaecke is a Professor at the Laboratory of Integrative Metabolomics (LIMET) at Ghent University, Belgium since 2011 with a 20% appointment at the Institute of Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, UK since 2018. She holds a Ph.D. in Bioscience Engineering (2008) on gut microbial food metabolism. 

Her team has specific expertise in optimizing and validating high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS)-based metabolomics and lipidomics methods with a focus on gastrointestinal matrices (saliva, stool, in vitro digests) and uses the latter to explore metabolic pathways of food- and gut microbiome-related diseases ranging from food allergies to obesity and its comorbidities. She is also particularly interested in the application of ambient ionization-based HRMS (specifically REIMS) for biofluid and food metabolomics and invented the MetaSamp® biofluid sampler in this context. 

Lynn’s lab has pioneered the field of DNA adductomics in the EU by developing a high-end analytical UHPLC-HRMS platform for untargeted DNA adduct measurements. In recent years, her lab has also gained an interest in the computational part of the metabolomics workflow with dedicated bioinformaticians on staff. Lynn is coordinator of the core facility on small molecule analysis (MSsmall) at Ghent University and a board member of the Nutrigenomics Society (NuGO). 

She was involved in the Horizon 2020 JPI-HDHL Foodball project and two EIT Food projects on food metabolomics and is now a core partner of the first Flemish Exposome project (Flexigut). LIMET’s metabolomics workflows have been sublicensed to Prodigest under the brand name MetaKey® for commercial application.

Michael Witting

Michael Witting

Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen
Germany
Email

  • Chair – Publications Committee

Dr. Michael Witting studied Applied Chemistry with a functional direction into Biochemistry at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg and obtained his PhD in 2013 from the Technical University of Munich. Since 2021 he is heading the metabolomics part of the Metabolomics and Proteomics Core of Helmholtz Munich. In 2018 he was named on the Top 40 under 40 Power List of The Anaytical Scientist. He is an active member of the Metabolomics Quality Assurance and Quality Control Consortium (mQACC), the International Lipidomics Society and the Metabolomics Society, where he served as member on the Board of Directors from 2020 to 2022.

Warwick Dunn

Warwick “Rick” Dunn

University of Liverpool
UK
Email

  • Chair – Website & Communication Committee
  • Co-Chair – Metabolite Identification Task Group

Professor Warwick “Rick” Dunn holds a chair in Analytical and Clinical Metabolomics at the University of Liverpool. He obtained a lectureship in 2011 at the University of Manchester and moved to a lectureship at the University of Birmingham in 2013. He obtained a BSc(Hons) in Chemistry with Analytical Chemistry from the University of Hull and a PhD from the same university focussed on developing interfaces to allow online monitoring of chemical process plants using mass spectrometry in association with BP Chemicals. He leads the Analytical and Clinical Metabolomics Group at the University of Liverpool. His research is focused on two areas (1) the development of new analytical tools and methods to enhance data quality, efficiency of metabolite annotation, coverage of detectable metabolites and sample collection strategies and (2) the application of untargeted and targeted metabolomics to the study of metabolism across the life course in humans including pre-birth, ageing, endocrinology, inflammatory and immune diseases and cancers with a focus on precision medicine. He was one of the founding coordinators of the metabolomics quality assurance and quality control consortium (www.mqacc.org). He was a board member of the society from 2010 to 2015 and now from 2022 to 2024. He sits on the Website and Communications committee, conference committee and education and training committee of the Metabolomics Society.  His career goals are to make metabolomics a standard resource applied in biological research and to train the next generation of metabolomics researchers.

Jessica Lasky-Su

Jessica Lasky-Su

Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Harvard Medical School
USA
Email

  • Former Society President
  • Chair – Metabolomic Epidemiology Task Group

Dr. Lasky-Su is an Associate Professor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. She earned her doctoral degree in Genetic Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health and has spent the last 20 years focusing on the identification of genetic, genomic, and metabolomic determinants for complex diseases. The accumulation of these efforts has resulted in over 150 peer-reviewed original research manuscripts.

Dr. Lasky-Su’s more recent work has focused on analytic and network approaches to integrate metabolomics and other omics data types with the end goal of making strides towards precision medicine. She is currently the principal investigator and co-investigator on many grants focused on the integration of metabolomics and other omics data types for several diseases including asthma, allergies, preeclampsia, macular degeneration, cancer, and several other complex diseases.

Dr. Lasky-Su currently serves in leadership capacities in a variety of consortiums, including acting as the chairman of the Consortium of METabolomic Studies (COMETS) and a scientific advisor to the “Metabolomics Workbench.” Through these efforts, she has worked to facilitate the utilization of metabolomics in large population-based cohorts.

Her long-term goals are to continue to promote metabolomics research among the epidemiological community through the establishment of solid statistical approaches, the harmonization of data, and the integration of metabolomics or other omics data.

Daniel Bearden

Dan Bearden

NIST
USA
Email

Dan Bearden is a Research Chemist for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), at the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML) in Charleston, South Carolina. Dan earned a PhD in Physics from Rice University (Houston, Texas) and he conducted postdoctoral research in structural biology at the Australian National University, Research School of Chemistry. He was on the faculty of the Chemistry Department of Clemson University for nearly 4 years before taking up his current position. Currently, he is the NIST Senior NMR Scientist at HML. His current research involves metabolomics for marine environmental research and quantitative NMR. Metabolomics is proving to be a powerful tool for the environmental community, linking biological response to organismal stressors with novel approaches.

Darren Creek

Darren Creek

Monash University
Australia
Email

Dr Darren Creek is a NHMRC CJ Martin Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne. Darren completed his PhD in pharmaceutics at Monash University in 2008, which involved applications of LCMS and spectroscopic methods to support the discovery of novel antimalarials, arterolane and OZ439. He then conducted post-doctoral research on clinical pharmacology of malaria with the University of California San Francisco and Makerere University in Uganda, and returned to Australia to investigate drug metabolism at the Centre for Drug Candidate Optimisation. On being awarded the NHMRC CJ Martin fellowship, Darren moved to Glasgow University, UK, where he played a major role in the implementation of the Scottish Metabolomics Facility. 

