Other Society Task Groups

Diversity Equity and Inclusion Task Group

Recognizing that discrimination, racism and other forms of structural inequality are widespread issues in science, the Metabolomics Society is committed to increasing diversity in our field by implementing diversity and inclusion into our activities and organizational culture. Productive, innovative and impactful scientific communities depend on a rich diversity of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. The DEI Task Group will focus on further cultivating a community where all members feel welcome and secure and that all voices are heard and respected. We aim to develop and promote strategies and best practices within the realms of racial, social, sexual and gender diversity. Our strategy will facilitate the Society’s mission to foster and sustain a diverse, equitable and inclusive metabolomics community.

Natasa Giallourou
Natasa Giallourou Chair
Candice Ulmer
Candice Ulmer Holland

International Affiliations Task Group

The IATG facilitates contacts between the Society and regional networks across the globe. Our main role is acting as a central contact point for potential new affiliates to help with their organisation and talk through affiliation with the Society. We also organise a regional get together each international meeting and have helped with the organisation of super-networks (e.g. the pan-Pacific meeting, the European networks, etc).

View the list of International Affiliates of the Society here.

Jules Griffin
Jules Griffin Chair
Merlijn van Rijswijk
Merlijn van Rijswijk Co-Chair
Craig Wheelock
Craig Wheelock

Industry Engagement Task Group

The IETG strives to connect corporations that market to the metabolomics community to the membership and activities of the Metabolomics Society. In addition, members of the Society who are employed in corporate settings are encouraged to interact on their concerns and interests through the IETG. Since IETG values the importance of communication, we have recently developed a newsletter full of recent information and events. Please review the newsletters by clicking the link for each issue.

Baljit Ubhi
Baljit Ubhi Chair
Fadi Abdi
Fadi Abdi Co-Chair
Nichole Reisdorph
Nichole Reisdorph
Craig Wheelock
Craig Wheelock
Christophe Junot
Christophe Junot
Georgia Charkoftaki
Georgia Charkoftaki
Melissa Fitzgerald
Melissa Fitzgerald
Heino Heyman
Heino Heyman
David Heywood
David Heywood
Doris Jacobs
Doris Jacobs
Tytus Mak
Tytus Mak
Robert Vreeken
Robert Vreeken
Clary Clish
Clary Clish
Therese Koal
Therese Koal
Christine Miller
Christine Miller
Robert Plumb
Robert Plumb
Nicolas Schauer
Nicolas Schauer
Regine Fuchs
Regine Fuchs

Society Strategy Task Group

The Society Strategy Task Group aims to develop evidence-based strategic recommendations for presentation to the Society Board of Directors. The strategic recommendations are intended to promote priority setting for the Society, establish agreement around intended outcomes, and assure the Society is working toward common goals.

Fidele Tugizimana
Fidele Tugizimana Chair
Julian Griffin
Julian Griffin
Robert Hall
Robert Hall
Justin van der Hooft
Mark Styczynski
Mark Styczynski
Krista Zanetti
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.

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.

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.

Merlijn van Rijswijk

Merlijn van Rijswijk

Netherlands Metabolomics Centre
The Netherlands
  • Co-Chair – International Affiliations Task Group

Bio coming soon!

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.

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.

Fadi Abdi

Fadi Abdi (Co-Chair)

Biocrates Life Sciences Ag USA Email
  • Co-Chair – Industry Engagement Task Group

Bio coming soon!

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.

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.

Georgia Charkoftaki

Georgia Charkoftaki

Yale
USA
Email

Bio coming soon!

Melissa Fitzgerald

Melissa Fitzgerald

University of Queensland
Email

Bio coming soon!

Heino Heyman

Heino Heyman

Bruker
Email

Bio coming soon!

David Heywood

David Heywood

Waters
Email

Bio coming soon!

Doris Jacobs

Doris Jacobs

Unilever
Email

Bio coming soon!

Tytus Mak

Tytus Mac

NIST

Bio coming soon!

Robert Vreeken

Robert Vreeken

Maastricht University and Janssen
Email

Bio coming soon!

Clary Clish

Clary Clish

Broad Institute
Email

Bio coming soon!

Therese Koal

Therese Koal

Biocrates
Email

Bio coming soon!

Christine Miller

Christine Miller

Agilent
Email

Bio coming soon!

Robert Plumb

Robert Plumb

Waters
Email

Bio coming soon!

Nicolas Schauer

Nicolas Schauer

Metabolon
Email

Bio coming soon!

Regine Fuchs

Regine Fuchs

BASF
Germany
Email

Bio coming soon!

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.

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.

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

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

Mark Styczynski

Mark Styczynski

Georgia Institute of Technology
USA

Mark Styczynski is an associate professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Dr. Styczynski earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), followed by postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute. While his Ph.D. work was in computational biology and bioinformatics, his postdoctoral training was in metabolomics and molecular biology; he has maintained research efforts in both of those areas since joining Georgia Tech in 2009. Currently his group’s work is at the interface of systems and synthetic biology, with main emphases including the integration of metabolomics data into the development of metabolic models and the development of biosensors for diagnostics using synthetic biology. He is the founding president of the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA, an international affiliate of the Metabolomics Society), and a member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium.

The Society Strategy Task Group aims to develop evidence-based strategic recommendations for presentation to the Society Board of Directors. The strategic recommendations are intended to promote priority setting for the Society, establish agreement around intended outcomes, and assure the Society is working toward common goals. The Task Group’s first focus area was the Society’s membership; the Task Group designed, executed, and analyzed the results of the first-ever Society membership survey.

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.