BIOMEDMEET2023

Dr. Im Sampen is a Principal Investigator funded by NIH, the Department of Defense (DoD), Veterans Affairs (VA) and Foundations as a multidisciplinary osteoarthritis (OA) pain research group. Her research has been instrumental in establishing preclinical rodent models to examine mutual cause-and-effect relationships in OA that linktissue degeneration with pain. She has served on multiple NIH and Foundation study sections administered by NIAMS, VA, or international funding agencies. She also served as an Editor-In-Chief for Gene Reports or Executive Editor (Gene) and an Editorial board member of numerous international journals. She has been a member of the Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS) since 2000 and served the ORS as Nominating Committee (elected), an Executive Member of Women’s Leadership Forum and Asian Leadership Forum member. She received various awards and honors, such as the Arthritis National Research Foundation Scholar Award, OARSI Investigator Award, Kappa Delta Elizabeth Winston Lanier Award from theORS, and VA Research Scientist Award.

Jacques Colinge is a full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montpellier, France. He received his master and doctoral degrees in Mathematics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He also holds an analyst degree in business computer science from IEPIGE, Geneva. Dr. Colinge obtained his habilitation from Technical University Graz, Austria. He held Scientist and team leader positions in the Pharma and biotech industry. He was a Professor of Bioinformatics at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, an Associate Professor (Privat Dozent) at TU-Graz, and the Head of Bioinformatics at CeMM, the Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna before joining Montpellier Institute of Cancer Research (IRCM) to serve as an Inserm Principal Investigator. Jacques Colinge has authored > 100 peer-reviewed papers, > 12,000 citations and h-index 50 (Google Scholar). His fields of expertise are computational proteomics and mass spectrometry, as well as network and systems biology.

Federico Carpi is an Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florence. From 2012 to 2016 he has been an Associate Professor (Reader) in Biomedical Engineering and Biomaterials at Queen Mary University of London, School of Engineering and Materials Science, UK. Since 2016, he is with the University of Florence, where he leads the ‘SMART – Soft Matter ARtificial muscles and Transducers’ research group (www.smart.unifi.it). His research interests include smart material-based biomedical and bioinspired mechatronic devices, and polymer artificial muscles. His publications include some 70 articles in international journals, 3 edited books and several contributions to books and conferences.

M. Michael Gromiha Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, M. Sc (1989): Madurai Kamaraj University, India, Physics PhD (1994): Bharathidasan University, India. Biophysics. Post Doctoral Fellow (1995-2002): International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), Italy The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Japan. Research Scientist (2002-2007): Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan Senior Research Scientist (2007-2010): Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan Associate Professor (2010-2018): Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India Professor (2018-present): Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India Adjunct Professor: Tokyo Institute of Technology (2017-2025); IIT Dhanbad (2021-2024); IISER Trivandrum (2020-2023) Visiting Faculty: Georgia Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina Charlotte, USA, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Chuo University, Tokyo, St. Petersburg Technical University, Russia, Purdue University, USA Research interests: Structural analysis, structure prediction, folding and stability of globular and membrane proteins, protein-protein, protein-DNA, protein-RNA and protein-carbohydrate interactions, next generation sequence analysis, deep learning, structure based drug design; disease causing mutations, development of bioinformatics databases and tools.

Paola Paci was trained as a theoretical physicist and she worked over 10 years on the field of computer modeling. She holds a degree in Physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", a Ph.D in Physics from the University of Pavia "A. Volta" and a Master in Bioinformatics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". She spent two years at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste for her theoretical studies on the condensed matter structure. She was researcher at the Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI) of CNR in Rome for 10 years where her research interests were focused on physics applied to medicine and biology, bioinformatics, systems biology. Nowadays, her research interests include Network Medicine. Now she is Associate Professor at the department of Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy).

Currently, Giulia Fiscon is Assistant Professor (RTD-A) in Bioengineering (ING-INF/06) at the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering (DIAG) of Sapienza University of Rome. She holds a degree summa cum laude in Biomedical Engineering at Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome in 2012 and a PhD in Engineering in Computer Science with classification: excellent at DIAG of Sapienza University of Rome in 2016. From the end of 2015 to Sept 2020, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the bioinformatics and system biology group of the Institute for Systems Analysis and Computer Science “A. Ruberti” of National Research Council in Rome. From Sept 2020 to Sept 2021, she was a research collaborator at Foundation for Personalized Medicine (FMP) and from Sept 2021 to Nov 2021 she was a post-doctoral researcher at DIAG of Sapienza University of Rome. She is author of 50 international publications, cited more than 1000 times and her h-index is 19, according to Scopus database. She serves as reviewer for several peer-review journals, she is Editor for Scientific reports, Bioengineered, Elsevier Biotechnology reports journal, and Computational And Mathematical Methods In Medicine international journal. Her research interests are in the area of biological complex system study. In particular, she works in the field of bioinformatics, computational biology, and network medicine.

