Metabolomics SocietyMetabolomics SocietyMetabolomics Society
Chair
Society President
Society Treasurer
This committee will enhance the availability and quality of training and education in metabolomics techniques to the global research community. It will help coordinate activities within the Metabolomics Society and engage and assist established training centres around the world. This will be achieved by:
Chair
The EMN aims to provide a forum for metabolomics researchers at the start of their professional career and serve the early-career members of the Metabolomics Society. Aspirations include, but are not limited to: strengthen communication and collaboration, encourage opportunities and invention, support developmental learning and enjoy professional growth.
Chair
Secretary
Treasurer
Advisor
The membership committee works to provide member services through the website and newsletters so that members are aware of the activities of the Society and can easily access the services that the Society makes available.
Chair
Society President
Chair
Society President
The Publications committee oversees the interactions of the Society with the various ways we publish information (excluding social media which is part of the Website & Communications Committee). Our main role is to review the relationship between the Society and Metabolites, our affiliated journal. We have two board members who are associate editors on the journal and they report back to the committee and hence to the board. In addition, this committee would assess any new affiliation proposals before bringing them to the board. The committee also oversees the content in MetaboNews.
Chair
Chair
Editor in Chief 2004-2015
Society Secretary
Immediate Past President
Society Treasurer
The University of Queensland, Australia
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 Centre’s 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. His research aims to integrate metabolomics with other –omics methods and metabolic simulations via genome-scale modelling, with a focus on C. elegans. Dr Schirra is one of the leaders of the “WormJam” international research community of C. elegans researchers.
Dr Schirra has been a Director of the Metabolomics Society since 2017, and is currently the Chair of the Society’s Conference Committee. He is also a committee member of the Australian and New Zealand Metabolomics Network (ANZMN), and Board Member of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance (ANZMAG). 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 Associate Editor of the journal Metabolites, and regional editor of Current Metabolomics.
Imperial College London, UK
I earned my PhD in Nutritional Metabolomics from the University of Reading in 2017 and subsequently joined the Department of Metabolism Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London. My research focuses on the application of metabolic phenotyping to the field of global health. Metabolomics and bioinformatics tools are used to investigate the biochemical impact of undernutrition and infections, in children living in developing countries to better understand their adverse consequences on growth, cognition and metabolism later in life. I have recently been awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the integration of metabolomic and genomic data in population-based studies for the identification of composite genotype-phenotype determinants of complex diseases and improved patient stratification.
Lecturer, Department of Biochemistry
University of Cambridge, UK
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.
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.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA
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.
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.
Örebro University, Finland
WWW: https://bioscience.fi/research/systems-medicine/profile
School of Medical Sciences, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
Turku Centre for Biotechnology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
Oil Crops Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Wuhan, P. R. China
Matej Orešič holds a PhD in biophysics from Cornell University (1999; Ithaca, NY, USA). He is a professor of medical sciences with specialization in systems medicine at Örebro University (Sweden), group leader in systems medicine at the University of Turku (Finland), and a guest professor in lipids and nutrition at the Oil Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Wuhan. As of 2016, he was made a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society. He previously served as member of the Board of Directors of the Metabolomics Society for two, consecutive terms (2008-2012). Prof. Orešič is one of the founders of the Nordic Metabolomics Society and currently its chair of the board. In 2019, he co-chaired the 1st Gordon Research Conference on ‘Metabolomics and Human Health’ (Ventura, CA, USA). Previously, he also chaired the Keystone Symposium on Systems Biology of Lipid Metabolism (2015; Breckenridge, CO, USA). Prof. Orešič’s main research areas include metabolomics applications in biomedical research and systems medicine. He is particularly interested in the identification of disease processes associated with different metabolic phenotypes and the underlying mechanisms linking these processes with the development of specific disorders or their co-morbidities, with a central focus on both type 1 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Prof. Orešič also initiated the popular MZmine open source project, which led to the development and release of popular software for metabolomics data processing.
University of Washington, USA
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.
Senior Lecturer
Edith Cowan University, Australia
Stacey Reinke is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Statistics and Computational Biology, and head of computational biology at the Centre for Integrative Metabolomics and Computational Biology (CIMCB) at Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia). She completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Alberta (Canada) in 2011. Her early metabolomics research investigated mitochondrial dysfunction in model systems, which later expanded to investigating energy metabolism dysregulation in inflammatory diseases. Stacey’s current research focusses include applied investigations of respiratory and early-life diseases, and methodological research into intuitive data science. She also has a keen interest in the intersection between contemporary research and pedagogical best practice, having recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education.
University of Colorado, USA
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 States Human Proteome Organization (US HuPO) meeting, and leading an internationally recognized Metabolomics and Proteomics training program.
Sciex, USA
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.
