Invited speakers

Dr. Jingyuan Fu is a professor of systems medicine in the University Medical Centre Groningen, the Netherlands, with a particular focus on integrative genomics and host-microbe interactions in complex diseases. She obtained a BSc in Biochemistry, a MSc in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (cum laude), and a PhD in systems genetics (cum laude). Via this route she developed her research line on systems genetics in complex traits and became an expert in integrative genomics and systems biology. Her research aims to acquire a greater knowledge of how the human genome and the gut microbiome interact with each other and affect human health, in order to create better methods for disease prediction, prevention, and treatment. To accomplish this, her study combines with large-scale genetic and microbial association studies in big groups of individuals with functional studies using advanced bacterial culturing and organ-on-a-chip technologies. She holds numerous prestigious personal grants (NWO-VENI VIDI VICI, and ERC-CoG) and several (inter)national consortia grants. She is a laureate of AMMODO Science Award in 2023 and is recognized as an “Highly Cited Researcher” by Web of Science since 2020.

Website: https://www.rug.nl/research/genetics/staff/jingyuan-fu

Maaria Kortesniemi works as an assistant professor in food development at the Food Sciences unit, Department of Life Technologies, University of Turku. She has completed her PhD in food chemistry in 2016 and holds a Title of Docent in food metabolomics since 2019. The topic of her PhD thesis was ”NMR Metabolomics of Foods – Investigating the Influence of Origin on Sea Buckthorn Berries, Brassica Oilseeds and Honey”. During her PhD studies (2014) and post doc phase (2018) she visited the Slupsky Lab in University of California – Davis. Kortesniemi’s research focuses on varying topics in the field of NMR metabolomics and food sciences, including human milk metabolomics, the botanical origin, quality and authenticity of honey, and the effect of Northern latitudes on the chemical composition and quality of berries.

Dr. Rodriguez-Mateos is a Reader (Associate professor) at the Department of Nutritional Sciences of King’s College London. Her research aims to investigate the health benefits of plant foods and phytochemicals, with a strong focus on understanding the bioavailability, metabolism and cardiovascular health benefits of dietary polyphenols. More recent interests include the investigation of the role of the gut microbiome on the health benefits of phytochemicals, and the development of biomarkers of food intake using metabolomic approaches. Her expertise includes development and validation of analytical methods for the analysis of foods and biological samples using LC/GC-MS and performance of randomized controlled trials with cardiovascular outcomes. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and Registered Nutritionist. She is also the Programme Director of the BSc in Nutritional Sciences, an Associate Editor for the Journal Food and Function, and the co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Phytochemicals and Health of the UK Nutrition Society

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/ana-rodriguez-mateos

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) (https://cibion.conicet.gov.ar/). In 2006, she earned 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 CIBION, which was a new research center in Argentina, where she leads the Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Group and the Mass Spectrometry facility. Her research group develops MS-based metabolomics and lipidomics analytical methods with applications in health and the environment. As well, her group contributes with pipelines for preprocessing LC-MS data for quality control procedures in untargeted workflows. She is co-author of >50 peer-reviewed publications (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6517-5301). Since 2014, she has coordinated hands-on metabolomics courses at CIBION for South American students, and has participated in strengthening the Latin American community through teaching in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina. In 2021, she became a Founding Member of LAMPS (www.lamps-network.org) and has been instrumental in integrating this young network with the Metabolomics Society as an International Affiliate. Since 2019, she has been a member of the metabolomics quality assurance and quality control consortium (mQACC), and she has been a member of the Metabolomics Society. In 2022, she was awarded the Metabolomics Society Medal and was elected to the Society Board of Directors. She currently serves as co-chair of the Membership Committee and of the newly established LipidMet Task Group of the Metabolomics Society. Additionally, since 2022, she has been the vice-president of the Argentinean Mass Spectrometry Society. She has also contributed as a guest editor for the journal Metabolites and serves on the editorial board of GigaByte.

Tomáš Pluskal is a Junior Group Leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. His laboratory develops new computational and experimental approaches for connecting plant natural products to their biosynthetic enzymes, and for engineering novel biosynthetic circuits using synthetic biology tools. In the metabolomics community, he is best known for leading and developing the MZmine software for mass spectrometry data processing.

Óttar Rolfsson is a professor of Biochemistry and Systems biology within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Iceland. Prof. Rolfsson is a biochemist by training and received his PhD in structural molecular biology from the University of Leeds in 2010. He runs a metabolomics laboratory and has managed several research projects from both a basic and applied scientific standpoint. These projects have all been driven by the idea that understanding molecular mechanisms can contribute to novel biomarker and/or therapeutic design and that cell metabolic variability can be accounted for using genome scale models of human metabolism. Currently his main research focuses on how grafting supports wound healing and the metabolic changes associated with endotheliopathy in the context of acute critical illness.

Dr. Egon Willighagen is assistant professor at Maastricht University and received his PhD in 2008 from Radboud University Nijmegen in the field of chemometrics. he is known for his work on open science cheminformatics projects such as the Chemistry Development Kit and his contributions to WikiPathways. He studies how mathematical representation and computation can maximize outputs from theoretical and experimental research in drug discovery, metabolomics, and toxicology. Dr. Willighagen was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cheminformatics between 2016 and 2021, where he pushed for innovation in the journal, e.g. with the adoption of the Citation Typing Ontology.

Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, China

Dr. Zheng-Jiang Zhu received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Nanjing University, China in 2006, and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, United States in 2011. Then, he moved to The Scripps Research Institute as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Prof. Gary Siuzdak from 2011 to 2013. From 2013, he was appointed as Principal Investigator and group leader for Laboratory for Mass Spectrometry and Metabolomics, affiliated with Interdisciplinary Research Center on Biology and Chemistry (IRCBC), Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The research in Zhu Lab focuses on mass spectrometry-based metabolomics technologies. His group are particularly interested in the application of ion mobility-MS for metabolomics and lipidomics. The bioinformatic tools developed by Zhu Lab, such as MetDNA, Met4DX, and AllCCS, have attracted significant usages from academic and industrial users. Dr. Zhu has published >80 peer-reviewed papers on the prestigious journals with >8000 times in citation (H-index 45). Dr. Zhu serves as an editorial board member for several international journals, such as Communications Biology, Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics (GPB).

Group website: https://www.zhulab.cn/