Darren has developed numerous analytical and bioinformatic methods to optimise outcomes from LCMS and GCMS based untargeted metabolomics studies, and his major contributions to the metabolomics field include: retention time prediction for metabolite identification, untargeted stable-isotope labelling for pathway discovery, and the user-friendly, open-source software for identification and evaluation of metabolomics data, IDEOM. His research has demonstrated the power of metabolomics for the unbiased discovery of novel enzymes, pathways and mechanisms of drug action, and he continues to develop metabolomics techniques, and apply metabolomics to parasitology, microbiology and pharmacology. Darren has over 30 peer-reviewed publications and maintains collaborations across all 6 continents that apply metabolomics to address important issues in biomedical research.

Justin Van Der Hooft

Justin Van Der Hooft

Wageningen University & Research
The Netherlands
Email

Wageningen University & Research (WUR) (The Netherlands)

After his BSc and MSc in ‘Molecular Sciences’ in Wageningen, The Netherlands, Justin also did his PhD in Systematic Metabolite Identification and Annotation at the WUR. His PhD resulted in papers in metabolomics-oriented peer-reviewed scientific journals like Analytical Chemistry and Metabolomics. Justin also presented his work at international meetings such as the Metablomics2010 meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the International Conference on Polyphenol and Health, 2011, Sitges, Spain, and the Metabomeetings in 2012, Manchester; and in 2014, London, UK.

Most importantly, he gained skills and hands-on experience in different aspects of the metabolomics pipeline: the use of mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (for metabolite annotation and identification) and data analysis of comprehensive data sets. In addition, Justin gained knowledge in plant polyphenol production and analysis and the human metabolism of ingested polyphenols. After his PhD, he held positions as a junior researcher at Plant Research International (NL), and as research associate in Glasgow (UK) at the group of Prof. Alan Crozier where he investigated the fate of (-)-epicatechin in human and rat using radioactivity monitoring, mass spectrometry, and NMR based approaches.

He then moved to Glasgow Polyomics to work with Dr Karl Burgess and Prof. Mike Barrett and different partners from Glasgow Polyomics. Justin obtained an ISSF Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to work on method development and implementation of fragmentation approaches to enhance the metabolite annotation capacities of the high-resolution LC-MS systems focusing on small polar metabolites in urine, beer, and bacterial extracts. The fellowship resulted in three first-author papers, of which one describes the implementation of Molecular Networking to perform drug and drug metabolite screening in urine extracts.

In collaboration with Dr Simon Rogers (Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK), Justin published a PNAS paper where topic modelling – often used in text-mining – is used for unsupervised substructure exploration in metabolomics data sets using a newly developed software tool MS2LDA. Justin has been working on metabolomics projects thereby exploiting the information-rich fragmentation data that modern mass spectrometers generate and alleviate the bottleneck of metabolite annotation and identification in untargeted metabolomics approaches. He now moved to the WUR to take up a shared Postdoc position between WUR and the group of Prof. Pieter Dorrestein at the UCSD, USA. The work will be focusing on how to combine workflows developed for genome and metabolome mining to aid in functional annotations of genes and structural annotations of metabolites.

Justin has been an active member of the Metabolomics Society for several years. He was part of the founding Early-Careers Members Network (EMN) committee and chaired the committee in the lead-up to Metabolomics2016 in Dublin. Recently, Justin joined the Board of Directors. He is part of the Strategy Task Group and the Metabolite Identification Task Group – something which is close to his heart.

Links:
LinkedIn 
Google Citations
MS2LDA tool
MAGMa tool
WUR-Bioinformatics
Pieter Dorrestein group at UCSD
Glasgow Polyomics

Tim Ebbels

Tim Ebbels

Imperial College London
UK
Email

Tim Ebbels obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge and in 1998 moved into bioinformatics via postdoctoral work at Imperial College in the metabolic profiling group of Prof Jeremy Nicholson. He was a key post-doctoral member of the Consortium for Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET), a large academic-industry collaboration which developed expert systems for predicting adverse effects in pre-clinical toxicity studies via metabolic profiling. 

In 2003 he joined Prof David Jones’ group at University College London to work on modelling and visualisation of transcriptomic data. In 2005 he returned to a faculty position at Imperial, within one of the world’s largest metabolomics departments. His group focuses on the application of bioinformatic, machine learning and chemometric techniques to post-genomic data, with a particular emphasis on metabolic profiles. He is involved in projects ranging from ecotoxicology, through molecular epidemiology, to the development of in vitro omics platforms to predict carcinogenicity. Much work focuses on detailed modelling of the analytical technologies used to obtain metabolic profiles, but his group is also addressing problems of data integration, visualisation and time series analysis.

Jules Griffin

Jules Griffin

The Rowett Institute &
University of Aberdeen
UK
Email

  • Chair – International Affiliations Task Group

Dr. Griffin studied chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went on to do postgraduate research in biochemistry, gaining his DPhil from Oxford in 1999 after studying in the laboratory of Professor George Radda.

Following this he held Postdoctoral posts as a Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Fellow in Radiology, as a research associate at Imperial College London and, later, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (UK). He was formally appointed as a University Lecturer (the US equivalent to an associate professor) at Cambridge University in 2007.

Dr. Griffin’s group uses a range of analytical techniques including NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (they have access to a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer, a Thermo LTQ ion trap, a Waters QTOF Ultima, a Waters Quattro Premiere triple quadrupole LCMS and two GC-MS), to follow metabolism in the brain to look at a range of disease processes. The majority of his work has centered on mouse models of disease including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses.

More recently, Dr. Griffin’s group has been using a combination of animal models (mouse, rat and C.elegans) to understand the metabolic consequences of “metabolic syndrome” including type II diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease and dyslipidaemia. His studies have attempted to cross-correlate metabolomic data with proteomics and transcriptomics to create a “systems biology” description of the consequences of pathology and genetic modulation related to the metabolic syndrome.

Oliver Jones

Oliver Jones

RMIT University
Austalia
Email

I am a senior lecturer in analytical chemistry at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. I obtained my PhD from Imperial College London in 2005, and was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge until 2009. I then worked as a lecturer at the University of Durham before moving to RMIT in 2012. I am currently president of the Australian and New Zealand Metabolomics Network – the first international affiliate of the metabolomics society (for which I write a newsletter sent weekly to almost 300 people). I am a member of the Metabolomics Society Data Standards task group as well as co-president of Proteomics and Metabolomics Victoria, secretary and board member of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance, a CI at the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science and a member the Australian Academy of Science, National Committee for Chemistry. I am also a deputy director of the RMIT Centre for Environmental Sustainability and Remediation. I have been an invited speaker at several conferences and have helped organise many others (I am a member of the organising committee of the 2017 Metabolomics Conference). Aside from metabolomics my group conducts research in analytical methods and technologies, particularly in multidimensional chromatography and NMR. I have 63 publications with a total of over 2700 citations and an h-index of 21.