National Cancer Institute, USA
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 (http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/comets). COMETS allows investigators from across multiple disease phenotypes to: 1.) leverage existing resources and data; and 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 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-018-1460-7).
Biography: 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 metabolomics research investigated mitochondrial dysfunction in model systems, which later expanded to investigating energy metabolism dysregulation in inflammatory diseases. During her first postdoctoral position, Stacey worked closely with David Broadhurst which fostered her interest in metabolomics workflows, design of experiments, data science, and programming.
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. During this time, she played a key role in developing large-scale clinical metabolomics workflows 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 is currently head of computational biology at the Centre for Integrative Metabolomics and Computational Biology at Edith Cowan University. Her applied clinical metabolomics research focusses on respiratory and early-life diseases and her methodological research lies at the intersection of data science, mass spectrometry-based metabolomics workflows, and pedagogical theory/practice. Her recent publications have included a tutorial review for using cloud computing to aid FAIR data science and adapting intuitive interpretation strategies for complex multivariate models. She also recently published one of the first formalised instances of metabolomics education being integrated in undergraduate curricula.
Statement of Purpose: I have enjoyed being an active member of the Metabolomics Society and broader community for the last 5 years, most notably between 2015-2017 when I served as Financial Lead, and later Chair, of the Early-career Members Network (EMN) Committee, ex officio member of the Board of Directors, and member of the Conference Committee. As Chair of the EMN, I led an active committee that established several key EMN initiatives including: the first social media account, an educational wiki site, the EMN travel bursary program, and introduced the more informal nature of the conference EMN Reception.
In 2017, I made the difficult decision to pause my high-level involvement with the Society to pursue a long-term personal goal of obtaining formal qualifications in tertiary education. Despite this extracurricular load, I have continued to contribute to the metabolomics community, including being an EMN conference workshop speaker, a table discussant at conference Career Night (2019) and sitting on two International Organising Committee (2018/2021). Additionally, I have become an Editorial Advisory Board member for the journal Metabolomics.
As I complete my educational qualifications, I am keen to return to the heart of the Society. I found my initial contribution highly rewarding and believe I have much more to give. If elected, I would like to contribute specifically to:
1. Driving forward educational initiatives by further developing resources and integrating pedagogical design and best practice for maximal efficacy.
2. Enhancing support opportunities for early-career researchers as they pursue their future career paths.
Tim Causon is a Senior Scientist in the group of Instrumental Analytical Chemistry and Metabolomics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU – Vienna). He completed his PhD within the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science (ACROSS) at the University of Tasmania (Australia). Following post-doctoral work at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria), he took up his current academic position at BOKU in late 2014. His current research interests centre on mass spectrometry and separation science to support metabolome assessment, focusing on the study of fermentation-based cell factories, incorporating state-of-the-art ion mobility-mass spectrometry into differential metabolomics workflows, studying wine via non-targeted fingerprinting, as well as a variety of application developments for both targeted and non-targeted workflows in industrial and environmental application areas.
Dr Evelina Charidemou holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge UK. She specialises in Nutritional Biochemistry and Metabolism. Her research was performed at the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research (MRC HNR). She holds a bachelor’s degree (Hons) in Biochemistry from Imperial College London, where she was awarded the honorary degree of the Associateship from the Royal College of Science UK (ARCS) for excellence during her studies. Her research focuses on the development of metabolomics and lipidomics tools to investigate aspects of the Metabolic Syndrome, particularly Type II diabetes and Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Specifically, she is using high-performance liquid chromatography and multivariate bioinformatic tools to analyse biological samples and identify biomarkers to understand the underlying mechanism of metabolism in diseases.
Dr Charidemou presented her work in National and International Conferences; The 12th and 14th International Conference of the Metabolomics Society in Dublin and Seattle respectively as well as the 11th annual Metabomeeting in Nottingham UK. In the 2nd Metabolomics Sardinian Scientific School, she was awarded the best presentation and she was invited to publish her research work at the International Journal of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Dr Charidemou has published her work at high impact journals such as Journal of Clinical Investigations Insights, Hepatology, Cell Science, Diabetologia and she has multiple scientific collaboration with the University of Oxford UK, University of Aarhus Denmark, Imperial College, as well as the University of Cyprus. In addition, she is an active member of the International Metabolomic Society, the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism, the Biochemical Society and she founded the Cyprus Metabolomic Network, of which she is currently the President. She has also been awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship.
Besides her scientific interests, Dr Charidemou is a former elite athlete of the Cyprus National Track and Field team and enjoys running.
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.
I received my PhD in Nutritional Metabolomics from the University of Reading (UK) in 2017. My PhD aimed at examining the impact plant bioactives have on cancer metabolism and evaluating their potential use as adjuvant treatments during radiotherapy. My educational background also includes an MSc in Nutrition and Health from Wageningen University (NL) and a BSc in Biology from the University of Leeds (UK).
