Symposium Programme & Speakers
SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS
Professor David Wishart
Head of the Human Metabolome Project, University of Alberta, Canada
David Wishart is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He currently holds the CIHR/Rx&D Bristol-Myers Squibb Chair in Protein Chemistry and is an adjunct professor with the Faculty of
Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Dr. Wishart is also a senior research officer and the co-director of the Nanobiology program at the NRC's National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT). After completing his BSc in Physics at the University of Alberta in 1984, Dr. Wishart obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University in 1991. He was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Alberta in 1995 and was promoted to full professor in 2003. Over the past 15 years Dr. Wishart has published more than 100 scientific papers and presented more than 200 abstracts and invited lectures. Dr. Wishart has served as the chair or co-chair for nearly a dozen major conferences (ISMB, CPI, PSB) and has sat on numerous boards and executive committees for several local companies, associations, research institutes and academic
bodies. He has co-founded two companies, BioTools Inc. and Chenomx Inc.
A major focus of Dr. Wishart's research over the past 3 years has been the determination of the Human Metabolome. This multi-university effort involves nearly 20 scientists who are working on experimental and computational approaches to identify
and quantify all the detectable metabolites (both endogenous and exogenous) in the human body. To date, the group has identified or found evidence for more than 2400 endogenous compounds and is archiving this information on a freely accessible webresource called the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). In addition to this work on endogenous metabolites, the group has identified and catalogued nearly 1200 drugs (now archived in DrugBank) and is working to complete a similar database on food additives. The group is using advanced methods in NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, multi-dimensional chromatography and machine learning to facilitate this work.
Professor Lars Keld Nielsen, PhD
Professor & Chair of Biological Engineering
Australian Institute of Bioengineering & Nanotechnology (AIBN)
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Professor Nielsen heads the Centre for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. The centre is dedicated to both the advancement of bioengineering science and its application to specific problems. Using thermodynamic principles, novel approaches are developed for handling complex, transient dynamics in developing tissue as well as rational design of complex pathways. A team of 40 people is using these novel approaches in the design of bioprocesses as diverse as the production of blood cells for transfusion and the production of industrial biopolymers. A key focus of the centre is the development and use of genome scale models as the basis for fluxomics and to integrate fluxomics with other ‘omics' data.
Paul Chambers, PhD
Paul Chambers was awarded a PhD degree in Molecular Genetics from The University of Hertfordshire, UK, in 1985, for research on transmission of mitochondrial genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Work for his PhD was conducted in laboratories at Hertfordshire University and The MRC, Mill Hill, London. He then took up a postdoctoral position in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University (Australia), focusing on the molecular biology of interferons. Following this, Paul took up an academic position at Victoria University (Australia) where he developed and coordinated undergraduate biotechnology programs and built a research group that focused on stress tolerance in yeast. He took up his current position, Principal Molecular Biologist and Research Manager at The Australian Wine Research Institute, in 2004. He currently supervises several research projects that focus on improving wine yeast performance, and generating novel wine yeast with improved winemaking characteristics.