Christophe Junot

Christophe Junot

CEA
France
Email

C. Junot is a doctor of Pharmacy. After having gained a PhD in Analytical Chemistry in 2000 (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris), he joined GlaxoSmithKline laboratories and developed experience in the field of pharmacokinetics and metabolism applied to drug discovery for 2 years. Since 2002, he works at the Life Science Division of CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) where he develops mass spectrometry based analytical methodologies for metabolome analysis in the fields of medicine and microbiology. C. Junot has been appointed as head of the Laboratory for Drug Metabolism Studies since September 2010. He is the deputy coordinator of the French MetaboHUB infrastructure for metabolomics and fluxomics and also in charge of the coordination of analytical chemistry developments in this infrastructure.

Marine Letertre

Marine Letertre

CEISAM Institute, University of Nantes
France
Email

During my PhD at Imperial College London (UK), I used 1H NMR spectroscopy, untargeted and targeted UPLC-MS based metabolic profiling to characterise the bidirectional interaction between drugs and the host microbiome, a key aspect to consider in pharmacological and toxicological studies. In 2020, I acted as a facilitator of the Corsaire metabolomics core facility of Biogenouest (France). My responsibilities were to coordinate the research teams within the network, improve their visibility, organize trainings and the annual scientific day, and support their management and the continuous improvement of their quality system. Since the beginning of 2021, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the CEISAM Research Institute, at the University of Nantes (France). My research aim to assess the complementarity between innovative NMR and MS methods as a new analytical strategy to move towards toxicological studies.

Steffen Neumann

Steffen Neumann

IPB Halle
Germany
Email

Steffen Neumann studied computer science and bioinformatics at Bielefeld University, and now his group focuses on the development of tools and databases for metabolomics and computational mass spectrometry. The group develops algorithms for data processing of metabolite profiling experiments, which are available in several Open Source Bioconductor packages, and addresses the identification of unknowns in mass spectrometry data. The IPB is member of the MassBank consortium and operated the first MassBank server in Europe. The MetFrag and MetFusion tools allow the identification of compounds where no reference spectra are available.

Sastia Putri

Sastia Putri

Osaka University, Japan
Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia
Email

Sastia Prama Putri is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University. She received her PhD from International Center for Biotechnology, Osaka University in which she worked on the discovery of novel bioactive compounds from natural products and gained in depth techniques in analytical and organic chemistry as well as biochemistry. Her awards include “Metabolomics Australia Poster Prize” in the 9th Annual Conference of the Metabolomics Society, Glasgow, UK”, a fellowship from UNESCO and scholarships from the Japanese Government. She is currently working on “JST-NSF: Metabolomics for low carbon society” project, focusing on application of metabolomics technology for optimization of various higher alcohols for use as biofuels. She has recently written two review articles on current metabolomics: technological advances and practical applications and is currently working as an editor for a book entitled “Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics: A Practical Guide” with CRC Press, Taylor and Francis.

Since she joined a metabolomics laboratory in 2011, she has been actively promoting metabolomics to scientific communities in her home country, Indonesia. One of her endeavors resulted in the establishment of a research collaboration with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute. This collaboration resulted in a paper on authentication of world’s most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak that recently gained worldwide attention and is featured including NPR USA, Science Magazine, BBC UK, RSC’s Chemistry World, USA Today, Nikkei Business Daily Japan, etc. During her PhD study, she served as the student representative for the Society of Invertebrate Pathology. She is now a part of the Metabolomics Society Strategy Task Group and is appointed as the first chair of the newly established Early Career Member Scientist Member Network (EMN) of the Metabolomics Society.

Charmion Cruickshank-Quinn

Charmion Cruickshank-Quinn

Agilent Technologies
USA
Email

Charmion Cruickshank-Quinn is from the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. She is an enthusiastic scientist whose background is in lung disease research, omics integration, and biomarker discovery, using LCMS-based metabolomics.

She received her BS in Chemistry from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany and her PhD in Chemistry from SUNY Buffalo. As part of her doctoral project, she performed method development for profiling biological samples to determine markers of oxidative stress and autism.

Charmion then pursued a Postdoctoral fellowship at National Jewish Health followed by a position as Instructor at the University of Colorado Denver|Anschutz working in the laboratory of Dr. Nichole Reisdorph. She performed targeted and untargeted liquid chromatography mass spectrometry-based metabolomics for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease projects. She also worked towards understanding the biological effects of cigarette smoking on a healthy metabolome using an emphysema mouse model, and determining parallels between mouse and human data for translation studies. Her other contribution to metabolomics involves taking a systems biology approach by integrating functional genomics and metabolomics data. Charmion recently accepted a position with Agilent Technologies as an Applications Scientist where she consults with clients nationwide on their LCMS-based projects.

Charmion has been active in the Metabolomics Society for the past two years where she was a member of the EMN Committee from 2016-2017, and currently serves as Chair for 2017-2018.

Nichole Reisdorph

Nichole Reisdorph

University of Colorado
USA
Email

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus. My research applies mass spectrometry to projects that are of therapeutic relevance to human diseases. While my lab’s main research focuses on systems approaches to understanding lung disease, our numerous collaborative efforts span from microbiome and toxicology research to exercise physiology and diabetes. Our laboratory and core facility have robust platforms in metabolomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics; these are applied to a very broad expanse of fields and interests.

In addition to my metabolomics background, I have extensive organizational and fiscal experience that I’ve previously used to serve the mass spectrometry community. This includes co-founding and serving as Treasurer for the Colorado Biological Mass Spectrometry Society (www.CBMSS.org). During my tenure, I was responsible for establishing the CBMSS as a non-profit organization, writing by-laws, setting up and managing money accounts, and providing financial statements to the Board and federal agencies. My fiscal experience includes managing a large core facility comprised of 18 scientists and students, co-organizing the 2010 United Stated Human Proteome Organization (US HuPO) meeting, and leading an internationally recognized Metabolomics and Proteomics training program.