Upon completion of my PhD I moved to Imperial College London for post-doctoral training. My key area of research is the application of metabolic profiling (NMR & MS) and bioinformatics in the field of global health. This systems approach is applied in large-scale population based studies as well as animal models recapitulating important features of enteric dysfunction. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the development of diagnostic tools of compromised growth and enteric infections in early-life, as well as inform interventions for the management of undernutrition and its adverse consequences in children from developing countries.
Lecturer,
Department of Biochemistry
University of Cambridge
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.
INRA – French National Institute for Agricultural Research, France
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 researchers at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) working with Pr. Michael 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, e.g. transcriptome/proteome) to predict impacts on metabolism and phenotype 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. in cancer). Since 2009, Fabien Jourdan has led the development of MetExplore open and its open access web server (www.metexplore.fr) which is used by more than 800 users worldwide and maintained and developed by a group of 8 computational biologists. Fabien Jourdan is member of the board 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.
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 19 years focusing on the identification of genetic, genomic, and metabolomic determinants for complex diseases. The accumulation of these efforts has resulted in over 100 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). Through this consortium, she has worked with other COMETs investigators to facilitate the utilization of metabolomics in large population-based cohorts. Her long-term goals is 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.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter:@LetertreMarine
I have recently finished my PhD at Imperial College London (UK) within the Stratified Medicine Graduate Training Programme. My PhD research aimed at exploring the bidirectional interaction between drugs and the host microbiome, a key aspect to consider in pharmacological and toxicological studies. To do so, I have used 1H NMR spectroscopy, untargeted and targeted UPLC-MS based metabolic profiling.
My Master training was specialized in the study of chemical transformations in biological systems, natural products and OMICs sciences, which gave me the opportunity to investigate the toxicity of Bisphenol A on human testicular explants by MALDI-IMS at the Protim platform in 2014 (Rennes, France) and on the development of a novel class of irreversible kinase inhibitors at the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre (New Zealand).
Since the beginning of 2020, I have started a new position as a facilitator of the structural and metabolomics analysis network of Biogenouest (France). My responsibilities are to coordinate the research teams within the network, improve their visibility, organize training and the annual scientific day, and support their management and the continuous improvement of their quality system. I am also part of the early career scientific committee of MSACL.
Assistant lecturer
Department of Biochemistry
University of Johannesburg
Msizi Mhlongo matriculated in 2008 from Sinethemba Agricultural Secondary School. Msizi Mhlongo then enrolled for BSc life and environmental sciences with specialization in botany and biochemistry at the University of Johannesburg and completed an MSc Biochemistry (cum laude) in 2015. He is currently enrolled for a PhD Biochemistry due at the end of October 2019.
He is involved in metabolomics training workshops in SA as a trainer and an organizer: metabolomics introductory cause (2019). Msizi is an active member of a number of scientific societies in South Africa including Metabolomics South Africa (MSA) (Affiliate to IMS), South African Association for Mass Spectrometry (SAAMS), South African Chromatography Society (ChromSA) and South African Society of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (SASBMB).
Currently, Mr. Msizi Mhlongo is a PhD student and assistant lecturer at the University of Johannesburg. Over the years, Mr. Mhlongo has been working on a UHPLC-MS based plant metabolomics projects and is continuing on related topics, involving phytochemical analysis, microbial metabolites analysis and plant-microbe interactions. He has gained valuable experience on metabolic data acquisition (using both GC-MS and LC-MS), data analysis (using multivariate statistical tools), metabolite identification and results interpretation.
I received my PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Potsdam (Germany) and the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm (Germany). During my PhD studies, I investigated the central carbon metabolism of the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. using a systems biology approach, under the supervision of Joachim Kopka. Upon completion of my thesis, I received a Minerva Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to work on a joint project between four groups in Israel, China, and Germany. Using lipidomics, a GWAS approach, and predictive modelling, I aimed to elucidate lipid metabolism in rice grain and its impact on the field performance of rice plants. In 2017, I moved to Cambridge (U.K.) to start a position in industry. I am currently working at Owlstone Medical, where I use my experience in metabolomics and data analysis to aid the discovery of volatile organic compound (VOC) biomarkers in breath. Owlstone Medical‘s vision is to be the global leader in Breath Biopsy for early disease detection and precision medicine. Our mission is to save 100,000 lives and $1.5B in healthcare costs.
In 2018, I received my PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Florida as a National Science Foundation-Graduate Research Fellow (NSF-GRFP). My PhD research pursued understanding whole-body exercise physiology and utilization of glucose in mice through lipidomics and metabolomics. Prior to my PhD, I obtained a BS in Biochemistry from Spelman College.