Riccardo L. Rossi was trained as a molecular biologist and worked for a decade on budding yeast cell cycle and metabolism regulations. He holds a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Milano "La Statale", Italy, and a PhD in Industrial Biotechnology from the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. As a postdoc, Riccardo spent two years at University of Milano-Bicocca, then three years at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA in the department of biochemistry working on glucose transcriptional regulation in budding yeast. Moving back to Italy he joined the National Institute of Molecular Genetics (INGM) in Milan first as a researcher, then as a staff scientist. He has been working there on microRNA mediated gene regulation in human immune cells studied with medium to high throughput method, from RTqPCR arrays to RNA sequencing. In the last few years he developed and interest for single cell RNA sequencing, marker selection from gene expression and biomarkers in general, developing new and unconventional computational approached to rank and select them, stably transitioning from bench work to computational analyses of omics datasets and development and deployment of computational methods. Riccardo is currently serving both as a research scientist and a bioinformatics facility manager at INGM.

Faezeh Ensan is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada. Her main research interests include knowledge graphs, semantics, knowledge representation and reasoning, Biomedical Informatics and information retrieval. She has published in venues such as Information Systems Journal, Knowledge and Information Systems Journal, Information Processing and Management Journal, AAAI, CIKM, SIGIR, WSDM and IPM. She was a co-chair of the MAISoN’17 workshop, co-located with the international conference of Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2017), and SeBiLAn2022, co-located with The Web Conference (the International World Wide Web (WWW2022) Conference). She was a guest editor for special issues in Elsevier’s Information Systems journal and Elsevier’s Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Gang Wei received Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007. After PhD study, he moved to Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena (Germany) as Alexander-von-Humboldt and Carl-Zeiss postdoctoral fellow until Dec. 2011. From 2012-2019, he worked as a senior researcher and group leader at the University of Bremen (Germany). Currently, he is a full professor at Qingdao University (China) and the guest professor of Ningbo Instutite of Materials Technology and Engineering (CAS). His research interests include 2D nanomaterials, supramolecular self-assembly, biomaterials, and biosensors. Up to now, he has published 170+ papers (Citation>8500, H-index=54) in the peer-reviewed journals such as Chem Soc Rev, Prog Mater Sci,Prog Polym Sci, Adv Funct Mater, and others. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Nanobiotechnology (BMC Springer), and the Editor Board member of several journals.

Dr. Lisziewicz founded three US companies Genetic Immunity, Inc., TREOS Bio Ltd (previously eMMUNITY Inc.) and Research Institute for Genetic and Human Therapy (RIGHT) to develop innovative vaccines that enable the human immune systems to conquer some of the deadliest diseases, including HIV and cancer.

IVO RENDINA was born in Italy, in 1960. He is a research director of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR), where he is now head of the Unit of Naples of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems, coordinating the activity of a permanent staff of 26 persons and about 10 young researchers under contract (mainly post-docs and PhD students). He was previously Director of the Institute for Electromagnetism and Electronic Components of the CNR. From 1995 to 1997 he taught Electronics at the Engineering Faculty of the “Mediterranea” University of Reggio Calabria (Italy). Since 1997 he has been teaching Electronics (from 1997 to 2002) and Optoelectronics (from 2002) at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Calabria (Italy). He obtained the Italian national scientific qualifications as full professor in the sectors 02/B3 Applied Physics and 09/E3 Electronics (first call of 2012). In 1997, he was a visiting scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is past-president of the Società Italiana di Ottica e Fotonica (SIOF), Italian branch of the European Optical Society (EOS), fellow of EOS, chair of the “Advisory Council for Aeronautic Research in Europe (ACARE)”, chair and organizer of several international conferences, such as the series of EOS Topical Meetings on Optical MicroSystems, the Optics+Optoelectronics SPIE Conference in 2015 and 2013, the Fotonica Conference in 2014 and 2013, the EOS Annual Meeting in 2008, the XII Sensors and Microsystems Conference in 2007. He has served as scientific and technical committee member of many international conferences organized by EOS, SPIE, OSA and IEEE in the field of optics and photonics, and guest editor of international scientific journals. He has authored and co-authored more than 300 journal and conference papers in the field of photonics, optical microsensors and microsystems.