Ute Roessner

Ute Roessner

Metabolomics Australia
University of Melbourne
Australia
Email

Dr. Roessner has obtained her PhD in Plant Biochemistry at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Germany, where she developed novel GC-MS based methods to analyse metabolites in plants. With the combination of small molecule analytics and sophisticated bioinformatics and statistics the field of metabolomics was born and is today an important tool in biological sciences, systems biology and biomarker discovery. In 2003 she moved to Australia where she established a GC-MS and LC-MS based metabolomics platform as part of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics. Since 2007 Dr. Roessner has been involved in the setup of Metabolomics Australia, an Australian Federal Government investment (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy 5.1 Evolving Biomolecular Platforms) through Bioplatforms Australia Ltd and now leads the MA node at the School of Botany, The University of Melbourne, Australia.

I consider myself as one of the pioneers of Metabolomics technology developments especially in the plant research / agricultural fields. My particular research interests always have been to use Metabolomics as a tool to better understand plant physiology and improve crop quality. However, due to leading a national Metabolomics service centre I also promote and apply Metabolomics in other research areas such as biomedical, microbial, foods and environmental. I have expressed interest to join the board of the Metabolomics society for a few years for multiple reasons. Most importantly to represent the Australian / New Zealand and Asian currently loosely connected as Australasian Metabolomics Network of which I function as the President. Secondly I believe my experiences in metabolomics applications as well as in a service setting can be of benefit for the society in contributing a different view. I am very enthusiastic to be involved in the society’s growth and promotion and decision making. The organisation of the last annual society meeting has hopefully proven my engagement and courage towards the society’s best in future.

Lloyd Sumner

Lloyd W. Sumner

MU Metabolomics Center
USA
Email

  • Co-Chair – Metabolite Identification Task Group

Dr. Sumner acquired his B.Sc. degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics in 1989 from Cameron University in Lawton, OK, USA and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry focused on mass spectrometry in 1993 from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK, USA. He then joined Texas A&M University, College Station TX, where he was the Director of the Mass Spectrometry Applications Laboratory and where he later served as the cofounder and Associate Director of the TAMU Laboratory for Biological Mass Spectrometry with Prof. David H Russell. He joined The Noble Foundation in 1999 and rose to the rank of Professor within the Plant Biology Division. Dr. Sumner relocated to the University of Missouri, Columbia in January 2016 as a Professor in the Biochemistry Department and Director of the new University of Missouri Metabolomics Center. 

Dr. Sumner’s research is focused on the development, integration and application of large-scale biochemical profiling of plant metabolites, proteins, and transcripts (metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics) for the discovery and characterization of the molecular and biochemical components related to plant natural products/specialized metabolites biosynthesis. He also applies these integrated omics technologies for greater insight into the physiological and biochemical consequences of gene expression and system responses to genetic and environmental perturbations. In the process, he has published approximately 135 peer reviewed articles and book chapters; many with leading national and international collaborators. 

Dr. Sumner’s research is or has been supported by the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, NSF 2010, NSF Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, NSF Major Research Instrumentation program, NSF-JST joint Metabolomics for a Low Carbon Society, NSF Integrative Organismal Systems, and The Oklahoma Commission for the Advancement of Science and Technology. 

Dr. Sumner is currently a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science; President of the Phytochemical Society of North America (2014-2017), former Treasurer (2010-2012) and President (2008-2010) of the Metabolomics Society; 2013 Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society; Co-founding Member of the International Advisory Committee for Plant Metabolomics; Principal investigator of a new Plant, Algae, and Microbial Metabolomics Research Coordination Network (PAMM-NET), and a 2007 Distinguished Alumni of Cameron University. Dr. Sumner has served as a Managing Editor for Plant Physiology, Front Pages Co-Editor and Editorial Board member for the journal Metabolomics, Associate Editor of Frontiers in Plant Metabolism and Chemical Diversity, and review Editor for several plant and metabolomics related Frontiers journals.

Reza Salek

Reza Salek

International Agency for Research on Cancer, WHO
France
  • Chair – Data Standards Task Group

I got my PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from University College London, UK. I started working in the field of metabolomics in University of Cambridge, overtime moving from lab experimental settings towards data analysis and data handling. In the past, I have worked as scientific investigator at the Medical Research Council, Cambridge UK. In 2012, I joined EMBL-EBI and currently work as the Scientific Coordinator. At EMBL-EBI we host the MetaboLights, the first general purpose repository for metabolomics data. For me, open access data sharing is of paramount importance to the metabolomics community growth, enabling us to move a step closer to the result reproducibility, a key objective for any scientific field. Here metabolomics standards can play a vital role having the opportunity to manage and coordinate a large EU infrastructure project on metabolomics data standards, COSMOS (Coordination of Standards in Metabolomics), it has re-ignited standards effort within community leaders, in a more bottom-up approach. Such efforts combined with data sharing in MetaboLights, I believe would benefit the community substantially.

Professionally, I’m member of the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre, Cambridge Neuroscience and Cambridge Cancer Centre. I’m the main organizer of the “EMBO Practical Course on Metabolomics Bioinformatics for Life Scientists 2012
 – 2016″ giving me the opportunity to work with group of talented and excellent instructors/tutors in metabolomics that share the same passion for metabolomics data handling. I’m also associate Editor for Frontiers Metabolomics Journal.

My role as the chair of data standards task group would be to work with leaders in this area, both from metabolomics and proteomics communities as well as industry, to establish and promote community wide agreed standards, in a more practical approach rather that just statements, focusing on data standards formats first.

Working together with Jan Stanstrup, we hope to merge and revitalise the metabolomics forum, and bring society activities to public domain discussions, for better engagement with society members and general metabolomics community. Please join us and share your thoughts and expertise with us.

Horst Joachim Schirra

Horst Joachim Schirra

University of Queensland
Australia
Email

Dr Schirra is one of the leaders of NMR-based metabolomics in Australia. He studied Chemistry at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland). In 1999, he joined the University of Queensland, where he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Australian Research Council and a prestigious Queensland Smart State Fellowship. In 2009, Dr Schirra became an independent Lecturer in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences at UQ, and in 2012 he joined UQ’s Centre for Advanced Imaging, where he leads a multidisciplinary research program in Metabolic Systems Biology and administers the newly established UQ Facility for NMR-based Metabolomics. 