Currently during my postdoctoral training, I am affiliated with the ETH Strategic Focus Area for Personalized Health and Related Technology (SFA-PHRT) project at ETH Zürich in the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology. This initiative focuses on standardization, normalization, and harmonization of flow injection analysis-mass spectrometry (FIA-MS) for long-term biological studies. Independently, I obtained funding for a side project with a colleague to study bacteria subpopulation pathogenicity.
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.
Dr. Fidele Tugizimana –
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.
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.
Dr Evelina Charidemou is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie studying the interplay between metabolism and epigenetics. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge UK. She specialises in Nutritional Biochemistry and Metabolism. Her research was performed at the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research (MRC HNR). She holds a bachelor’s degree (Hons) in Biochemistry from Imperial College London, where she was awarded the honorary degree of the Associateship from the Royal College of Science UK (ARCS) for excellence during her studies. Her research focuses on the development of metabolomics, lipidomics and epigenomics tools to investigate aspects of the Metabolic Syndrome, particularly Type II diabetes and Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Specifically, she is using high-performance liquid chromatography and multivariate bioinformatic tools to analyse biological samples and identify biomarkers to understand the underlying mechanism of metabolism in diseases.
In addition, she is an active member of the International Metabolomic Society, the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism, the Biochemical Society and she founded the Cyprus Metabolomic Network, of which she is currently the President.
Besides her scientific interests, Dr Charidemou is a former elite athlete of the Cyprus National Track and Field team and enjoys running.
On November 8, 2019, I finished my doctoral thesis, entitled “Development and application of metabolomic strategies though advanced analytical techniques in biological samples” in the University of Granada (Spain). During my pre-doctoral period, I developed untargeted metabolomic methodologies to apply them in the study of bioactive compounds as well as in the study of systemic autoimmune diseases. As part of my training, I completed a predoctoral stay at Chalmers University (Sweden) in 2018, where I managed to specialize in data processing techniques and statistical analysis of metabolomic data using R language-based programs. From July 2020 to March 2022, I enjoyed a postdoctoral contract at the BIH metabolomics platform (Berlin), actively contributing to the MSTARS project (Multimodal clinical mass spectrometry to target treatment resistance). From April 2022, I am enjoying a postdoctoral contract at the University of Granada, where I am working on projects focused on the study of bioactive compounds from plant matrices through nutritional intervention trials.
Laim is a final year PhD student in Metabolomics & Systems Medicine at the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen and University Hospital Tuebingen, Germany.
Her main research focuses on NMR spectroscopy-based metabolomics in pre-clinical and clinical immunology, neurology and oncology studies. She is also excited about metabolic imaging and MALDI-2 technology possibilities in medical research.
She obtained her Master of Science degree in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and before that, a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering at Riga Technical University, Latvia.
Sandi Azab is a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Dr. Sonia Anand in the Department of Medicine, McMaster University. Her PhD in chemical biology (supervised by Dr. Philip Britz-Mckibbin) specialized in bio-analytical chemistry, biomarker discovery and metabolomics. Sandi is also a practicing Pharmacist with certification and ongoing passion for smoking cessation support.
Sandi is interested in researching cardiometabolic disease in women and children with the help of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics in a multigenerational setting, in-utero as well as in early childhood of young boys and girls. Sandi’s previous research includes the development of novel high-throughput methods for fatty acids profiling and PFASs biomonitoring using multiplexed, non-aqueous capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (MSI-NACE-MS) to enable samples’ screening from large birth cohorts. Recent work also entails a comprehensive metabolomics study in peripheral artery disease patients, as well as the investigation of dietary biomarkers. Sandi highly enjoys the multidisciplinary nature of her research where epidemiology, analytical chemistry, biostatistics, bioinformatics, and metabolomics are applied to approach complex biological problems.
Hobbies:
Hiking, reading, watching sunsets and raising/taming her highly-energetic twin boys
Education
PhD, Chemical Biology – McMaster University Aug, 2020
Registered Clinical Pharmacist – Ontario College of Pharmacists 2016
MSc, Pharmaceutical Sciences – Alexandria University, Egypt 2010
BSc, Pharmaceutical Sciences – Alexandria University, Egypt 2006
German High School Certificate – DSB German School, Alexandria 2001
Fitri obtained a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia. After working as a researcher in a start-up company for 8 months, she decided to pursue her education as a double-degree master’s student in biotechnology at Institut Teknologi Bandung and Osaka University. She has always been interested in food quality and technology and joined food metabolomics research team in Bioresource Engineering laboratory under Prof. Eiichiro Fukusaki supervision. After she finished her master’s study in both universities, she continued her study as a PhD student supported by MEXT Scholarship at Osaka University. She obtained her PhD in 2022 and is now working as Postdoctoral Researcher at the same university.
I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School under the mentorship of Dr. Jessica Lasky-Su, focusing on multi-omic data integration for lung disease and COVID-19. My doctoral studies at Imperial College London were supervised by Professors Elaine Holmes and Jeremy Nicholson, specialising in metabolomics and data driven integration techniques for a wide range of clinical studies. My key skills are in bioinformatics and multi-omic data analysis; core interests include big data integration, transcriptomics, microbiome analysis and metabolomics.
Tee Khim Boon is a PhD student in University Malaya, Malaysia. She earned her Master of Science in Clinical Drug Development in Queen Mary, University of London. For the past 10 years, she worked as regulatory pharmacists in National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency, Ministry of Health Malaysia to review clinical trial protocol and bioequivalence dossier, also performed Good Clinical Practice and Bioequivalence inspection locally and internationally. The accumulation efforts on international bioequivalence laboratory inspection and clinical trial inspection resulted in her strong foundation in targeted metabolomics analysis using LCMS. Her recent study is focus on exploration of LCMS-based pharmacometabolomics using combination of targeted and untargeted approach to study Metformin and herbal medicine in phase 1 clinical trial under control environment. She started her PhD project in a randomized, cross-over, pharmacometaboloics study of Andrographis paniculata and Metformin in healthy volunteers under fasting condition in 2019 (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT04161404). Her long-term vision is promoting pharmacometabolomics research into phase 1 clinical trial by integrating pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and clinical outcomes using herbal medicine, generic medicines, and biosimilar medicines in the pharmaceutical drug development program.
I hold a BSc in Clinical Biochemistry (University of Sonora, Mexico), MSc in Food Science (CIAD AC, Mexico), and PhD in Human Nutrition (University of Glasgow, UK). After completing my PhD studies, I worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University (USA), investigating biomarkers of sugar intake and, later, as a research associate at the University of Cambridge and then transferred to Imperial College London (UK), investigating metabolic phenotypes associated with obesity. I recently joined the Metabolomics Science Technology Platform at The Francis Crick Institute, where I am involved in the implementation of MS-based metabolomics workflows and the development of supercritical fluid-MS methods. My research interest focuses on (a) the metabolic changes associated with chronic and age-related diseases, (b) the effect of dietary components and environmental factors on disease progression and, (c) translate that understanding into solutions for prevention.
I Anza-Tshilidzi Ramabulana ‘mukololo wa ha Mureisi Ramabulana’, am PhD candidate (Biochemistry@UJ) and laboratory technician (Nutrition@UNIVEN) from South Africa. I am passionate about application of mass spectrometry in metabolomics specifically natural product research. I am also a digital content creator, creating on the YouTube and Instagram Space. My personal Mantra: “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”-James Clear
Silvia Radenkovic is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Clinical Genomics, Mayo Clinic, USA. Previously, she completed her Ph.D. at the KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium, and Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, under the supervision of Dr. Eva Morava (Department of Clinical Genomics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA) and Dr. Bart Ghesquière (Metabolomics Expertise Center, CCB-VIB, Leuven, Belgium). Her main interest is inborn errors of metabolism (IEM). Her research focuses on using tracer metabolomics in IPSC and IPSC-CM to uncover novel cardiac-specific pathomechanisms and potential therapeutic targets to treat different IEM. She is looking forward to interacting with other members of EMN and MetSoc, participating in organizing conference workshops and webinars, as well as recruiting of new members. She is looking forward to broadening her skills, networking and giving back to the metabolomics community by participating in EMN.
I am a final year PhD student at Strathclyde University (Glasgow-UK) and will soon defend my thesis about metabolomics applied to the study of ageing and cancer to give more insight into their distinct phenotypical and functional changes.
Native from Brazil, Millena Barros Santos is a Postdoc Researcher in France at Bordeaux Metabolome-MetaboHUB (META Team, INRAE Bordeaux Nouvelle-Aquitaine), funded by MetaboHUB, the French infrastructure in Metabolomics and Fluxomics. Her current research focuses on metabolomics approaches to study large plant cohorts, mainly developing analytical methods to identify metabolites in plants using mass spectrometry and generating data to elucidate associations between metabolic profiles, select genotypes for plant performance, and evaluate plant response to environmental conditions. She recently finished her Ph.D. in Food and Nutrition – Food Science Area in the Food and Nutrition Graduate Program (PPGAN) at the Federal University of State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) in Brazil (CAPES scholarship). Her thesis entitled “Untargeted metabolomics for the characterization of wheat, rice, and some of their coproducts applying conventional, deep eutectic solvents and in situ biotransformation” was focused on improving knowledge about the metabolite composition of wheat and rice, the most consumed cereals by humans. She conducted a metabolic characterization, focusing on phenolic compounds and lipids, by untargeted metabolomics approaches, considering different stages of grain maturation, genetic diversity, the resulting coproducts obtained from industrial milling, and the evaluation of different solvents as extraction media. During her thesis, she had the opportunity to perform metabolomic analyses of other food matrices in partnerships with Brazilian and International Laboratories and to follow an internship with a Brazilian scholarship (FAPERJ) at INRAE, Institut SupAgro, and CIRAD in Montpellier, France.