Dr Schirra uses NMR-based metabolomics to investigate the basic principles of metabolic regulation and the role they play in fundamental biological processes, environmental change, and in the development of disease, especially obesity and cancer. His research aims to integrate metabolomics with other –omics methods and genome-scale metabolic simulations. Dr Schirra is Board Member of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance (ANZMAG) and committee member of the Australian and New Zealand Metabolomics Network (ANZMN). He has been a member of the Metabolomics Society since 2008 and was Co-chair of the 13th International Conference of the Metabolomics Society in Brisbane 2017. He is editorial board member of the journals Metabolites, and International Scholarly Research Notices, and regional editor of Current Metabolomics.

Susan Sumner

Susan J. Sumner

RTI International
USA
Email

Hello. I am Susan Sumner and I direct the NIH Common Fund (C-F) Eastern Regional Comprehensive Metabolomics Research Center (RCMRC) at RTI International (a non-profit basic research institute located in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA). The RTI RCMRC is part of the NIH C-F Metabolomics Consortium that established Metabolomics Workbench, and worked together to establish standards for data deposition and reporting. I also work within the NIH C-F program to develop and implement programs for training early career and seasoned scientists who want to include metabolomics in their research. As the PI of the RTI RCMRC, I lead a team of 25 researchers who conduct targeted and broad spectrum metabolomics analysis of cells, tissues, and biological fluids using NMR and chromatography coupled mass spectrometry. My team works with basic, applied, and clinical researchers to identify biomarkers for the early detection and diagnosis of disease, to monitor treatments, and to provide insights into biological mechanisms. In addition to directing the metabolomics core at RTI, I also direct an analytical core for the NCATS-funded North Carolina Translational Sciences Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the metabolomics core for the NIEHS-funded Center for Human Health and Environment at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and the NIEHS-funded Untargeted Analysis Resource Core for the Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) Program at RTI. I serve on the editorial boards for Metabolomics, the Journal of Applied Toxicology, the Journal of Toxicology, and as an Associate Editor for Environmental Health Perspectives. I am an adjunct professor in the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, and the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Craig Wheelock

Craig Wheelock

Karolinska Institute
Sweden
Email

Craig E. Wheelock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, where he serves as director of the Integrative Molecular Phenotyping Laboratory (www.metabolomics.se). He is also a visiting professor at the Gunma Institute for Advanced Research (GIAR), Japan, where he leads the Karolinska International Open Laboratory in metabolomics. Following post-doctoral work on lipid mediators at the University of California Davis, he conducted additional post-doctoral studies at the KEGG laboratory in Kyoto University, Japan. In 2006, he was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to relocate to the Karolinska Institute, where he founded the Integrative Molecular Phenotyping Laboratory. 

Research in his group focuses on elucidating mechanisms in respiratory disease, with an emphasis on the relationship between childhood environmental exposure and disease onset. In recent years, efforts in his group has moved into the challenges of data analysis and the laboratory has worked extensively on applying multivariate modeling to integrate and investigate ‘omics-based data structures. He is a member of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Science Event Working Group and a consultant on the NIEHS funded Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) project at Mount Sinai, New York. When not balancing his time between Sweden and Japan, he enjoys teaching his kids to kayak and play nicely with others.

Krista Zanetti

National Cancer Institute (NIC), NIH
USA
Email

Krista Zanetti is a Program Officer in the Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program (EGRP), Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Zanetti earned her Ph.D. in Nutrition from Cornell University in 2003 and joined the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program at the NCI. During the first year of her fellowship, she earned an M.P.H. at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Zanetti then conducted primary research in the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis in the NCI’s Center for Cancer Research from 2004 to 2010.

Since joining EGRP in 2010, Dr. Zanetti’s primary focus has been building infrastructure and capacity to support metabolomics in population-based studies. In 2014, she spearheaded collaborative efforts to establish the trans-NIH international Consortium of Metabolomics Studies (COMETS), which brings together 57 prospective cohorts from the North America, South America, Europe and Asia. COMETS allows investigators from across multiple disease phenotypes to:

  1. Leverage existing resources and data
  2. Work collectively to develop methods, tools and protocols for data harmonization and sharing, quality control and data standardization.

More recently, Dr. Zanetti collaboratively organized a meeting in 2017 that led to the establishment of the metabolomics Quality Assurance and quality Control Consortium (mQACC). mQACC’s mission is to engage the metabolomics community to communicate and promote the development, dissemination and harmonization of best QA/QC practices in untargeted metabolomics.

David Broadhurst

David Broadhurst

Edith Cowan University
Australia
  • Co-Chair – Data Analysis Task Group

Professor David Broadhurst, born Chester UK, holds a first class honours degree in Electronic Engineering, an MSc in Medical Informatics, and a PhD on the subject of ‘‘Application of Artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Algorithms to Metabolic Profiling’’. He has been an active member of the metabolomics community for the last 18 years, where he is a recognized expert in design of experiments, signal processing, biostatistics, and machine learning. 

David worked for an extended period as a post-doctoral research fellow developing large-scale clinical metabolomics protocols alongside Dr. Warrick Dunn, at the University of Manchester as part of Professor Douglas Kell’s Bioanalytical Sciences Group. In 2009 he moved to Cork University Maternity Hospital, Ireland, to investigate pre-symptomatic metabolite biomarkers predictive of major pregnancy diseases. In 2011 David was appointed Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he was scientific lead for a range of basic/clinical metabolomics projects, and continued his pregnancy related research. 

More recently he has expanded his research portfolio to a diverse range of post-genomic translational/precision medicine projects. In March 2016 he was appointed to his current position as Professor at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. In addition to many collaborative Systems Biology projects. His current research primarily focuses the application and optimization of diverse multivariate modelling techniques (parametric & non-parametric linear models, decision trees, machine learning, Structural Equation Modelling, Multilevel random-effects models, etc.) within the domain of systems-biology. 

Additionally, he has research interests in data visualization, design of experiments, and developing quality assurance procedures for ‘omic based studies. David travels extensively around the globe lecturing on the perils of poor experimental design and importance of robust and diverse statistical analysis.

Nik Rattray

Nicholas Rattray

University of Manchester
UK
Email

Dr Nik Rattray is a bioanalytical chemist working within the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), part of the University of Manchester. At present, he is an Experimental Officer in the new BBSRC SYNBIOCHEM centre where he serves as metabolomics lead. His current interests lie in applying mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to a design-build-test synthetic biology environment. This approach allows metabolomics to inform and influence the metabolic engineering of various microbial/mould based scaffolds with the ultimate goal of discovery and upscale of new valuable speciality chemicals.

Born in Dumfries UK, Nik earned his 1st Class undergraduate Masters (with Honours) in Medicinal Chemistry from Manchester Metropolitan University and subsequently gained his PhD from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Manchester in the area of Biophysics and Molecular Diagnostics. He subsequently moved to the MIB, worked as a mass spectrometry technician (breathomics) and subsequently as a post-doc (clinical and microbial metabolomics) under Professor Roy Goodacre, starting his journey into metabolomics based research.

Since gaining his PhD and working at the MIB, Nik has published over 25 peer review publications has contributed to over 40 conference proceedings and is co-investigator in grants totalling over £700,000. He is acting secretary within the University of Manchester Mass Spectrometry Steering Committee, serves as a technical director and trustee within the RORO registered charity (recycling scientific equipment and creating research opportunities in the developing world), is leading on the establishment of a UK-wide synthetic biology mass spectrometry users forum and currently acts as a Project Area Liaison within the ERA-net FAIRDOM data-management community 

His current research direction concentrates on advancing mass spectrometry based metabolomics into the automation of synthetic biology whilst at the same time developing methods to integrate ion-mobility and imaging mass spectrometry into more general metabolomics applications.

Nik now acts on the Conference and Training Committee within the Metabolomics Society and as the second chair of the Early Career Members Network (EMN).

Masanori Arita

Masanori Arita

National Institute of Genetics
RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science
Japan
Email

With Ph. D. in information science, MA started his career as a termed researcher at Electrotechnical Laboratory (Tsukuba, Japan). Soon he moved to Computational Biology Research Center of AIST (Japan) as its starting member in 2001, and was later appointed as Associate Professor of Computational Biology Department, The University of Tokyo in 2003. Around this time he started to work on plant metabolomics with Prof. Kazuki Saito and joined RIKEN in 2007. Currently he is Professor at National Institute of Genetics (Mishima, Japan) and Team Leader at Center for Sustainable Resource Science, RIKEN.

Robert Mistrik

Robert Mistrik

Hichem
Slovakia
Email

Robert Mistrik (46), HighChem, Slovakia, has a masters degree in chemistry from the Slovak Technical University, Bratislava, Slovakia and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Austria. He held a postdoctoral position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA. He is the creator of Mass Frontier, a software for processing and interpreting mass spectral data in which the spectral tree concept was introduced. He is the author of precursor ion fingerprinting method that allows identification of metabolites based on substructural identities of tandem mass spectra. In 2009, he was awarded the Head of the Year prize, a national award for exceptional achievements in science and technology. Dr. Mistrik has been a member of the scientific steering committee of the METAcancer consortium, aiming to identify small molecule biomarkers in breast cancer tissue. Currently, he is leading the m/z Cloud initiative that is a collaborative effort to build a comprehensive spectral trees library for identification of metabolic components utilizing molecular evolutionary patterns.

Mark Viant

Mark Viant

University of Birmingham
UK
Email
  • Co-Chair – Model Organism Metabolomes

Mark R. Viant is a Professor of Metabolomics in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. He also serves as the Director of the Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) Environmental Metabolomics Facility at Birmingham. Prof. Viant received his BSc in Chemistry and PhD in Chemical Physics at the University of Southampton, UK. Following postdoctoral research in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, he shifted his research interests into environmental toxicology, conducting further postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Davis. 

In 2003 he was awarded a NERC Advanced Fellowship and relocated to the University of Birmingham, where his research team now focuses on the development and application of both NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry in environmental metabolomics, specifically as tools for chemical risk assessment and environmental monitoring. His primary research interests include the molecular characterisation and understanding of stress responses in aquatic organisms, in particular to environmental pollution. In addition his team develops novel analytical and bioinformatic approaches for metabolomics. He has authored over 90 publications, including pioneering applications of metabolomics to environmental health issues in aquatic organisms.

Oliver Fiehn

Oliver Fiehn

UC Davis
USA
Email

Dr. Fiehn obtained his MSc in Analytical Sciences in 1993 from the Free University Berlin and then received his PhD in 1997 at the Technical University of Berlin in Analytical Chemistry. From 1998-1999 Dr. Feihn started out as an associate research scientist in metabolomics at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam. He later became a group leader from 2000-2004. Dr. Feihn joined the faculty at the University of California at Davis in 2004 as an associate professor with the department of Molecular & Cellular Biology at UC Davis. He is also a member of the Metabolomics Society and the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.

Gary Siuzdak

Gary Siuzdak

The Scripps Research Institute
USA
Email

Gary Siuzdak is Professor of Chemistry, Molecular and Computational Biology and Director of the Center for Metabolomics at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.  He has also served as Vice President of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and guest faculty at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research has focused on developing mass spectrometry-based metabolomic technologies including nanostructure-based imaging, XCMS and METLIN informatic tools, and their application to understanding the fundamental biochemistry of cancer, stem cells and chronic pain.  He has two books, “Mass Spectrometry for Biotechnology” and the “The Expanding Role of Mass Spectrometry in Biotechnology”.  My interest in serving the Metabolomics Society is to further help this rapidly growing and exciting area of science.

Christoph Steinbeck

Christoph Steinbeck

Friedrich-Schiller-University
Germany
Email

Christoph Steinbeck was born in Neuwied in 1966. He studied chemistry at the University of Bonn, where he received his diploma and doctoral degree at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, working on methods for computer assisted structure elucidation. In 1996, he joined the group of Prof. Clemens Richert at Tufts University in Boston, MA, USA, where he worked in the area of biomolecular NMR on the 3D structure elucidation of peptide-nucleic acid conjugates. In 1997 Christoph Steinbeck became head of the Structural Chemo- and Bioinformatics Workgroup at the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute of Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. In 2002 he moved to Cologne University Bioinformatics Center (CUBIC) as head of the Research Group for Molecular Informatics. In 2003 Christoph Steinbeck received his Habilitation in Organic Chemistry from Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. From 2008 to 2016, he was Head of Cheminformatics and Metabolism at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. During this time, his group developed open chemistry databases for the biosciences, such as ChEBI, the dictionary and ontology of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, and the MetaboLights database, a repository and reference database for Metabolomics.