Marvin is a doctoral student in bioengineering at Osaka University, Japan. His research explores the multidisciplinary bridging of food metabolomics and molecular epidemiology to better understand foods’ health benefits. Aside from his research interests, Marvin plays a number of musical instruments and enjoys playing badminton.
I am a PhD student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa working on a metabolomics project aimed at understanding the metabolic biomarkers associated with valvular heart diseases. Further, I am the convener for the early-career members network of Metabolomics South Africa. At the start of my PhD project, I found it challenging to get researchers experienced in metabolomics at our core-facility; however, through the workshops and seminars organised by the Metabolomics South Africa, I managed to connect with other researchers at different levels of metabolomics training. Therefore, through EMN I am interested in organising webinars and training specifically targeted to suit MetSoc EMN and affiliate members in Africa to facilitate knowledge transfer. In addition, I wish to create opportunities for collaborations between early career researchers in Africa and those in the developed parts of the world. Moreover, I intend to create opportunities for inter-Africa symposiums and meetings to create networks and possibilities for EMN members collaborations in Africa.
I earned my PhD in Nutritional Metabolomics from the University of Reading in 2017 and subsequently joined the Department of Metabolism Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London. My research focuses on the application of metabolic phenotyping to the field of global health. Metabolomics and bioinformatics tools are used to investigate the biochemical impact of undernutrition and infections, in children living in developing countries to better understand their adverse consequences on growth, cognition and metabolism later in life. I have recently been awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the integration of metabolomic and genomic data in population-based studies for the identification of composite genotype-phenotype determinants of complex diseases and improved patient stratification.
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.
I received my Ph.D. in Natural Products and Molecular ecology from the University of French Guiana (FR) in April 2017. My interdisciplinary thesis under the supervision of Christophe Duplais and Lucie Zinger, Bacterial microbiota of the cuticle of ant species in French Guiana: antibiotic activities and community ecology, aimed at understanding factors shaping the composition of the bacterial microbiota of the cuticle of tropical ants and evaluating the potential for bacterial isolates from ants aimed at the discovery of new antibiotics. Beforehand, my educational background includes a Pharm. D. from Auvergne University (FR) with a focus on Natural Product Research and a Master’s degree in Research and Development in Synthesis, Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Natural Products from Paris Sud University (FR).
In 2017, I moved to the United States for a short period at The Natural History Museum of Chicago, invited by the research team of Corrie Moreau to pursue my Ph.D. research on ant cuticle microbiota, and then started my first post-doc position at the University of Pittsburgh (US) in 2018, in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, at the School of Medicine in the research team of Erik Wright. We have developped a 3D printed platform to decipher the chemical interactions of Streptomyces bacteria in the soil microbiome and to identify new microbial competition strategies. We have used direct-infusion mass spectrometry to acquire exometabolomics data in collaboration with Christopher Anderton of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland (US).
Since September 2020, I am an assistant professor in France, at the University of Tours and in the Biomolecules and Plant Biotechnology lab. The focus of my research is on deciphering Apocynaceae specialized metabolism pathways and regulation with metabolomics. I am teaching molecular biology, botany, and mycology to Pharmacy students.
Alexandra is currently in the final year of her PhD studies at The University of Western Australia. She obtained a Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Science from the University of Otago, and worked as a clinical scientist in New Zealand, before quickly realising her passion for research using advanced technologies such as mass spectrometry. She moved to Perth, initially studying vitamin D metabolites using mass spectrometry. Her passion for MS continued on to a PhD, in which she is currently using it to investigate the human milk lipidome and understand how lipids contribute to infant growth, development and health. Due to the enormous impact that early nutrition has on human outcomes, the aim of research like this is to encourage evidence-based guidelines for infant and maternal nutrition, to ultimately improve both short and long term health.
Contact: [email protected]
I received my BS in Marine Sciences and my PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. My thesis focused on the isolation, identification, and structure elucidation of bioactive natural products from Hawaiian organisms. I moved to Charleston, SC as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in a joint position between the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) and National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST), where I worked on utilizing NMR-based metabolomics as a bioprospecting tool for hyperthermophilic microbial compounds.