Today, Christoph Steinbeck is Professor for Analytical Chemistry, Cheminformatics and Chemometrics at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. The Steinbeck group’s research is dedicated to computational metabolomics and natural products research, the elucidation of metabolomes by means of computer-assisted structure elucidation and other prediction methods and algorithm development in cheminformatics. The group further helps developing a number of the leading open source software packages in Chemo- and Bioinformatics, including the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK), which was co-founded by Christoph Steinbeck

Christoph Steinbeck is also leading the European e-infrastructure project PhenoMeNal on large scale computing with human metabolic phenotyping data.

Over the course of his career, Christoph Steinbeck was founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cheminformatics, a director of the Metabolomics Society, chairman of the Computers-Information-Chemistry (CIC) division of the German Chemical Society, and established the German Conference on Cheminformatics. Christoph is a lifetime member of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC), a member of the Metabolomics Society, the German Chemical Society, as well as of various editorial boards and committees.

Donald G Robertson

Donald G. Robertson

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
USA

Dr. Robertson received a BA in biology from The King’s College (NY) as well as a Master’s degree in Environmental Health Sciences and a Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Michigan. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology, serves on several editorial boards and is an ad hoc reviewer for numerous toxicology-oriented journals. His pharmaceutical career began at Parke-Davis which was later acquired by Pfizer where he had various roles in the Drug Safety Evaluation organization over the past 20 years.  His involvement in metabolomic technology began over 12 years ago eventually leading to his full time appointment as co-leader of the Metabolomics Evaluation Group at Pfizer. With the closure of Pfizer’s Ann Arbor facility, Don took the opportunity to relocate to Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, NJ where he is a Research Fellow in Discovery Toxicology and co-leader of the Applied and Investigative Metabolomics Group. Don’s expertise in metabolomic technology has led to various appointments to both industrial and regulatory groups interested in utilizing and understanding this emerging technology. He was a charter-member of the COMET I and II metabolomics consortia and served as the chair of the biology committee within the Metabolomics Standardization Initiative. He has published and presented extensively on the topics of metabolomics and drug-induced toxicity and was senior editor of the volume entitled “Metabonomics in Toxicity Assessment”.

Kazuki Saito

Kazuki Saito

RIKEN PSC
Chiba University
Japan
Email

Website 1
Website 2

Kazuki Saito obtained his Ph. D from the University of Tokyo in 1982. After staying in Keio University in Japan and Ghent University in Belgium (Prof. Marc Van Montagu’s laboratory) as a post-doc, in 1995 he has been appointed as a full professor at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chiba University, until now. He now holds the post of Deputy Director of RIKEN Plant Science Center, where he is also Group Director of the Metabolomic Function Research Group.

Kazuki is one of the pioneers in the field of plant metabolomics, featuring with the efforts on functional genomics by integration with transcriptomics. For his distinguished research, in 2010 he was awarded The Prize for Science and Technology (Research Category) by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. Kazuki’s current research aims to understand the mechanism and regulation of plant metabolism through the genomics and post-genomics approaches and subsequently to apply the obtained knowledge to synthetic biology.

Robert Hall

Robert Hall

Plant Research International
Netherlands
Email

Professor Dr. Robert D Hall gained a PhD in plant biotechnology and enzymology (Edinburgh, 1984) and has subsequently completed 30 years research experience, including 20 years project / group management experience. He moved to The Netherlands in 1987 where he currently works at Wageningen Plant Research as Deputy Business Unit Manager Bioscience. He also holds a Special Professorship in plant metabolomics at Wageningen University. He was previously Director of the Netherlands Centre of Biosystems Genomics, a Public Private partnership in plant science and was coordinator of the EU-METAPHOR project. He is co-founder of the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre and currently serves on the Supervisory Board. He (co)organised the first ever international metabolomics conference in Wageningen in 2002 and the international Metabolomics Society conference in Amsterdam in 2010. He was on the Board of the international Metabolomics Society from 2008-2014 and was the elected President (2010-2012). He was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship of the Society in 2015. He is scientific advisor / member of a number of (inter)national research committees coordinating research strategy and funding both in Europe and N. America. His primary research activities are now centred on functional genomics and developing metabolomics technologies for application in plants for both science and industry. He is on the Editorial Boards of Frontiers in Metabolomics, Molecular Biotechnology and the journal Metabolomics. He has completed nearly 200 publications of which 75% are in peer-reviewed journals and he has edited 3 books including 2 on Plant metabolomics.

Web Page

Josh Rabinowiz

Josh Rabinowiz

Princeton University
USA

Bio coming soon!

Marta Cascante

Marta Cascante

University of Barcelona
Spain

Marta Cascante is Full Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University of Barcelona and leader of the Integrative Systems Biology, Metabolomics and Cancer team. She has authored over 250 publications. She is partner of European translational research projects (H2020) in the field of systems medicine and metabolomics and member of the editorial advisory boards of Metabolomics and BMC systems Biology. She has been distinguished in 2015 with Icrea Academia Prize and with the Narcis Monturiol Medal of the Catalan Government for her scientific merits.

Research interests are focused on cancer and metabolic diseases with the goal of elucidating the networks and pathways that are fundamental in their development and progression. More specifically, the Integrative Systems Biology, Metabolomics and Cancer team’s mission is to devise new therapeutic strategies to forestall therapeutic resistance in cancer through integrative approaches that afford a rational identification of molecular targets, with emphasis on metabolic regulators, for effective synergistic combinations with chemotherapeutics with demonstrated efficacy and/or natural products. To tackle our mission, our team assembles high-level expertise in comprehensive metabolic analysis, bio-computational approaches, generation of cellular and pre-clinical animal models, functional genomics and drug discovery. We have generated proof-of-principle evidences that resulted in publications and a patent application of the effectiveness of this approach. We intend to generalize our approaches to inhibitors currently in use as first-in-line or emerging therapies, by unveiling and targeting the corresponding adaptive metabolic responses in order to overcome therapeutic resistance in cancer. Furthermore, in the framework of H2020 project “PheNoMenal “, coordinated by EBI, her team has been contributing to develop and deploy an e-infrastructure that makes it feasible for healthcare researchers to process analyze and mine molecular phenotyping data, to facilitate large-scale data analysis in the coming age of Precision Medicine.

Matej Oresic

Matej Orešič

Örebro University
Sweden

Email

  • Secretary – Lipidomics Task Group

Prof. Matej Orešič holds a PhD in biophysics from Cornell University (NY, USA). He is a group leader in systems medicine at the University of Turku, visiting associate professor at the Örebro University, and guest professor in lipids and nutrition at the Oil Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Prof. Orešič is one of the initiators of the Nordic Metabolomics Society and currently its chair of the board. As of 2016, he is a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society.