I’ve recently transitioned (2020) to a Research Chemist postion at NIST where I am addressing biochemical measurement challenges in microbial systems through metabolomics analyses, and working with stakeholders to identify ways to address community needs and issues. This builds on my previous work, as a 2018 awardee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine National Research Council Research Associateship, on the development of a microbial biofilm model for metabolomics.
Since 2019, I have served as the Inaugural Chair of the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA) Early Career Members Council. In addition to professional development activities, I interact with a variety of programs that aim to increase female, Native Hawaiian, and minority representation in STEM (including Nā Pua Noʻeau, Keaholoa STEM Scholars, Students of Hawaiʻi Advanced Research Program, among others).
Native from Brazil, Vinicius has received his PhD in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Campinas after a 2-year experience period working in CEMBIO, under the supervision of Coral Barbas and Javier Ruperez, in Madrid. During this period, he worked on the adaptation of a tissue sample extraction methodology for the application on dried blood spots samples collected from female soccer players during an international championship, later analyzed using multiplatform metabolomics (CE-MS, GC-MS and LC-MS). Currently, Vinicius is working as a Post-Doc Researcher at the Institute for Biomedicine at EURAC Research, in Bolzano – Italy, under the supervision of Johannes Rainer. His main activities are related to sample preparation and LC-MS data generation (both targeted and untargeted) from plasma samples of the CHRIS populational study, which is mainly focused on Parkinson, ageing and cardiovascular diseases.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA
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.
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 (https://cibion.conicet.gov.ar/mass-spectrometry/?lan=en). 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 (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6517-5301). 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 www.lamps-network.org), 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.
Osaka University (Japan) and Institut Teknologi Bandung (Indonesia)
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.
Dr. Fidele Tugizimana –
Biography: 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.
Statement of Purpose: If trusted and elected the 2nd term for a director position on the BoD of the Metabolomics Society, I would like to continue serving the Society (and the metabolomics community in general) in ways that promote the growth, use and understanding of metabolomics in the life sciences across the globe, and particularly in South Africa and in Africa in general. Being active member (President) of the Metabolomics South Africa (MSA) (with about 250 members from across Africa), increasing (Society) membership in Africa is one of the focus areas of MSA; and this is done through developing initiatives and framework to increase interactions between the Society and MSA (which expands to other parts of Africa) via networking, training, and collaborations. The metabolomics training workshops we (MSA) have started in South Africa are always highly attended in numbers (from SA and across Africa), showing the great need for understanding and use of metabolomics in life sciences in SA and Africa in general. And this, visibly, predicts a significant growth of metabolomics in Africa. Furthermore, I look forward to contribute in the aspects of data quality, data standards initiatives and computational tools for data mining and interpretation. Thus, when elected (for the 2nd term) as a director, and as part of the team, promotion of metabolomics in South Africa and Africa, training, data quality and standardization initiatives, DEI promotion and networking will be my areas of contribution and focus.
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 is currently 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 include the accurate measurement of chronic disease biomarkers and the assessment of clinical analytical methods in patient care.
University of Birmingham, UK
Ralf Weber is the Director of Bioinformatics for the Phenome Centre Birmingham at the University of Birmingham (UK). He obtained his BSc degree in Bioinformatics from the HAN University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen (Netherlands). In 2007 he moved to the University of Birmingham where he completed a PhD in computational mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. He continued to work as a Research Fellow from 2010 – 2016 and was involved in a variety of clinical, toxicology and computational-focused research projects. During spring 2016 he was a visiting researcher at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (China). Currently, he is the module lead for the ‘omics’ science component of the MSc Bioinformatics course at the University of Birmingham. He is a co-founder of and trainer in the Birmingham Metabolomics Training Centre since 2015, and a past committee member of the Early-career Members Network of the international Metabolomics Society from 2013 – 2016. His research team’s interests include the development and application of data processing, biostatistics and data mining tools to facilitate biochemical annotation and interpretation of clinical and toxicological metabolomics data.
National Cancer Institute, USA
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 (http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/comets). COMETS allows investigators from across multiple disease phenotypes to: 1.) leverage existing resources and data; and 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 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-018-1460-7).
INRA – French National Institute for Agricultural Research, France
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 researchers at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) working with Pr. Michael 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, e.g. transcriptome/proteome) to predict impacts on metabolism and phenotype 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. in cancer). Since 2009, Fabien Jourdan has led the development of MetExplore open and its open access web server (www.metexplore.fr) which is used by more than 800 users worldwide and maintained and developed by a group of 8 computational biologists. Fabien Jourdan is member of the board 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.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA
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.
Lecturer,
Department of Biochemistry
University of Cambridge
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.
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.
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.
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 19 years focusing on the identification of genetic, genomic, and metabolomic determinants for complex diseases. The accumulation of these efforts has resulted in over 100 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). Through this consortium, she has worked with other COMETs investigators to facilitate the utilization of metabolomics in large population-based cohorts. Her long-term goals is 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.
WWW: https://bioscience.fi/research/systems-medicine/profile
School of Medical Sciences, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
Turku Centre for Biotechnology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
Oil Crops Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Wuhan, P. R. China
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.
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.
Dr. Fidele Tugizimana –
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.
University of Birmingham, UK
Ralf Weber is the Director of Bioinformatics for the Phenome Centre Birmingham at the University of Birmingham (UK). He obtained his BSc degree in Bioinformatics from the HAN University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen (Netherlands). In 2007 he moved to the University of Birmingham where he completed a PhD in computational mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. He continued to work as a Research Fellow from 2010 – 2016 and was involved in a variety of clinical, toxicology and computational-focused research projects. During spring 2016 he was a visiting researcher at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (China). Currently, he is the module lead for the ‘omics’ science component of the MSc Bioinformatics course at the University of Birmingham. He is a co-founder of and trainer in the Birmingham Metabolomics Training Centre since 2015, and a past committee member of the Early-career Members Network of the international Metabolomics Society from 2013 – 2016. His research team’s interests include the development and application of data processing, biostatistics and data mining tools to facilitate biochemical annotation and interpretation of clinical and toxicological metabolomics data.
Imperial College London, UK
I earned my PhD in Nutritional Metabolomics from the University of Reading in 2017 and subsequently joined the Department of Metabolism Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London. My research focuses on the application of metabolic phenotyping to the field of global health. Metabolomics and bioinformatics tools are used to investigate the biochemical impact of undernutrition and infections, in children living in developing countries to better understand their adverse consequences on growth, cognition and metabolism later in life. I have recently been awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the integration of metabolomic and genomic data in population-based studies for the identification of composite genotype-phenotype determinants of complex diseases and improved patient stratification.
Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester. His research interests are broadly within analytical biotechnology and systems and synthetic biology. He has over 20 years experience of advanced bioanalytical measurements including MS-based metabolomics and has pioneered the application of a variety of Raman spectroscopy methods for the direct analysis of bacteria and their products. His research group (www.biospec.net) comprises ~25 researchers (1:2 PDRA:PhDs) and as PI and CoI he has a combined grant portfolio of >£15M from the UK and EU. He is founding director of a novel microbial resistance typing diagnostics company (Spectromics; www.spectromics.com). He has published >350 scientific papers and if you believe in such metrics has healthy H-indices (58, WoK; 70, Google Scholar). He helped established the Metabolomics Society, is a director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum, is founding Editor-in-Chief of Metabolomics (established 2005) and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of four other journals. Finally, he was awarded the RSC Industrially-Sponsored Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry in 2005, made a Fellow of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy in 2015, and delighted to be made an Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society in 2016.
Biography: Fabien Jourdan is a senior research scientist at INRAE (the French National Research Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research) Toulouse, France. He graduated with a PhD in computer science at the University of Montpellier (France) in 2004, working on the premises of social networks, in particular studying their topology. He then shared his time between a software startup company and a research assistant position. In 2005 he was hired by INRAE (Toulouse, France) to develop computational solutions for metabolomics studies (mainly NMR). In 2006 he spent a year as a visiting researchers at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) working with Pr. Michael 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, e.g. transcriptome/proteome) to predict impacts on metabolism and phenotype 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. in cancer). Since 2009, Fabien Jourdan has led the development of MetExplore open and its open access web server (www.metexplore.fr) which is used by more than 800 users worldwide and maintained and developed by a group of 8 computational biologists. Fabien Jourdan is member of the board 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.
Statement of Purpose: “Serving as a board member and secretary since 2019 has been an honor. In addition to board activities, I worked on improving the award process. I would like to pursue that by increasing the visibility of the awardees (invited talks during the conference). I was involved in the communication activities like revamping the website. I reactivated the tweeter account of the society (from 500 new followers per year to 900). With the president, we worked on the affiliations of regional networks (Latin America, Poland). Promoting them is essential since they are key in disseminating metabolomics and supporting young scientists worldwide.
Beyond going further in my initiatives, if elected, I would like to be part of the effort to increase diversity in our community through support of regional societies and increase open online resources. I would also like to stay active in the digital transition which allows reducing financial barriers to access cutting edge science. I would like to pursue supporting EMN by providing more visibility through communication to facilitate kicking off young scientist careers. On a scientific point of view, one of the challenges I foresee is the interpretations of metabolomics data. We need to foster connections with data mining, visualization and network science. We managed to stay united during the pandemic and we all felt the genuine joy of meeting again in person during MetSoc2022, showing that science is above all a human adventure and the Society is there to accompany us in shaping the future of metabolomics community.”
Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA
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.
Sciex, USA
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.