His main research areas are metabolomics applications in biomedical research and systems medicine. He is particularly interested in the identification of disease vulnerabilities associated with different metabolic phenotypes and the underlying mechanisms linking these vulnerabilities with the development of specific disorders or their co-morbidities, with main focus on type 1 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Prof. Orešič also initiated the popular MZmine open source project, leading to popular software for metabolomics data processing.

Thomas Hankemeier

Thomas Hankemeier

Leiden University
Netherlands

Bio coming soon!

Rima Kaddurah-Daouk

Rima Kaddurah-Daouk

Duke University Medical Center USA
  • Chair – Precision Medicine & Pharmacometabolomics Task Group

Bio coming soon!

Bruce Kristal

Bruce Kristal

Brigham and Women’s Hospital
USA

Bio coming soon!

Masaru Tomita

Masaru Tomita

Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University
Japan

Bio coming soon!

David Wishart

David S Wishart

University of Alberta, TMIC (The Metabolomics Innovation Centre)
Canada

Professor, Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science, University of Alberta
Director, The Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC)

Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He also holds adjunct appointments with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He has been with the University of Alberta since 1995.

Dr. Wishart’s research interests are very wide ranging, covering nanotechnology, molecular biology, analytical chemistry, metabolomics and bioinformatics. For the past 12 years, Dr. Wishart has led the “Human Metabolome Project” (HMP), a multi-university, multi-investigator project that is cataloguing all of the known metabolites in human tissues and biofluids. Using advanced methods in NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, multi-dimensional chromatography and machine learning Dr. Wishart and his colleagues have identified or found evidence for more than 110,000 metabolites in the human body. This information has been archived on a freely accessible web-resource called the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). More recently, Dr. Wishart’s efforts have focused on using metabolomics to develop rapid diagnostic tests for cancer, colitis and kidney disease. This is part of an ongoing effort to integrate metabolomics into precision medicine.

Over the course of his career Dr. Wishart has published more than 400 research papers in high profile journals on a wide variety of subject areas. He currently directs The Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC), Canada’s national metabolomics laboratory.

George Harrigan

George Harrigan

Monsanto
USA

Bio coming soon!

Julian Griffin

Julian Griffin

University of Cambridge
UK
Email

Dr. Griffin studied chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went on to do postgraduate research in biochemistry, gaining his DPhil from Oxford in 1999 after studying in the laboratory of Professor George Radda. Following this he held Postdoctoral posts as a Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Fellow in Radiology, as a research associate at Imperial College London and, later, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (UK). He was formally appointed as a University Lecturer (the US equivalent to an associate professor) at Cambridge University in 2007.

Dr. Griffin’s group uses a range of analytical techniques including NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (they have access to a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer, a Thermo LTQ ion trap, a Waters QTOF Ultima, a Waters Quattro Premiere triple quadrupole LCMS and two GC-MS), to follow metabolism in the brain to look at a range of disease processes. The majority of his work has centered on mouse models of disease including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses. More recently, Dr. Griffin’s group has been using a combination of animal models (mouse, rat and C.elegans) to understand the metabolic consequences of “metabolic syndrome” including type II diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease and dyslipidaemia. His studies have attempted to cross-correlate metabolomic data with proteomics and transcriptomics to create a “systems biology” description of the consequences of pathology and genetic modulation related to the metabolic syndrome.

Baljit Ubhi

Baljit Ubhi

Sciex
USA
Email
  • Chair – Industry Engagement Task Group

Baljit is currently the global staff scientist for metabolomics & lipidomics applications at SCIEX and is based on the West Coast in California, USA. In this role, she has global responsibilities, to drive key collaborations, generate scientific proof statements, and work closely with market managers, product planners and R&D to drive new market opportunities as well as many other responsibilities. Baljit joined SCIEX as an application scientist in Europe in November 2011 after finishing her Ph.D. studies at the University of Cambridge, where she applied metabolomics to disease biomarker research in the group of Dr Julian Griffin. Prior to this, she held a research scientist position in the metabolic profiling group at GlaxoSmithKline R&D in the UK where she evaluated biomarkers from the effects of drug toxicity in support of drug candidate selection and development.

Caroline Johnson

Caroline Johnson

Yale School of Public Health
USA
Email

Dr. Caroline Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Metabolomics in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). In 2009, she graduated from Imperial College London with a PhD in Analytical Chemistry under the mentorship of Profs. Jeremy Nicholson, John Lindon and Ian Wilson, where she studied the role of reactive drug metabolites in relation to toxicity. She then held a postdoctoral appointment at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in Dr. Frank Gonzalez’s lab and examined the biological effects of ionizing radiation and dietary exposures on human health using metabolomics. From 2012-2016 she directed the cancer metabolism efforts at the Scripps Research Center for Metabolomics with Prof. Gary Siuzdak’s lab where she was involved in the optimization of XCMS Online and METLIN technologies.

Since joining YSPH in 2016, her lab’s primary focus has been to develop metabolomics for epidemiologic and population-level analysis. The lab is also using mass spectrometry imaging approaches to better understand tissue metabolite heterogeneity and the link between metabolites and cellular pathology. The lab is currently investigating the relationship between genetic and environmental influences in women with colon cancer, and the examination of early-life exposures in pregnancy outcomes. Dr. Johnson also serves on the editorial boards for Metabolites, Toxicological Sciences and Frontiers in Immunology and Nutrition.

Dan Raftery

Dan Raftery (Chair)

University of Washington
USA
Email

Dan Raftery is currently a Medical Education and Research Endowed Professor at the University of Washington, School of Medicine, and is a Member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle WA. Dr. Raftery received his PhD from Berkeley and was previously Professor of Chemistry in the Analytical Division at Purdue University, where his group started research in metabolomics in 2003.

Dr. Raftery’s current research program is focused on the development of new analytical methods and their application to a range of clinical and basic science studies in metabolomics. His group uses advanced mass spectrometry and NMR methods for the identification of early biomarkers and metabolic risk factors for a number of cancers and other diseases, and for the exploration of systems biology in cells and mitochondria.

Dr. Raftery founded and directs the Northwest Metabolomics Research Center at UW Medicine, and works with more than 75 research groups per year on a large variety of metabolomics studies.